Why I’m tired of videos like Colbie Caillat’s ‘Try’
I hate to be one of those journalists to shit on everything. When Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes lost everything in a fire and Guardian writer Holly Baxter wrote a scathing article in response, I myself lamented how callous and bitter journalists can be. However, as a former student and avid consumer of media, I have to say that the disillusionment with media tactics like Colbie Caillat’s ‘Try’ runs deep. The truth is that this is just another targeted marketing campaign aimed at women.
During university I worked at an advertising agency. When working with a new client we would get together and discuss the product, demographics, and how best to get our client’s results. On the surface, Caillat’s video seems like a heartwarming music video to go along with a song about loving yourself inside and out. However, upon closer inspection, ‘Try’ is a little bit more than that. It's a cleverly constructed and executed attempt to win women over.
Caillat, whose EP dropped last year, has failed to compete with her female contemporaries in recent years. ‘Try’ has elements of known successful marketing campaigns and merely combines them for an assured hit. These include:
This photoshopping campaign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKlVyUJw3TM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKlVyUJw3TM
This Dove Beauty Selfie Experiment
This Dove Self-esteem project
The first kiss campaign
Lily Allen’s Hard Out Here music video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CazRHB0so&feature=kp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CazRHB0so&feature=kp
Now, I’m not saying the message is wrong. It’s great to let women, especially young girls, know that they don’t have to wear makeup all the time. But, marketing exercises that fixate on women and makeup are forgetting one thing: we know everything you’re telling us. Women aren’t the naive, insecure, deers in the headlights that marketers would have you believe.
I know that I don’t have to wear makeup all the time; I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; I know that most women on magazines are photoshopped; and I know that the record industry is really tough on women with regards to their appearance. Most women know all this.
Society telling us that women are shackled to the chains of cosmetic appearance underestimates our intellectual capacity for critical thinking. These faux-feminist campaigns rely on the incorrect assumption that I ( or any other woman for that matter) get out of bed and put on makeup in the morning so that people will like me or to impress people. To set the record straight: I don't haul around a makeup bag filled to the brim with at least £300 worth of cosmetics because society tells me to or because I want to impress men.
While it’s a nice enough message, the song is admittedly mediocre and the music video old hat. If you want to assure women that it’s important to feel good about themselves then take care to show us images of women in positions of power and authority. Not just insecure naive women.
Now, with videos like ‘Hard out Here’ and ‘Try’ people are asking stupid questions like, “Is the music industry finally respecting women?” The answer is no. It’s going to take a lot more than barefaced ‘women of a certain age’ to turn the tides of institutionalised sexism in the music industry.
