A vat of lip gloss couldn’t dress up Kylie Jenner’s music video
With its pointless violence, “Glosses” doesn’t make a lick of sense as a promotional vehicle
Kylie Jenner released a music video this week.
If you missed it due to an emergency root canal or acute food poisoning, consider yourself lucky. Both are less painful. Tumbling down a flight of stairs with burrs in your underwear is less painful than watching this exercise in big budget bonkers.
Now, look. I realize there is no law that requires music videos to make sense. If there were, Britney Spears, PSY, Nicki Minaj, Björk, Fatboy Slim, Euryth- mics, Bonnie Tyler and Devo would be serving life sentences and using metal lances to pick up trash by the side of a yellow-brick road while tethered to a chain gang of singing mannequins near a neon forest of undead children who are hurling chicken wings at the moon.
If you got the multiple music video references in that sentence, email me the correct answers and I will set you up with a free subscription to Toronto Star Touch. Just kidding! It’s always free! Tell everyone you know to download the free app and freely enjoy Star Touch each and every day!
You see what I did there? I embedded an ad in this column. That’s pretty much what Kylie is doing with her video for “Glosses.” The only difference is my ad is not incongruent and her ad is utterly baffling.
So let’s try to solve this three minute and 11 second pop culture riddle together.
Start the video. We begin with a spedup establishing shot. We are in a hot and arid place. Nevada? New Mexico? No idea.
At the 10-second mark, the beat drops and a severely Auto-Tuned voice that may or may not be coming from Kylie’s larynx can be heard warbling about the interstate or being hungry.
Seven seconds later, there is a decrepit sign that reads, “Motel.” Jenner pilots her Rolls-Royce convertible toward the ramshackle joint.
At the 30-second mark, she hits the brakes to gaze into her rearview mirror and apply lip gloss.
Kylie adjusts her sunglasses and designer bandana like a true Beverly Hills thug.
Cut to an interior shot. Inside a motel room, there are a few men who are, what, drug dealers? Gunrunners? Human smugglers? No idea. The only thing that’s clear is soon we will sympathize with these poor bastards. They do nothing to deserve what happens next.
A young woman saunters past a briefcase that contains stacks of cash and a semi-automatic weapon. She trains her long eyelashes at one of the men and says: “So is this what we negotiated on the phone? Because we’re going to have a problem if there’s not all the money here.”
At the 1:04 mark, she too brushes on lip gloss.
Now we’re back outside in the dusty parking lot where Jenner is reclining in the sunshine in a bra-top, blowing bubbles and texting a cryptic compound word — “Gametime” — to cue the mayhem.
At 1:24, a woman in short shorts kicks open the motel room door. She brandishes a firearm and says, “Get the hell on the ground” with the fearsome inflection of Jessica Rabbit. Her hair is radiant.
The woman already inside, the one in thigh-high boots and some kind of zippered latex bodice, smashes a bottle across the head of a man without chipping one of her nails. The door-buster pistol-whips another man. Her mascara does not run.
It’s like a Revlon commercial as imagined by Quentin Tarantino.
There is an attempted drowning as the head of one man is dunked into an aquarium. Another man is kicked in the giblets. Another is thrown out the window, landing close to where Jenner is now soaking up rays in a fur coat.
At 2:19, the three female assailants stroll out of the motel and are identified by onscreen graphics. The woman sucking on a red lollipop is “Like.” The woman who jumps in the back seat is “Literally.” The door-buster is “So Cute,” which is not a description the men now writhing in pain would have guessed.
Kylie hits the gas and the Rolls speeds off as Literally throws the cash into the sky, making the motive for this attack even tougher to determine. The four women are then presumably apprehended because the video ends with them standing in front of one of those height charts used by police for mug shots and lineups.
What is “Glosses”? It is a commercial for Kylie’s new line of lip gloss that arrived on Friday. But does the video make a lick of sense as cosmetics marketing? No, not unless the message is supposed to be, “Apply this lip gloss and transform into a psychopathic felon! Look your violent best when getting locked up for life!”
Like, Literally and So Cute? No, Kylie’s new line should come in shades of Shame, Revolting and So Pointless. vmenon@thestar.ca