When pop stars become auteurs

Visu­al albums are not quite poet­ry to film’s prose, nor are they a chap­ter in film’s fic­tion­al devel­op­ment. Rather than a trend or a style, they func­tion as a dis­ci­pline, tak­ing the expec­ta­tions of tra­di­tion­al film­go­ers and upend­ing them, build­ing some­thing fresh and live­ly that breaks free of a story’s tra­di­tion­al struc­ture. In this way, they feel more like the com­ic book to a film’s nov­el. As in com­ic books, the visu­al album’s sto­ry is sug­gest­ed, tucked into the gap between frames, observers impli­cat­ed as sto­ry­tellers in view­ing. The best stars pour the his­to­ry of their music, the sto­ries that lay dor­mant in the writ­ing process, into the wait­ing struc­ture of the visu­al album, fill­ing it with non-lit­er­al mean­ing. Vision­ar­ies from Prince to Kate Bush under­stood that music and film are only ever a few feet away, twin cre­ative impuls­es on an inevitable col­li­sion course.

Of course, where there is art, there will be auteurs: peo­ple whose ideas and expres­sions are curbed around immov­able objects and events that fill their van­tage point. The visu­al album has become a touch­point for our most for­mi­da­ble pop singers, their recog­nis­able fin­ger­prints cling­ing to every new­ly released image. Every few months, a new iter­a­tion of the visu­al album is released, prompt­ing the next wave of frus­trat­ing dis­course, both den­i­grat­ing the skill in launch­ing such a project (treat­ing it as an over­long music video) and over­stat­ing the artis­tic impulse neces­si­tat­ing its release (which is always tied to the mar­ket­ing of a per­son­al brand). When Jen­nifer Lopez released the trail­er for her bizarre and unex­pect­ed pas­sion project enti­tled This is Me… Now: A Love Sto­ry, it prompt­ed a round of ques­tions sur­round­ing the prece­dent and legit­i­ma­cy of this sto­ry­telling mode.
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Each new visu­al album is tan­gled in the ear­ly offer­ings of the medi­um, stretch­ing back to the likes of A Hard Day’s Night – the kind of light-heart­ed, triv­ial out­ing that could only thrive in a genre’s ear­ly, unre­hearsed moments. The Richard Lester-direct­ed movie employs an absur­dism that both upends and explains The Bea­t­les’ unde­ni­able suc­cess. Their ear­ly tunes were catchy and entic­ing to a new gen­er­a­tion of post-war teenagers des­per­ate to escape their cau­tious, fru­gal par­ents. Inevitably those teenagers would devel­op into stern par­ents, and The Bea­t­les would be treat­ed as a pop rock rel­ic of their youth. They are now firm­ly woven into our cul­tur­al mem­o­ry and respon­si­ble for the pre­dictable pat­terns which ensue, but A Hard Day’s Night arrived on the ​‘60s scene as a strange, unex­pect­ed emblem of the future. Ever since then, artists have been seek­ing out new and thrilling­ly imper­fect con­tain­ers for their music, reck­on­ing with that first prick­ly, uneven shape.
This is Me… Now shares in A Hard Day’s Night’s fran­tic deliri­ous­ness, yet Lopez and her fel­low women in pop can’t sum­marise their per­son­al­i­ties and careers in such friv­o­lous visu­al out­ings. Audi­ences expect a degree of real­i­ty, or at least relata­bil­i­ty from these women. As such, Lopez and direc­tor David Mey­er (who had pre­vi­ous­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed with her for the ​‘I’m Real’ music video) adopt an epic lens. In This is Me… Now, Lopez plays The Artist: a woman in ther­a­py, a sub­ject of inter­est for the cos­mos-bound Zodi­ac coun­cil, a child from the Bronx pur­su­ing her dream. Ulti­mate­ly, the film can’t always jus­ti­fy its own grandios­i­ty, but like all visu­al albums, it suc­ceeds in assem­bling a host of filmic ref­er­ences with­in which the star is located. 

Pop music is often accused of being bland in its acces­si­bil­i­ty, smoothed into a shiny, reflec­tive sur­face that lis­ten­ers can spot them­selves in. Through these films, artists have a chance to weave more obvi­ous­ly respect­ed scenes and images into the tapes­try of their albums, com­pli­cat­ing those crit­i­cal mis­giv­ings and prov­ing that pop music is trace­able, born from an author and one with a spe­cif­ic point of view. As Andrew Sar­ris wrote in (the con­tro­ver­sial) ​‘Notes on the Auteur The­o­ry in 1962’, the ​“inte­ri­or mean­ing” of a director’s work is inex­plic­a­ble in ​“any lit­er­al sense, because part of it is imbed­ded in the stuff of cin­e­ma and can­not be ren­dered in non-cin­e­mat­ic terms.” As an image-mak­er, Lopez and her pop music peers under­stand that a suc­cess­ful tran­si­tion to cin­e­ma requires an under­stand­ing and embody­ing of film his­to­ry. Great mov­ing images are only explic­a­ble through images that came before – a sequence of obscure, imper­fect translations.

