Artist Selection with a Stunning Outcome

Many know the indie singer songwriter Sia for her latest single Chandelier. Sia was quite involved in the music industry before her single dropped. She wrote songs as she does today but she sold them to other famous artist. The song Pretty Hurts was written by Sia in 2013 and was originally going to have Katy Perry sing it. Katy Perry never saw the offer for the song and Beyoncé ended up calling it her own with help from Ammo as her co-producer. 

Beyoncé used the song Pretty Hurts and found that it followed the theme of her album, to find what makes you happy. Beyoncé took Sia’s song and truly made it original. She poured so much emotion into the song and really portrayed the emotion and deep meaning quite well in her music video. Beyoncé deserved to have the song.

The lyrics to Pretty Hurts describe a girl’s life and what measures she would go to in order to look “pretty”. Beyoncé in her video decides to use a beauty pageant as her stage to capture a very extreme example of the meaning behind the lyrics. She shows herself throwing up in-between a costume change in the pageant, a girl with a spray gun making sure all of her flaws are covered and that her pigment isn’t too pale, even tears before going on stage. The video alone shows an incredible message, it really captures today’s idea of “pretty” and what it takes to reach that status to its full meaning. Beyoncé makes you ride her emotional roller coasted with this song by building the intensity of the video when her lyrics get more intense. The strong intense emotion shown in the video and sung through the lyrics almost makes you feel like the girl trying to be “pretty” is you. You start to fall for this story she is telling and you forget it is only music.

The end of the song and video left me pondering if spray painting yourself and throwing up is really necessary to be “pretty”. It also made me think about how wrong it is to have a competition to judge who is “prettier”. It made me think, how can you judge someone’s appearance in that setting seeing that their appearance is very much fake to begin with. All of these thoughts running through my mind made me realize that Beyoncé truly did a wonderful job of getting her message across. Her video paralleled her lyrics and aided in the emotional struggle Beyoncé wanted us to see and understand. The song itself was beautiful and it almost seemed like her lyrics were her crying when the video showed her crying or when she was in emotional pain. She made us understand that pretty hurts, and it shouldn’t.