Pretty Hurts Critique

Critique of “Pretty Hurts” By Beyoncé

Cameron Hayes

“Pretty Hurts” was released in 2014 as a single. however it was on her 2013 album, and the music video that accompanied it was also released in 2013.  The music video portrays a bunch of girls in a beauty pageant, with Beyoncé being one of them. In this song, Beyoncé delves into the very difficult topics such as what “pretty” is in society today. In her music video, she presents society’s image of pretty to be perfect. She is not supportive of that image though.

At about the 1:20 mark of the video, Beyoncé comes out onto the stage to sing for the judges. Shine the light on whatever’s worse. This really speaks to the need of society to shame girls for anything that is wrong with them. A girl could be almost perfect, but have one pimple on her forehead and society is concerned with that pimple, not anything else. This leads into her next line Perfection is the disease of a nation. Which she is really trying to say that only perfect is pretty in society today. She then goes into her best line of the performance in my opinion, Tryna fix something But you can't fix what you can't see. This to me really speaks to her last few lines about society. Society shines a light on the worst parts of you, but sometimes, it’s a false “error”. Just because society says it’s the worst about you, doesn’t mean that something is actually wrong. Girls will try to fix something that society says is bad about them however in the end, you can’t fix what you can’t see, because it is not there. There are very good examples of this in the video. The most poignant for me was the very skinny girl who was eating cotton balls to get skinnier. She clearly was very skinny, but society has told her that she’s not and that she needs to be even skinnier. As for what Beyonce’s view on this is, she does not support it. This is evidenced by a few things. First of all, it is shown when Beyonce wipes off her makeup, showing that she does not want to be perfect, she just wants to be her. The second evidence of this is when she destroys all of her trophies near the end of the video. This really shows that she does not care about what society thinks is her being pretty. She just wants to be pretty to herself.

In the end, this video is meant to show that there is nothing wrong with the girls in the video, the error is with society at large. It was a perfect indictment of our society’s need to point out the bad things in a person. Even if the bad things don’t exist, we will even make things up just so that we feel better about ourselves. This video did a great job of showing that most of the time, what society is telling you is bad about yourself, is usually false. Overall, I think that Beyoncé created a interesting video that showed people the wrongs of society today when it comes to what “pretty” is.