'Tell Me That I'm Pretty': Spent Explores The Restrictive Nature of Beauty Standards In Their New Video
‘Tell Me that i’m pretty’: Spent explores the restrictive nature of beauty standards In Their New Video
Anna Morrissey
Spent, a Queer, non-binary artist, uses their music as a medium to explore their gender identity, and question socially prescribed binaries.
Their new music video, ‘Pretty,’directed by Ben Cole, is a rejection of the rigidity of gender norms and what is culturally considered as ‘pretty.’ They do this while also exploring the contradictory yearning that almost everyone feels in the face of the ability to feel or be perceived as the object of ‘prettiness.’ A satirical yet forgiving example of how, when living in a society that values beauty over all else, we can never fully escape it.
“Pretty me
can you tell me I’m the best you’ve ever seen.
Pretty fun
can you tell me that I don’t need anyone.”
The video is not conventionally pretty, the glitchy music and visuals of bandaged heads and pouring fake blood unnerving – yet this is interspliced with beautiful shots of Spent, red eyebrows drawn on and skin glowing. We have been transported into a different gaze, the camera duplicating their face into a rainbow tryptic, seeing Spent as an authentic expression of themselves instead of bandaged, being painted by hands that aren’t their own, trying to be conventionally pretty. This new world, introduced half way through, is mystifying and far more alluring, the video a celebration of the weird, the prettiness in being authentic and the power in diverging from the status quo.
