I watched Gnesa’s “Wilder” music video for you assholes. For that, you OWE me. You owe me Big Time. First, here is the video. Go watch it. No, I’ll wait. Just go watch it and tell me how long you can sit through it: Gnesa - Wilder (Music Video)
Okay, are you back? How far did you get? My completely unofficial poll consisting of responses to someone’s post on G+ suggests an average watching time of 1 minute, 12 seconds before you stopped watching. I sat through the entire 4 minutes and 7 seconds of this. YOU OWE ME.
Now, on to the review. First, the good parts of the video. Yes, there are some good parts. Gnesa is an attractive lady. The various outfits she changes between throughout the course of the video seem well suited to her. Her makeup seems to be well crafted. Okay, let’s get on to what you really want to hear.
But before we get into that, let me say one thing. I do not have any contempt for Gnesa. She honestly appears to be trying her best and is pursuing her dreams to “make it” as a pop singer. That said, I do feel sort of bad for what is about to happen. Gnesa, I’ll quote Parry Gripp here: No matter how insane or ridiculous they seem, you have to follow your dreams. It’s a shame your dreams are about to catch fire. The bad kind of fire.
Let’s start with the overall aesthetic of the video, which appears to be “Glamor Shots Does Music Videos Now” (totally stole that joke). It starts off with and extreme close up of Gnesa, who kisses to the camera. So far, so good. Then, it shifts to Gnesa against a white background, with nothing else, like a photography background. Next up, Gnesa is to the left side, with a black background, against which some generic lightshow effects are displayed. This imagery is repeated a few times. Occasionally the white background will have a piece of furniture that Gnesa is draped across...like a photography studio. The last type of shot is a fairly extreme closeup of Gnesa that is not well framed at all. There is also occasionally a wind machine that blows her hair around for no reason.
The music is probably the worst and best part of this. First, it is HORRIBLY mixed, often times drowning out the vocals to the point where it is difficult to understand the words (which may be a blessing in disguise). Second, it sounds like a lot of it was taken from a demo recording on a particularly fancy keyboard. Not the $75 dollar Casio special many of us were exposed to in our youth, but the bigger, more expensive brother keyboards for “beginning music enthusiasts”. What does this mean? It means the music sounds canned. Like it was made to generically appeal to such a wide range of musical tastes it is utterly forgettable and bland. It almost seems like fake music, intentionally made to sound derivative and bad. It is also INCREDIBLY repetitive, with the whole song consisting of the first minute repeated 3 more times to pad out the run time.
The “choreography” is...non-existent. Gnesa is about as skilled in the realm of dance as I am, which is to say, “not very”. She can almost keep in time with the music, but not quite. Perhaps her attempt at a “sensual” wiggle will be successful another day. I did enjoy the part where she slowly spins around in the chair. That chair is kind of awesome. That “finger shake” she does occasionally seems out of place too. Like she just threw it in for the heck of it, and the director was like “Yes, that seems fine. Let’s run with that!”. Gnesa also gets this weird look on her face at times, like maybe she is high. I bet this song would be much better if I was high. But I digress.
Now, we get to the vocals. I’m afraid Gnesa lacks just about every quality that a professional singer is required to have. She is out of tune, her range is limited at best, and her voice cuts through my ears like a sonic knife of suffering. Auto-Tune can cover many sins, but this may be too much for it to handle. Seriously, this is a travesty.
The lyrics of the song are mostly incomprehensible, given the terrible mixing job done on this video. I occasionally hear the world “wilder”, which makes sense, given the title of the song. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they are repetitive, bland, and useless. They appear to repeat in the same loop as the music too.
This video is just incredibly horrible, so much so it almost attains a sort of infamy, like Manos: The Hands of Fate or Battlefield Earth. It is so bad it makes me think that maybe it was INTENTIONALLY bad, like on a sitcom when they have someone try out for a talent show and it is predictably awful, but it’s a staged sort of awful. If this turns out to be some sort of viral media stunt to promote a comedy or something I would not be surprised in the least.
On a scale of 5 frowny faces to 5 smiley faces, I give it 3 frowny faces. It is SO bad it is fascinating in a way, like a particularly spectacular train wreck, which is why it doesn’t rank lower. I cannot in good conscience recommend watching this video, unless you just get overwhelmed by morbid curiosity.