For Lopez, the arti­fi­cial­i­ty of the CGI-ed set mim­ics the feel and design of the clas­sic musi­cals that first inspired her. Visu­al nods to Sweet Char­i­ty and Sin­gin’ in the Rain abound, all of which lend the idea of Jen­nifer Lopez ​“The Artist” real weight. Noth­ing feels as delib­er­ate as her fas­ci­nat­ing and fre­quent ref­er­ence to Bar­bra Streisand. After a cacoph­o­ny of breakups, Lopez’s char­ac­ter lies on the sofa watch­ing Katie (Bar­bra Streisand) and Hubbell (Robert Red­ford) argue in The Way We Were. ​“We’d both be wrong! We’d both lose!” Hubbell con­cludes. ​“Couldn’t we both win?” Katie and Lopez respond earnest­ly, one from the screen, one from the liv­ing room. Streisand is the key to unlock­ing Lopez’s prac­tice of image-mak­ing; a New York-born roman­tic, direct­ed by an oth­er­world­ly sense of des­tiny, still pre­oc­cu­pied with life’s mad­den­ing what-ifs.
All the best visu­al albums wear their ref­er­ences on their sleeve, push­ing the medi­um for­ward through a brash refash­ion­ing of famous images. Per­haps none more so than Beyoncé’s Lemon­ade, which remains the 21^st cen­tu­ry stan­dard for the visu­al album. Like Lopez’s offer­ing, it is ambi­tious, writ large on the biggest can­vas pos­si­ble. And like This is Me… Now, it is also a deeply per­son­al response to the spec­u­la­tion around her mar­riage, but one that patient­ly merges home videos with moments of cin­e­ma his­to­ry (specif­i­cal­ly draw­ing back to Julie Dash’s Daugh­ters of the Dust). The suc­cess of pop albums isn’t depen­dent on filmic nods, but rev­er­ence for great art is an indi­ca­tion of a great artist, and such major celebri­ties can use the visu­al album to plat­form their taste, remod­el­ling pub­lic atten­tion around their new, cre­ative stand­ing – just as Bey­on­cé did in 2016.

Lemonade’s earth-shat­ter­ing suc­cess reori­ent­ed the mar­ket and refo­cused her career, replac­ing the blur­ry image of Solange launch­ing her­self at Jay‑Z in the cor­ner of the MET ele­va­tor with the more mar­ketable moment of Bey­on­cé approach­ing the cam­era, swing­ing a base­ball bat across her shoul­ders: an obvi­ous and effec­tive repo­si­tion­ing of social pow­er. This too is the mark of an auteur, faced with a cacoph­o­ny of pub­lic inter­est, choos­ing to direct that inter­est inward, con­cerned sole­ly with (what Sar­ris described as) the shift­ing rela­tion­ship ​“between a director’s per­son­al­i­ty and his material.” 

Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Com­put­er exists in a sim­i­lar genre-bend­ing plane to This is Me… Now, using the aes­thet­ics of sci­ence fic­tion to lend Monáe’s opti­mistic mes­sag­ing a recog­nis­able shape. Monáe is Jane 57821, a woman sub­ject to the oppres­sive tests of a total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment and rem­i­nisc­ing on a his­to­ry of whirl­wind romances. The singer-slash-film-star and her pro­duc­tion design­er Fer­nan­da Guer­rero employ an aes­thet­ic that merges cold, grey robot­ic imagery and the warmth of Amer­i­cana; the future and past col­laps­ing into one anoth­er in kalei­do­scop­ic bursts. With this style, Dirty Computer’s drama­tis­ing of the bat­tle between state and spir­it is potent, held under the mul­ti-coloured spotlight. 

Like Lemon­ade, or even A Hard Day’s Night, Dirty Computer’s sense of polit­i­cal and per­son­al con­text is what ele­vates it from trend­ing top­ic to respect­ed out­put. This is Me… Now doesn’t grad­u­ate to these heights, but it does prove that this form remains a mean­ing­ful tool of self-def­i­n­i­tion, a haven of free expres­sion for the celebri­ties involved. For the rest of us, visu­al albums are a strange, mem­o­rable deep dive into famous psy­ches, one where the egos run­ning amok are not just exec­u­tives oper­at­ing from stu­dio offices. These famous faces are up front, bla­tant in prov­ing they see where they fall in film his­to­ry and refresh­ing­ly obvi­ous in their desire to be seen.