While not everyone has been enthused about another case of North West wielding her nepo baby status to be part of something she otherwise wouldn’t, there’s no denying that FKA Twigs’ latest video in support of Eusexua, “Childlike Things,” has plenty of worthwhile things to say. And perhaps that’s, in part, because playwright Jeremy O. Harris is credited with writing it (one assumes Twigs conceptualized, while Harris chimed in for the scathing dialogue portions). But that’s the least of the random collaborators associated with this project. There’s also director Kevin Smith (who looks like he’s fallen prey to Ozempic)—though the video itself was directed by Twigs go-to (perhaps because they’re dating), Jordan Hemingway—playing “The Executive” and podcaster Jake Shane playing his assistant/lackey type. Granted, Shane’s appearance is slightly less random considering Twigs recently appeared on his podcast.
As the two men ascend a spiral staircase (Hitchcock semiotics dictating that such a symbol “capitalize[s] on phobias, and signifie[s] impending doom”), Shane proceeds to explain to The Executive, “She wrote this [likely referring to “Childlike Things” itself] when she was still a teenager so it’s like we thought she was one thing but this album is completely different. It feels like a rave in Shoreditch, like, underground in Prague, a mall in Korea [South, obviously].” The Executive remains unimpressed and mostly annoyed, replying, “Just remind me, she’s like, what, a contortionist this FKA [FKA said like “Ficka”] Twigs?” Shane appears shocked, reminding, “She’s one of our artists… And what she’s doing with Eusexua is, like, really cool.” Smith groans, “Eusexua, what is that?” “It’s like a feeling.” “I don’t like it.” Hemingway then cuts to Twigs preparing to, effectively, “audition” for The Executive in order to get more money for a music video she wants to make.
And, speaking of getting money, the scene is, naturally, prolonged so that Twigs can emphasize the fact that she’s applying Nyx lip gloss. Hemingway then cuts back to the stage area, where Shane is continuing to explain to The Executive, “She’s beneath viral. She’s her own artist.” The Executive scoffs, “‘Beneath viral.’ Was she ‘beneath viral’ when she was beneath the rock star [a reference to Matty Healy]. Or the vampire [a reference to Robert Pattinson]? Remember this one? Or the child star, ugh [a reference to Shia LaBeouf]. I mean, come on, there’s not, like, a low-rent white guy she hasn’t dated.” It’s then that Twigs appears, interrupting them with an abrupt, “Hi” to let The Executive know she overheard his shit-talking.
Wearing satiny “culotte-style” underwear and a beige-ish top, Twigs no sooner greets The Executive than he asks, “Yeah, how old are you?” Twigs starts to let a “th” sound slip out before correcting herself to say, “Twenty-four” (at the time of the video’s making, she’s thirty-seven). The Executive ripostes, “Yeah, you’ve been at this for a while.” Twigs glosses over his comment to suggest that after he sees what they’ve been rehearsing, he’ll understand why they’re requesting a higher budget for her music video.
The Executive looks back at her in disbelief. “More budget? You serious? This ain’t the 90s anymore. This ain’t even the naughts [it’s aughts]. You know, we don’t have that kind of money. If we do, it’s for songs that have a beat and a hook, stuff like…that.” He stops slightly short when he notices the wounded expression on her face. Twigs then defiantly takes the stage in a manner resembling both Pearl (Mia Goth—incidentally, Shia’s baby mama) going out for her big audition and Shelly Gardner (Pamela Anderson) in The Last Showgirl doing the same.
Taking a few purposeful breaths before she starts moving her body as though it’s being puppeteered (her nickname, Twigs, after all, arose from her bones cracking when she moves with such flexibility), Twigs delivers some deranged choreo before then asking The Executive in earnest: “What do you think?” And this three-minute, seventeen-second intro then leads into Twigs performing the music video as though it actually had a budget, complete with costume changes and elaborate set designs. But in between serving cunt and violence (to quote from “Drums of Death”), we see that this is all just the vision being projected in Twigs’ mind. What The Executive has been watching is far more depressing and macabre. Hence, his announcement that he’s leaving.
Twigs bursts forth to shout (delivering the following soliloquy like it’s true Shakespeare), “You can’t leave. Your figures and numbers don’t mean anything when you’re sweating on the dance floor discovering something new for the first time. That’s what this is about. The thrill of it. The…ecstasy.” The Executive looks at her strangely then, as though wondering if she means the drug. Twigs continues, “…that takes over when you open the door on something you didn’t even know was shut within you. Watch me. Watch me discover it. Watch me discover it.”
