When I first saw the video for Gabriella Cilmi’s On a Mission, I thought it would be funny (ha) to write a post on this embarrassing excuse for a pop song. This disgustingly infectious track has now polluted my head for one long, tawdry week and so it is with immense relief that I expel this track from my iPod never to be heard again.
Its beginning is deceptively promising. A growling bassline thumps under tinny artificial percussion which gives way to a thumping 4/4 beat and fabulous Pointer Sisters synths. Sadly, Cilmi has the kind of foghorn voice last heard terrorising people in the form of Anastasia. Consequently, not even a half-hearted funky guitar lead-in can save the graceless, ugly chorus.
The lyrics are from the same diabolical faux-feminist rhetoric as Destiny’s Child’s Independent Woman and Beyonce’s Diva and Single Ladies (spot the common denominator), in which women should be extra proud if they pay for their own things, walk all over people, and then sneer at their ex-boyfriends for not marrying them as they shake their booty in that sorry dawg’s face.
However, while Beyonce has the excuse of making decent music, Gabriella Cilmi, er, doesn’t. Not that it really matters, as Gabriella has her thoughts on far higher things, being as she is “a woman, on a mission (whoah-oooh-oooh)”. These are the kind of inspiring mantras you’d find on a discontinued Davina McCall workout video.
The video is a graveyard for ghosts of music video gimmicks. Its weird outer space setting is like the freakish lovechild of Jennifer Lopez’s Play and The Darkness’ I Believe in a Thing Called Love – two videos I had mercifully forgotten until now. Cilmi appears as a sexy astronaut, a sexy mythic deity, a sexy cartoon character, a sexy sheer-suited something-or-other, a sexy self-referential video of her sexy self, a sexy disco chick, a sexy goth warrior queen and a sexy pop princess.
As if that weren’t enough clichés for one video, we also get girls performing chorus-line moves, girls dancing in water, girls in bikini and underwear combinations, lots of vague, utterly pointless repeated symbols, some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it animation, an offensive amount of poorly-executed bluescreen, and cost-cutting recycling of footage you’ve already watched.
Best of all, the dancing appears to have been choreographed by Mortimer and Reeves. I would especially like to draw your attention to the peculiar breast wiggling and torso bending at 00:24, the bizarre tit-turning at 00:36 while dressed like a dominatrix version of the Daft Punk swimmers, Cilmi’s comely flash of her bosoms at 00:47 as if to prove that, yes, she really IS a woman, the lovely bikini-charleston at 00:50 and the amazing dislocated-dance-wobble at 01:04. As we come to the end of the first chorus, Gabriella’s cheerful little skip at 01:08 is doubtless a reverential nod to Monty Python. And that’s just the opening third.
Thus continues more of the same depressing, derivative, unimaginative trip... and then, just when you thought things couldn’t get any more degrading, there’s a rap.
As if that weren’t enough clichés for one video, we also get girls performing chorus-line moves, girls dancing in water, girls in bikini and underwear combinations, lots of vague, utterly pointless repeated symbols, some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it animation, an offensive amount of poorly-executed bluescreen, and cost-cutting recycling of footage you’ve already watched.