Videos: Then and Now
Leslie Gore and Lil’ Kim. In terms of listening to their music and watching their videos, they are nothing alike. Yet in terms of their popularity for their eras, both succeeded in having songs reach #1 and becoming major names in the recording industry.
Gore, a singer from the “girl group era� was best known her first hit single, the 1963 song “It’s My Party� (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Gore). At the time that she recorded the single she was 16 years old and the song was about a boyfriend who had gone off with another girl and Gore’s reaction to that. It was interesting to watch this video because when it is done playing, youtube allows you to watch related videos. I followed up “It’s My Party� with “It’s Judy’s Turn to Cry�. I found it very interesting that her first song talks about how she needs her man to have a good time at her party and that she wasn’t going to be happy until he came back to her. I feel this is a very young outlook on love, especially if it is a first love. Her second single then was a follow up to her #1 hit about how Johnny came back to her. The man was forgiven and the other girl was left behind. I also thought this showed a young view of love because all it took to get Johnny back was to make him jealous. The video itself I thought fit the song. In this black and white clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4&feature=related), Gore is standing on a stage with female synchronized dancers dancing behind her as well as to the side. In the audience couples are dancing back and forth with each other while she sings. To begin with a camera frames Gore and a few of her background dancers. It then zooms in and starts to change between mid-shots and medium close-ups of Gore. You get to see her singing and trying to convey how she feels about her man walking in with a different girl. Each new shot of Gore will last anywhere between 12 to 15 seconds before moving on to a different area of the floor or a different shot. I also liked the slow variation of shots because during the group scenes you see her friends “keep dancing all night.�
Kimberly Jones, aka Lil’ Kim, known for her hardcore rap and barely there outfits, recorded “How Many Licks� on her second album The Notorious K.I.M. The song is about Lil' Kim bragging about the various men she's been with and the effects her "dolls" have on men (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Many_Licks%3F). This song reflects quite a different aspect of men and women. In Gore’s video, the woman pined after the man. In Lil’ Kim’s video, the woman had her choice of any man she wanted and he really didn’t matter. He was expendable and one of many. While Gore’s song has innocence in it, “How Many Licks� has fantasy. It gives the impression that the woman has everything but only if she is sexually charged, pin up hot and willing to treat a man, as well as her self worth, with indifference. The content of the song is very “colorful� and so was the video was as well. It moved very quickly and was highly charged with various camera angles and many scenes that included people as well as objects (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuqJssfGG8U). How it starts with the camera switching between a wide shot to a long shot to a mid shot and back again gives us a very intense feeling. She looks you in the eye and then turns away. The camera angle also changes between a straight on shot to a high angle shot, where it is angled towards Lil’ Kim. During this she is walking forward and at least once bares her teeth giving a menacing expression. The term man-eater comes to mind as well as her “declaring control over her sexuality, which meant that she was nullifying the power of the male gaze.� (http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue05/features/fiona2.htm. The rest of the video plays out like a story with her lyrics corresponding to the scenes in the video with occasional erotic dancing. These specific scenes of the video also brought to mind Mark Zeltner article and a comparison to eighties videos where “women…defined themselves by their relationship to the male gaze. The women in these videos seemed to pose for the camera and wanted to be objects of voyeurism.�
What a difference forty years can make. While Leslie Gore’s video was drastically different from what Lil’ Kim’s was, both cannot define but do highlight how love and relationships have changed. I can’t forget though that in the time of Gore’s song, the hippie movement of free love and peace was on the rise, something that can’t be seen in Gore’s song and video. Lil’ Kim’s video is the same. It doesn’t define a wide scale movement and help to define what love is in 2000. Yet both videos show what time can do to an idea like love and make us sing along to it.