Being Blunt

Little Music Video Review
James Blunt
"You're Beautiful"
Director: Sam Brown

I check Slate.com pretty obsessively everyday, and when the year started I felt shocked and hurt when Jody Rosen took the helm of all things music at that most respectable of web magazines. I wondered why the so-loveable Hua Hsu had been excised, and I longed for more diatribes such as his "Notes on 'Humps'" and more praise like "The Insanity Plea." But with his latest review-ette of James Blunt's album, Rosen has won my following. I suppose we like critics because we agree with them (or, rather, because they agree with us), but Rosen's notes on Blunt's "unassuming" smarminess are great and on the mark--and, as a result, deliciously worth the read.

After reveling in Rosen's review, I just couldn't resist adding my two cents about the way Blunt came onto my radar. A month or so ago, I had been watching MTV Hits for about half an hour when I first caught sight of the video for "You're Beautiful." Blunt stares out at the camera, quietly, calmly sitting in a cross-legged zen-ish pose--and this is how he starts begging for some attention. His puppy dog eyes stare out at the camera; it's raining; he croons about how I, being his audience, am really pretty; how he saw me in the subway; how I was with someone else; how he kind of has a plan to catch me anyway. It's a lost cause, he knows, but he still thinks I'm hot. So, the strategy is that he's peering out at me from his humble, bare-bones platform, and I'm supposed to want to get it on with him?

I don't think so.

Beyond staring out and singing in the rain (and not even in the great Gene Kelly way of, ahem, singing in the rain), there's not much going on in the video. He wants to beseige his audience with his looks and his hot bod. But as I kept watching, I couldn't really understand how, by emptying his pockets and taking off his shoes and shirt, Blunt was disarming himself for me. When he finally mannishly swan dives into a stormy ocean at the end, it actually feels -- after every object removed, every raindrop drizzled on his head -- like he's enacted a ritual for himself. It becomes solely an advertisement for Blunt, which is the inherent idea behind music videos, but so unearnest an ad because it's clearly trying to do something by doing the exact opposite. In other words, the video makes James Blunt the center of attention when the song and his intent staring signals that the goal is for his audience to be the center of attention. And for all his weepy, staring pleas into the camera, he just can't cut it. He's just pretty self-absorbed.

"You're Beautiful" the video sure will woo his already-wooed fans, but it has absolutely no relevance to the song and it certainly won't win any skeptics into the Blunt fold. I thought about the song too. It's not that bad and I devised a test: despite the video, do I like the song anyway? Well, when I hear it on the radio, I keep mixing it up with the Lifehouse song "You and Me." And after I realize it's "You're Beautiful," I just wish it were "You and Me" because, for all it intents and purposes, "You and Me" just reminds me of Jason and L.C. getting it on in "Laguna Beach." Now that's beautiful.