In 2000, Paul Hunter (often known for working with Aaliyah, creating the masterpiece that was the “Honey” video and then carving out a distinct aesthetic in the 00s in videos like “If You Had My Love, “Me Against the Music” and “My Love Is Like…Wo”) came along to help retool the still “too sweet” image Christina Aguilera had reluctantly curated. With her previous videos, “What A Girl Wants” and “I Turn to You,” barely featuring an exposed midriff, “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)” was a chance for her to lay the groundwork for her “style” (assless chaps) during the “Dirrty” era of 2002. With choreography by Tina Landon (who got her start as a Laker girl when Paula Abdul was still the choreographer), the vibe of the video was more playful and innuendo-laden than anything Aguilera had done thus far.
This was underscored by the vibrant sets and costumes saturated in greens, yellows, reds and blues, helping to make the video an instant success with its young audience attracted to bright, shiny things. An audience that made it soar to number one on the then end all, be all of tastemaking, TRL. Cut to nineteen years later when a Disney star in her own right by the name of Selena Gomez seems to have thought that everyone would forget about Aguilera’s iconic offering to the pop culture gods. Released the day after the much more listenable “Lose You To Love Me” (which was also of more interest to a pyre-loving public that relished its effigy of her relationship with Justin Bieber), “Look At Her Now” is an embarrassment on a number of levels. For starters, there’s the repetition of Gomez chanting, “Mm-mm-mm, mm-mm-mm, mm-mm.” In case she has amnesia, the only people in history who have ever gotten away with “mm’ing” in a song are Hanson (“MMMBop”) and Madonna (“Frozen”). She and her coterie of songwriters including Julia Michaels have obviously not looked to history for a reference point in this regard.
Nor did they in conceptualizing the video (yet another Apple product promo in celebration of iPhone), also directed by Sophie Muller–just as “Lose You To Love Me” was–in a move that vastly under uses her talent. With the same oval-shaped sets and incandescent hues, the video draws immediate parallels to “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You).” Especially when adding the extra ingredient of an entirely choreography-reliant “narrative.” At the very least, however, the video is more than an entire minute shorter than Aguilera’s (for attention spans among the pop music audience–and beyond–have waned that much in almost two decades). Which means there’s far less opportunity for employing the fanfare of a sizable budget, as Aguilera did with her “people in boxes” and staircase scenes.
Another signature of the video, popular in many of the late 90s/early 00s era, is an opening that at least attempts something like a storyline, with Aguilera giving her best impression of talking on the phone (though it’s very clear there’s no one on the other side of the line) to set up a time for her boyfriend to “come on over,” as the song would say. She then plops down on the bed in her blue and white camo pants (again, this video came out in the summer of 2000) to join the rest of her friends emitting the synthetic non sequitur, “Wow.” It’s then that the scene cuts to the nonstop choreographed extravaganza.
The lyrical difference between the two similarly hued videos is at least palpable. Where Aguilera is urging the object of her affection to “cross the line” (rather rapey, but it was acceptable then), she sings, “It’s paradise, when you and I get close, get tight/One on one/I wanna go all, all night/ I wanna play that game with you baby/Listen to me/All I want is you, come over here baby.” Contrasted against Gomez’s relishment of her independence and freedom from a toxic relationship she only realized after enough healing time was, indeed, very bad for her, there is a marked dichotomy in the embraced tween/teen pop lyrical content of now versus the era of Aguilera (rhyme intentional). It’s just that the message might be taken more seriously if it wasn’t packaged in the same frothy wrapping as it was nearly twenty years ago. Because even if pop was still deemed frivolous back then, there was conviction behind it. Take, for example, Camila Cabello’s recent blatant theft of Madonna’s Marie Antoinette-influenced “Vogue” performance from the 1990 VMAs. An unbridled ripoff. Not even an intelligently meta homage, as Britney and Christina gave at the 2003 VMAs while dressed in white before Madonna descended a giant wedding cake now in the groom role. Madonna herself–the original postmodern expert in culling from other elements of art, music and dance (Antoinette obviously falling under that umbrella)–would know better than to do what Cabello did. Or Gomez in the “Look At Her Now” video. Instead, Cabello appeared with just as many backup dancers in tow, all bedecked in Louis XIV-sanctioned garb for an overtly MARINA-sounding rendition of her latest single, “Cry For Me,” to take to the Saturday Night Live stage possibly hoping no one would remember 1990. It was there that she “earnestly” bemoaned, “I want you to cry for me, cry for me/Say that you’d d-d-die for me, die for me/And if you can’t then maybe lie for me, lie for me.”
That last lyric alone is a prime exhibit of how pop music functions at the moment. For though it was always a genre that prided itself on peddling lies via an overdramatization of love and love lost, there was an innovative showmanship to it. Crafted by the hands and contorted facial expressions of everyone from Kate Bush to Jewel. But looking at the devolution of pop as it stands, it’s as though the likes of Gomez and Cabello (no shade specifically to Latinas, though it sounds like that when singling out these two women next to each other) are doing an impression of an impression of what it is to be heartbroken and damaged. Even the revered for her “avant-gardeness” Billie Eilish, to boot. No one quite sure anymore what the difference is between that line. What’s more, with preadolescents and adolescents more prone to living their existence out on a screen anyway, there’s no denying that the ersatz quality of pop is only bound to worsen (see: Ashley O in Black Mirror) as more decades pass and someone ends up comparing a subsequent music video to Gomez’s “Look At Her Now” as opposed to its true progenitor, “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You).”
