Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up Brief Analysis

The fact that the whole video is filmed in the view of the protagonist makes this it so effective. The outrageous actions the character goes through such as, snorting cocaine, injecting heroin, violence, drinking alcohol, stealing a car and drink driving, make the viewer intrigued into what the person looks like and, 99 people out of 100 would guess that it is a man. To the shock of most people, including me, at the end it is revealed it is a woman.

The fast cutting works well with the pace of the music and some daring effects are used to make the audience feel what the woman is feeling. Her drug taking and alcohol drinking would disorientate her vision and the director, Jonas Åkerlund, chooses to use a blur effect in a few of the shots to portray this. Being filmed at night there was constant dark lighting involved. Although when she was in certain clubs the bright lights made the audiences view less clear again, working on the audience-character relationship.

The video runs around the theme of a reckless night out involving everything bad that you could possibly do and works well with the only lyrics in the song, “change my pitch up, smack my bitch up”, a controversial and expletive sentence. Although similar to other videos of this genre of music, I think the visuals in this particular video amplify the music more than others I have seen because of the disorientating camera movements that occur throughout.

Jordan Griffin

Jordan Griffin

 Link To Music VideoI enjoyed watching this video as it showed everything a normal person would not dare to do on a night out from a first person view point. From the first frame it had me interested into what this person looked like and shocked me at the end when I saw it was a woman. The unconventional effects and lighting worked well with the genre of music and even when slowed down was still effective. The pace of the cutting also kept up with the song.