![]() ![]() Lil Nas X appears addicted to wielding his selfie camera while shirtless. Lizzo seems happy to film herself strutting on a treadmill. Some artists are great at doing that sort of thing. Rather than being asked to flaunt their bodies on a battleship for a big-budget video, they can just act silly in their bathrobe or backyard. One might guess that pop stars would be relieved by TikTok’s ostensibly humble demands. ![]() Read: How pop music’s teenage dream ended That ecosystem thrives on calculated messiness-producing the feeling, if not the fact, of seeing people how they really are. With a booming, young user base, TikTok has become a music-promotion ecosystem of extreme importance. Today, the most important pieces of visual media in music resemble “7/11.” On TikTok, new songs surge or flop based on how effectively they entice users to perform some slapdash feat: a simple dance, a costume change sourced from the bedroom closet, a cute or cringe confession. Everyone knows they can’t be Beyoncé-but when watching this easy-breezy video, they might forget that. It also gave the public yet another chance to marvel at this particular celebrity’s fabulousness: her vision, her body, her work ethic. The video let viewers indulge deep-seated human desires to pry into other people’s bedrooms and to connect with celebrities as if they were siblings. Packed with details and quick cuts, “7/11” had no doubt been sweated over like any other Beyoncé product, to clever effect. The goddess of #flawless was loosening up. Giggles and apparent mistakes were plentiful. Every shot could’ve been captured by Beyoncé herself, using an iPhone. In 2014, about a year after the pop queen popularized the term visual album by surprise-releasing 17 expensive-looking music videos all at once, she dropped a lighthearted B side: “7/11.” It came with a clip of the singer shimmying in drab hotel corridors, on a rumpled bed, and between bathroom counters cluttered with products you might find at CVS. T he defining music video of the past decade is probably the one in which Beyoncé showed off her laundry pile and Lubriderm. ![]()
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