I Heart Sophie Muller

Sophie Muller is a genius. That was always the case but it seems another chunk of the population is realizing it. Right now, she is everywhere. The Beyonce Déjà Vu video is hers; the most sophisticated and stylized (and awesome) country music video of all time--excepting Johnny Cash’s Hurt--Like We Never Loved At All (Faith Hill) is also hers. She will soon put out Stealing Kisses (also by Faith Hill), which given the song itself, shall prove to be another genius video for her. She did the Dixie Chicks’s Not Ready To Make Nice. Beyonce’s going to work with her again, of course, in Ring The Alarm—cause Beyonce knows a good thing. Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie is hers as well.

Remember that fantastic Maroon 5 video, for She Will Be Loved with Kelly kick ass Preston? It was hers. So was their first video, This Love. Gwen Stefani’s been onto her for a while, with Underneath It All and Luxurious and No Doubt stuff like Don’t Speak. So has Nelly Furtado. Garbage, Annie Lennox and Eurhythmics and Sade and other UK acts were onto her long ago, of course. She’s done KT Tunstall’s Black Horse video too. My secret wish is that she will do KT’s Other Side of The World video, should that be a single—which it should.

She’s got that feminine intuitive intelligence (that men can have too, it’s not biology!), that aesthetic that can actually thrive while serving the medium of the music video and not the ego of the director (ahem, Hype Williams). Each video’s its own world, own little movie, moment, and emotion: each one’s its own visual interpretation of a song. And her style, though vastly ranging and super resourceful and creative, is consistently sophisticated and personal and sharp. Very sharp.

In mass culture, both originality and distinction are very hard to pull off I think. The culture seems set up precisely so that you can be superiorly good and still be just doing variations on the themes of the moment--you could just be brilliant at reverberating a same general tone as everyone else. Everyones bitches about lack of originality but when everything is so deeply submerged into a massively distributed aesthetic, a sort of coordinated "sense" of the times, to actually do something crisp and new and brilliant is very hard. The people who can do it have something beyond just being very talented. I have a video director crush on her. She’s on my list of idols now. I wish I could Netflix all her videos and have a Sophie Muller festival.

PS: And you know what else she did? The priceless, pitch-perfect, make your day better These Words video with the little radios that dance (Natasha Bedingfield)!!!