Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Never Again’
Saw the clip for Kelly Clarkson’s new song Never Again and all I can say is… never again will I have much respect for her [ETA] as a singer/music video star. In it, her boyfriend has presumably cheated on her, she’s killed herself and he’s gone to the other woman. The video shows a series of scenes where she’s haunting him, showing up at deserted airports and pushing herself in his face, putting her hands over his eyes in the car so he starts to swerve, driving him crazy as she shows up everywhere. The crazy stalking escalates until it turns out that it was all some kind of dream and she’s left him, head held high. In between these scenes she sings with a band in what would have been an elegant tailored white suit if she’d remembered to wear an elegant tailored white shirt between the jacket and bra.
I don’t really get what she’s trying to say. Is it a fantasy where she gets back at her boyfriend for cheating? Is she enamoured with the idea of him being haunted by her success? Of being sorry he no longer has access to her coat-tails? If any is the case, why not have a montage where she becomes more and more famous while he and his trophy wife rot in obscurity? Success, as they say, is the best revenge.
Instead, she resorts to cheap tactics of stalkerish behaviour and skimpy clothes. I don’t care if it’s a fantasy or dream sequence, she can do better.
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6 comments
I like the song. I don’t understand the video.
I would caution against placing all the blame on Clarkson. Just because she’s a pop star doesn’t mean that she is fully in control of her videos or her image, especially if she isn’t considered famous enough to succeed no matter what she does.
I would really advise that you learn how to criticize a person’s actions without invalidating them as people (ie. losing all respect for her as a person). We are born and raised in a culture that encourages us to have little to no respect for women, and feminists should not be adding oil to that fire.
Arg, bloody fields weren’t filled in…
I don’t know how much she contributed to the video and I realise many music stars don’t have the clout to tell the studio they won’t do something. But I don’t think that absolves her of responsibility of what gets put out there under her name. I don’t even get what the hell the video’s saying, it’s so vauge, but I don’t think stalking/endangering people, even in a fantasy sequence, is OK because ‘they deserved it’ (and how do you qualify that???) and I don’t have much respect for people who promote that message, even if her only contribution was going along with it.
And obviously, when I said I don’t have much respect for her, I meant as a singer/star of music videos. I don’t know her personally to pass judgement on her as a person :p
After that last comment, Scarlett emailed me and asked me to add the words “as a singer/music video star” at the end of that first sentence, because she realized from Tekanji’s comment that she should have qualified the point. I put the [ETA] before it so the comment thread would make sense, since there’s this whole meta layer about criticism that is quite interesting.
Scarlett, the qualification certainly helps clarify that you are only judging her capacity as an entertainer. But Tekanji raises another point that ties into something else that’s… well, not strictly a feminist issue, but certainly a media issue, and one that women will find familiar: blaming the visible person.
Have you ever talked to someone who blames a movie’s badness solely on the star? As if that person wrote, directed and acted the entire production? That’s a very common form of convenient obliviousness. It makes it easy for writers, directors and movie producers to serve up bigotry and have us get mad at someone else for it. It also makes it easy for us to forget that we, the audience, buy that shit.
It’s possible Clarkson had literally no control over the video. The music industry is all about hardcore manipulation. They get stars addicted to drugs for the sole purpose of manipulating them by providing more drugs only when the star does what she’s told. Even though some musicians are too smart to fall for that, I have to assume people who would resort to using drugs like that on teen performers will do whatever the fuck it takes to control their stars.
I’m not saying a musician has no responsibility for what they perform. I just find it far more interesting to speculate a bit about the forces that may or may not be behind the video. Perhaps she wrote the whole thing herself. But maybe, like actresses given shit parts we complain about, she was under contract and had to serve up what a production staff believed (or convinced itself) the audience wanted.
Even Paul McCartney can’t control what commercials the Beatles songs appear on.
This video didn’t strike me as all that vague. The immediate cuts between the shots where she’s screwing with him and an identical shot where he’s alone made me assume from the beginning that it was his own guilt over having been a jerk. It could be my interpretation, but it is a fairly conventional trope for “this is only happening in this person’s head”. The ending makes that more clear when after all of this has gone on, the ex boyfriend is show waking up in his car- the entire ’story’ part of the video was a dream inspired by his own guilt.
So I don’t believe the message was ever intended to be that stalking people or vindictive retribution is okay, but that if you do something intentionally that hurts someone else most of the damage is what you do to yourself. They’ll move on and you’ll be stuck trying to find a way to live with yourself.
I may be in the minority, but the whole stalking thing still makes me uncomfortable. I get that it was some kind of dream/fantasy as opposed to RL, but it wasn’t clear to me weather it was HIS guilt or HER fantasy of ‘haha, bet you’re sorry now that I’m famous’. And if it was her fantasy then I think there are much better ways of playing that.
I also realise that the singer isn’t the only player in the songs/clip, just the most visible, although I still say we all have to take some responsibility for what gets put out in our names, even if there are mitigating circumstances. (And incidentally, I do blame Arnie for T3.)
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