I first saw this video when it was the itunes free single video of the week in 2007. “I Wanna Have Your Babies” by Natasha Bedingfield is completely and utterly disturbing. This song, without the music video, is actually decently catchy and demonstrates a wide range of vocal talent. However, when paired with the music video, takes the song from catchy and cute to creepy and crazy. The music video begins with babies floating in a bubble and popping; it looks equally as strange as it sounds. The oddities continue when Bedingfield sings to a variety of men that she wants to have their babies, and they quickly flee the scene. Although the concept of the song and video are shaky, the cinematography is actually pretty wonderful. There is a parallelism in the verses with the showing of Natasha Bedingfield’s face, up close, while she sings, and then the camera zooms out slightly as the imaginary future is pictured. There is no real consistency with colors, but the consistency with the clothing lies in the individual scenes themselves. The clothing choices match the scene and the vision of the man, but the clothing choices borderline racist, especially in the scene with the black man. Although the clothing choices seemed sound, they portray a somewhat shallow view of the future. The lighting adequately fits the scene, as does the texture. In the middle of the video, a small blonde boy is shown bobbing back and forth saying, “La la la la la-lala-lala.” This disturbs me, completely. The sound of babies singing right before a rather sexy scene shows a level of distaste. At the end of the video, when Bedingfield falls in love with the barista, and the future is shown, the creepiness continues as there are dancing elephants, babies crawling around, and babies floating in buckets on the ceiling. Overall, although this is an extremely catchy, singable song while listening, any viewer would agree that this video is disgusting to the general public.
Happy Monday everyone!
Looking forward to seeing if y’all are as creeped out by this video as I am.
Writing on Music, Summer 2015 