Despite her heartfelt entreaty, The Executive, predictably, remains unmoved, telling her, “No amount of witnessing you ‘discover’ is gonna help you get on Spotify’s Discover page any easier. You want my best advice? Hook up with a rapper, get your BPMs up, then we can try this again one day, alright?” Twigs looks at him sadly and says, “My fans think I’m a deity so they don’t like it when I put rappers on my songs.” Perhaps a nod to the lack of appreciation for Caprisongs. And maybe the retroactive ick of her 2020 collaboration with Kanye West (and Ty Dolla Sign) on “Ego Death.” Though she seems to continue to show support for Ye through North. Hence, perking up to tell The Executive, “But I’ve got something even better for you.” She then goes back to the center of the stage to introduce North as a “sartorial goddess” and “raspy-voiced troublemaker” and “truth teller” and “producer and rapper extraordinaire.” That’s a lot of hyperbole to sidestep saying, “Kim Kardashian’s product.” Even so, Twigs is quite affectionate toward someone who came up with a verse as innocuous (at least when translated to English) as, “Hello/My name is North-chan/From California to Tokyo/Jesus, the King (ah-ah)/Praise the Lord (ah-ah)/Jesus is the one and only true God (you need to know).”
Twigs would also describe of their “team up,” “It was perfect, it was so serendipitous. And if you think about it, the crazy thing is, I wrote the song when I was twelve, thirteen, she wrote the song [a.k.a. verse] when she was eleven. When I wrote the song, North wasn’t born, and when she wrote the song, I was thirty-six. So we’ve collaborated through time. This is a collaboration that has taken decades to come to fruition. It’s so meta and it’s so beautiful. That’s what I really love about music and about art and about creating, things can take decades and decades and you don’t know the reason why.” In this case, apparently, the reason it took so long was so that North could continue to relish the trappings of being a nepo baby. Complete with appearing in bombastic attire alongside Twigs for the “budgeted” portions of the music video.
In another scene, Twigs lives out her Swan Lake fantasies by appearing in White Swan attire as she showcases some ballet moves to the rhythm of the song. Becoming truly lost in the music as she sings, “Lost in a world of childlike things.” In the next scene, she provides the kind of choreo that can easily be replicated on TikTok, almost like a meta nod to what the entire video speaks to, which is that music has been overtaken by the concept of “virality” (this point further driven home by the fact that, evidently, the video is so “long”—at eight minutes—that it requires YouTube to interrupt it with an ad…though the same didn’t happen with her also nearly eight-minute “Eusexua” video).
Looking at him hopefully as the “grimy version” of herself after trotting out North, he finally concedes, “Okay. It’s fire. But maybe, you know what, shoot some short-form stuff, fifteen seconds, get it up on all the socials. But I wouldn’t shoot a music video for it, you know.” Twigs remains frozen in her prostrated position, that look of simultaneous hope and being gut-punched still plastered on her face. The very look that Gaga has on a few times in the video for her own 2011 epic, “Marry the Night” (which clocked in at an even longer time than “Childlike Things,” at nearly fourteen minutes). And while Gaga’s song might highlight the music industry’s shortcomings during a different era (the 00s, when all the money for musicians was starting to disappear), it nonetheless conveys the same feeling that Twigs wants to get across. Which is that musicians, whether they’re just starting out or have been in the game for years, are treated disposably by the people who run record labels. An all-too-common occurrence that Chappell Roan also recently called out at this year’s Grammy Awards when she rehashed the story of what it was like to be dropped by her label with no fallback support whatsoever, telling the audience, “Because I got signed so young—I got signed as a minor—and when I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt and, like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized to not have health [care]. And if my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to.”
Gaga was similarly dropped by Def Jam after a few months, signed by L.A. Reid in September of 2006. Of the unexpected boot, Gaga would comment, “After he signed me, he never met with me. I used to wait outside his office for hours, hoping he’d take meetings with me about my songs, but it never happened. He eventually dropped me after three months… I was pretty devastated. I know what it’s like being on a label when they don’t quite get it.” Obviously, so does FKA Twigs. And she’s been on indie, mid-tier and major labels, all giving her plenty to say about the way artists are treated at every level.
With “Childlike Things,” Twigs gives another battle cry, in the spirit of Gaga in her own lengthy video for “Marry the Night” (which she self-directed), shouting to the mountaintops that she won’t be stopped. That she won’t compromise her art for the sake of a few extra clicks. After all, not capitulating has gotten her this far. What does she need a suit’s advice for? It’s they, instead, who need to take her advice and let artists do what they do: create. Without the pressure of being told that creation needs to “sell well.” Or, nowadays, “trend well.”
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