Taking a somewhat divergent track from the single that launched her into the Italian limelight, “Bambola,” Betta Lemme’s latest single, called “Give It,” drips with far less innocence, instead both oozing sex and seeming to showcase the perfect combination of metal and pop in its sonic nods to Nine Inch Nails and Britney Spears (as Lemme herself has described it). Speaking to this melding, the video itself is reminiscent of both a night in Berlin and Amsterdam.
As Lemme spoke of what she saw in her mind’s eye while recording the track, “I pictured a curious girl walking down a long corridor of a dark club in Berlin. I couldn’t shake the image of this hallway in my mind since recording it, so the video treatment was built around the track’s immense drop.”
Reminding one of the very prostitutes that can be seen lining the windows of the Red Light District, clones of Lemme stand idly behind rows upon rows of glass encasements waiting for, ostensibly, nothing. At first standing against a white backdrop in tan pleather pants, a gold-tone necklace that reads “Give It” and a white crop top that perhaps only a girl of European descent (Lemme might be of Montreal, but is of the Italian persuasion) could carry off effectively, the sinister, sweaty beat builds to a red background as Lemme taps the floor like piano keys, transforming it into the red underbelly that is about to envelop her, much the way that any Amsterdam or Berlin night can. Her eyes flashing a pinkish red, we are suddenly transported into that corridor of her mind, filled with the same The Matrix-esque lasers in pink-red instead of green.
Now dressed in a bondage-inspired pleather getup with the same hairstyle that conjures the image of Beyonce at the 2016 Met Ball, Lemme lets the “Closer” by NIN-sounding rhythm wash all over her, at a certain point seeming to be back at war with the “good” part of herself (it’s all very Madonna in the “Die Another Day” video), the one we saw dressed in white at the beginning only faintly tapping into the proverbial Black Lodge of sin. That both Berlin and Amsterdam are representative of the flipsides of transgression and redemption (those Dutch in particular can be such goody two-shoes in the light of day) when night and daytime activities are contrasted against one another further heightens their symbolic presence in the video.
With a row of doors opening and closing as her white-clad self walks through the hallway, the graphics begin to swirl and we get the sense that the space is once more becoming ephemeral, like a Berlin nightclub around 7 a.m. Walking behind her “nightlife self”–the one dressed in black–our tempted by the darkness white-clad heroine follows with an overt yearning.
Alternating between French and English as she does on “Bambola,” Lemme admits, “I ask myself the same questions, I tell myself the same lies.” For one must do just that to ignore the fact that, no matter what city you’re in, les nuits ne changeront pas. Succumbing to the peccadilloes of lust and alcohol, however, is at least somewhat more tolerated in these twin cities of iniquity shrouded in daytime “quaintness.”
