My Favourite Music Video

I am not a music critic, I am far from it, I like listening to music very often, there are songs that I like and songs that I dislike but I am incapable of analysing the same way I would a film or a videogame; hell I don’t even have a favourite song or artist or album or any of that stuff! I just don’t know what to look for to make something any of those things, sometimes I struggle to even be able to tell the genre of something because every genre has about a million subgenres and oh god it’s so confusing! However, one thing that I can analyse, are music videos. You see music videos are pretty much a different form of art than music, it’s more of an extension, combining music with film and giving us something brand new, whether that be something with a narrative or not, doesn’t matter, what does is, is it an accurate representation of the song? Does it add anything? Is it creative? Well today I'm going to talk about my all time favourite music video. Ladies & Gentlemen...Sinead O' Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U

It may seem odd at first to pick this as my all-time favourite music video because about 90% of it is just simply looking at Sinead O’Connor’s face; it’s not very visually interesting nor is it all that creative, so what is it that makes this one stick out to me? Because what this song and this video are able to capture, is the pain and weight of the words been sung. The song is Sinead singing about an ex whom she has recently separated from, and throughout this video we see every emotion that a person can experience from a bad break-up, we see anger, spite, regret and most importantly: sadness. The fact that this video is able to tell this story through just one shot lasting 5 minutes is truly outstanding, and more importantly is that I 100% believe every emotion and every word sung, especially considering that Sinead O’Connor didn’t actually write the song, it was actually written by Prince, which shows how good of a performance O’Connor gives.

Also the fact that it is just O’Connor’s natural face; no make-up or anything, there’s nothing to distract from the focus, and also nothing artificial about it, everything is upfront and natural, brutal honesty and I absolutely love that. Which is also why I hate a certain other music video that uses a very similar style of close-up *cough* wrecking ball *cough*; however that video is nowhere near as effective because it is very artificial, there is so much make-up and airbrushing in the video that it just feels fake and I can’t take it seriously. But not O’Connor, here it’s nothing but honest and natural emotion coming from a person who’s going through a bad experience and that is why it is my all-time favourite music video.

-Danny