Before the days of TikTok, the children of this country used to engage in a far more noble hobby: sitting in front of the TV, glued to the screen, watching music video channels for multiple hours at a time.
You’d get home from school, ditch your backpack and dig your hand into a packet of crisps with your eyes affixed to whichever pop princess was writhing around on screen, always barely clothed and often spouting lyrics as suggestive as her dance moves.
So perhaps this is why I’m so unaffected by the outrage that seems to have taken hold of the viewers of Sam Smith’s new music video for I’m Not Here To Make Friends. The video shows Smith all laced up in a cream silk corset, complete with matching nipple covers and budgie-smuggler pants, prancing about like the non-binary Birth of Venus.
The outfit, paired with raunchy choreography, has got some people’s knickers in a twist. The usual puce-faced suspects everywhere have been decrying its explicit nature and calling for age restrictions on music videos.
But where were those age restrictions when I watched Britney Spears pin a man down on a table and tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue during the video for Womanizer when I was just 12 years old? Or when nine-year-old me watched on completely unfazed as Beyonce and Shakira performed matching belly dances and grinded against walls in the video for Beautiful Liar, circa 2007?
If your issue is explicitness in music videos , there have been plenty of other opportunities for you to bring it up before Sam Smith’s newest music video dropped. Or perhaps – just perhaps – you might be a homophobe? Or another sort of bigot?
I’m not picky, just admit it. Because Smith has, by no choice of their own, become an all singing, all dancing vessel for other people’s fury.
And if anything, you should be grateful for the nipple covers – Smith would have been able to get away with having their nips out, unlike women in music videos, and they still chose not to. A modest icon, if you ask me.
