Beyoncé graces the cover of this year's TIME 100 issue and she's made TIME.com the first official outlet by dropping intense, touching music video to her self-titled visual album's opening ballad, "Pretty Hurts." The TIME 100 cover subject makes an epic statement on the nature of beauty and the clip strives to explore the definition of pretty, in which we finds Beyoncé critiquing what she sees as a bankrupt beauty culture, and features a cameo from Harvey Keitel.
Beyoncé starts her self-titled fifth album with an assault on the pressures that women face to attain physical perfection. The touching opener, was co-penned by Beyoncé with Australian singer Sia Furler and producer Ammo, is a smoky pop and neo soul song with speechy lyrics about the tyranny of the beauty industry, intended as a self-empowerment anthem as Beyoncé sings about the fatal consequences that our common pursuit of the perfect body can have, and how perfection is a disease while looking flawless and negatively of beauty stereotypes. Well, the whole point is that beauty alone will not bring you happiness, especially when you've achieved it on someone else's terms.
Despite the fantastic lyrics, what you see on screen is a different picture. The Melina Matsoukas-directed clip is a graphic depiction of the stresses suffered by models and beauty queens and concludes with home footage of a pre-teen Beyoncé accepting a singing award after a presenter mispronounces her name. Beyoncé is portrayed as a beauty pageant contestant exploring the correlation of outer beauty and happiness, but she is also a troubled beauty queen who is addicted to diet pills and represents "Miss Third Ward," the area of Houston neighborhood where she grew up.
Miss Third Ward does everything in her power to look flawless, but still can't achieve perfection. While the concept for the video was conceived from society's view on beauty and the extremes some women go to to attain it, Matsoukas said she also pulled some of her inspiration from Queen B herself. It was Beyoncé herself who suggested that Miss Third Ward loses in the competition. And actually the woman who wins is an albino woman. "When you get this trophy, and you're looking at it, is it worth it?" Beyoncé asked. "That song represents finding that thing in the world that makes you truly happy."
Beyoncé starts her self-titled fifth album with an assault on the pressures that women face to attain physical perfection. The touching opener, was co-penned by Beyoncé with Australian singer Sia Furler and producer Ammo, is a smoky pop and neo soul song with speechy lyrics about the tyranny of the beauty industry, intended as a self-empowerment anthem as Beyoncé sings about the fatal consequences that our common pursuit of the perfect body can have, and how perfection is a disease while looking flawless and negatively of beauty stereotypes. Well, the whole point is that beauty alone will not bring you happiness, especially when you've achieved it on someone else's terms.
Despite the fantastic lyrics, what you see on screen is a different picture. The Melina Matsoukas-directed clip is a graphic depiction of the stresses suffered by models and beauty queens and concludes with home footage of a pre-teen Beyoncé accepting a singing award after a presenter mispronounces her name. Beyoncé is portrayed as a beauty pageant contestant exploring the correlation of outer beauty and happiness, but she is also a troubled beauty queen who is addicted to diet pills and represents "Miss Third Ward," the area of Houston neighborhood where she grew up.
Miss Third Ward does everything in her power to look flawless, but still can't achieve perfection. While the concept for the video was conceived from society's view on beauty and the extremes some women go to to attain it, Matsoukas said she also pulled some of her inspiration from Queen B herself. It was Beyoncé herself who suggested that Miss Third Ward loses in the competition. And actually the woman who wins is an albino woman. "When you get this trophy, and you're looking at it, is it worth it?" Beyoncé asked. "That song represents finding that thing in the world that makes you truly happy."
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