Music videos are a perfect medium for laying bare societal ideologies. They are quickly produced, focused on visual spectacle, and ultimately advertisements for artists and record labels. In the 1980s, the heyday of music videos, these elements combined to create a canon of stereotypes, tropes, and cliches that frequently objectified women. In videos made for male rock bands, women largely appear as objects of desire, writhing on cars and being hosed down with water. They are background dancers or love interests and exist merely to be seen by male audiences. To put it simply, in this era of music videos men have symbolic power and women do not.
When bands offered an alternative to these images, their videos were often a complete rejection of the forms’ customs. R.E.M., icons of 1980s indie rock, were experts at this technique. The video for their song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” follows a teenager rummaging through an abandoned house while doing skateboard tricks, and 1986’s “Fall On Me” consists of unedited footage shot by lead singer Michael Stipe at a quarry. However, in the music video for “Pop Song 89”, the band both continued the artistic simplicity of their 1980s video output and acknowledged the standards of the medium.
The video initially appears as indebted to convention as the song’s generic title. Directed by Stipe, the simple concept finds him and three women dancing, with all four shirtless. A rockstar dancing with half-naked women? What is this, a Def Leppard video? One could certainly make the argument that a video full of topless women is inherently sexist thanks to the context in which audiences typically see these images. Although music videos are an art form, they also exist to sell records, and in this model, women who appear in videos can become products as well. “Pop Song 89” is a video directed by a man, featuring women whose only role is to be topless.
However, instead of dutifully following traditions of objectification, “Pop Song 89” acknowledges this history before subverting expectations of what a music video full of topless women should look like. By utilizing nudity, costuming, and choreography to position women as equals, Stipe elevates “Pop Song 89” from standard rock video fare to something much more meaningful.
Many music videos of the era use nudity to present men as holding symbolic power, in which men are fully clothed and women are half-naked props. In contrast, “Pop Song 89” prioritizes androgyny, using both nudity and clothing as an equalizer. All four dancers are shirtless, including Stipe, and when MTV asked him to censor the video’s nudity, Stipe put black bars over everyone’s chests, including his own. As he later stated, “a nipple is a nipple”. In his video work, Stipe was highly conscious of combatting the power imbalances present in 1980s music videos, and doing away with the double standards of nudity helped eliminate those imbalances.
Underscoring this androgyny is the four actors’ matching pants and Michael Stipe’s long hair. His femininity and their matching clothes blur gender differences even further; at some points, it’s hard to tell who is who. This androgyny is markedly different from other videos of the era, many of which subjugated women by creating gendered divisions in which men had power and women did not. In contrast, “Pop Song 89” uses these same tools of nudity, clothing, and hair to eliminate the visual division of power in which men look and women are looked at.
Stipe employs choreography to further portray the sameness between him and the women in the video. The minimalist dancing of the four comes across as human instead of manufactured. Their moves are a little awkward and a little goofy; they are dancing like real people. They all move the same way, and they all look like they’re truly having fun. They smile at each other, fall in and out of sync, and take part in group hugs. There’s no trace of sexy choreography meant to titillate the audience, instead, it’s just normal people existing joyfully.
The choreography is also devoid of hierarchy. Although for most of the video, Stipe is in the foreground with the three women behind him, as the video progresses each actor has a turn in the spotlight. In this video, women are not background dancers, but important players. The choreography makes “Pop Song 89” different from other rock videos because it erases power dynamics. Gone is the expected portrayal of women as background eye candy and men as commanding rockstars. Instead, lighthearted dancing and a lack of hierarchy lead to a much more egalitarian music video, wherein women and men are depicted with equal importance.
“Pop Song 89” is compelling because of how it rejects common music video strategies. Shirtless women don’t exist solely to be looked at, and choreography isn’t used to enforce hierarchy. The video is a response to the objectification of women in music videos, and after presenting a seemingly faithful re-creation of all the videos that came before it, Michael Stipe reveals his satirical intentions and gives the audience a glimpse into a world of androgyny and equality. In this world, nudity becomes a mark of parity, clothing, and hair let exploited differences fade away, and choreography is a way for friends to come together in equal standing. In “Pop Song 89”, all the music video tropes that are so familiar to the viewer are gently dismissed, and new possibilities are discovered.
