Famous musicians are not like us. Or, at least, that’s what some of their flashy music videos would have us believe. Although we all may share the common characteristic of being human, every so often pop stars remind us plebs that the Mean Girls “you can’t sit with us” notion of their celebrity sets them apart.  Taylor Swift recently made the point in her Sin City-style Bad Blood video, stuffed with her posse of model-actress friends in an assortment of sex-shop latex garb. Now Madonna’s shouting herself hoarse reiterating the currency of “cool” mates with her video for squalling, brostep track Bitch I’m Madonna.  While the idea of famous people spending time together is far from novel – yes, I’ve seen handfuls of photos taken inside Studio 54 and come across Awesome People Hanging Out Together on Tumblr – there’s a certain desperation at play when a video’s sole premise is to highlight how much staged fun wealthy people can pretend to have while a camera rolls.  Beyond inspiring teens to tag their friends in Instagram comments, footnoted with the hashtag “#squadgoals”, what is an artist as revered as Madonna doing flouting a passing friendship with Rita Ora? Bitch, as she keeps insisting, she’s Madonna: surely by now she doesn’t have to prove she’s still relevant with a motley crew of recognisable faces. That model-actor Jon Kortajarena, designer Alexander Wang (dancing adorably, it must be said), and comedian and actor Chris Rock appear, just long enough to mouth the words to the song’s vocal hook, makes for a combination so bizarre that it feels more slapdash than slick.  It’s funnier to note that all the biggest names in the video – Beyoncé, Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj – are edited in during snippets that weren’t shot live on location. The intimacy and gentle humour that lent Michael Jackson’s Liberian Girl its cameo-filled magic in 1987 largely came from how the celebs interacted with each other on set, from Whoopi Goldberg and Carl Weathers to John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John reprising their Grease chemistry. Madonna’s video – which premiered on Jay Z’s celeb-endorsed music streaming platform Tidal – appears flat and glossily detached in comparison, as the action flits from Cyrus giving the finger to seconds of West clutching his head, apparently mid-scream. It just feels as though the stars quite literally video-phoned it in. Where’s the joy in that?  Since MTV galvanised the music video’s potential as an artform – and a dent in record labels’ budgets – we’ve seen the format take on cinematic value. In 2015, “me and some famous people I know” doesn’t sound like a video treatment. It’s more of a creative cop-out. As celebrities give their fans more access to their personal lives, on Instagram, Snapchat and the like, the lines between best-version-of-my-life social media posts and visual art increasingly blur. The taste left in my mouth is the same: a tinny sense of wannabe Fomo, writ large.  Acts like Die Antwoord, in their cameo-filled Ugly Boy video, and Haim in their talk show-aping video for My Song Five ft A$AP Ferg, have recently shown that the celebrity angle can be pulled off with minimal showboating or an actual concept. Beyoncé and Jay Z roped in Sean Penn, Don Cheadle, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rashida Jones and others for an elaborate fake film trailer to announce their joint On the Run tour in 2014. It was overblown and ridiculous, but at least they opted for a storyline.  Paul McCartney’s stiff-looking Queenie Eye video – starring Kate Moss, Jude Law, Meryl Streep and various other people looking as though they filmed each sequence in front of a green screen in their homes – ought to have served as a warning for Madge: if the most inventive thing you feel you can do is throw a lot of familiar faces in a room, it may be time to pare right back and start again.  I understand that Madonna may have wanted a fun and colourful video, true to her song’s party-focused lyrics. It’s just a shame that this one follows the current trend, rather than slotting in next to the powerful work she’s previously made with director Jonas Åkerlund (a frontrunner in the field of music videos as short films).  At the end of the day, it’s just a video. But, as curmudgeonly as this makes me sound, it makes me hanker after the flair that other directors and artists have displayed in such a potentially rich medium. I can’t party with Madonna, but I’d love to be enthralled by the storytelling and originality in her visual work.
Bitch, she insists, I’m Madonna. Then why does she feel the need to fill her latest promo with recognisable faces that feel like they’ve been phoned in?