Pretty Girls: a classier case of tainted love, with a touch of Alyson Ston
Most of today's artists assume the stances and lifestyles they propose in their videos. They live through their music, they let it radiate and ripple on to their listeners. A question emerges, is this lifestyle a play carefully staged by an actor with a keen sense of his future success, or is it his true inner nature? It's a pretty hard pill to swallow, this "celebrity inside", this superstar that big artists tell us lies deep within each and every one of us. This unidirectional character is also somehow of a bugging matter: you film a video in which you show people who you are. That's every rap video in a nutshell.
What Alyson Stoner chooses to do in her video "Pretty Girls" is act as a deeply controversial, manipulative "femme fatale". There are few to no clues that hint to the whereabouts of her true stand on love, attraction and feeling. These clues are in a comment she immediately posted. Here it is:
"The message behind Pretty Girls is a social statement about the power of Beauty in culture and the manner women are expected (and choose) to use it to get their way. In my film Sugar Babies, my character unexpectedly gets a ‘sugar daddy’ and navigates what it means to mix love and money. Our song shows the tempting allure of superficiality and manipulation over authenticity. The video shows Aliases using the "tactic" of Beauty for personal gain. Don't be so quick to assume this was me giving in. It is deliberately the opposite".
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