Watching Natalie Imbruglia’s Beautiful Love is a slightly depressing experience, though not because the song itself is terrible. It is actually rather pleasant, and Imbruglia remains, well into her career, completely capable of selling a pop song. The problem lies in everything surrounding it.
She wanders through what appears to be a Cotswolds village, wearing a helmet, carrying a takeaway coffee and dancing with the slightly frantic energy of someone who has been handed an iPhone five minutes before filming began. The coffee cup is flung around so enthusiastically that you spend half the video wondering whether it is actually full and whether she is about to baptise the pavement in oat milk. It is charming, perhaps, but also astonishing when you remember what a major pop single used to look like.
There was a time when releasing a song by a major pop artist meant creating an entire visual world around it. The music video was not something casually knocked out on a Tuesday afternoon; it was an event. Directors, choreographers, stylists, cinematographers, art departments, editors and enormous production crews were assembled. Sets were built, locations transformed, concepts developed, lighting designed and wardrobes carefully considered, so that every frame had a reason to exist. Crucially, people cared about making the thing memorable.
The 1990s and early 00s were probably the high-water mark of this particular form of pop culture. Think of Britney Spears arriving at school in …Baby One More Time, Michael and Janet looking iconic in a spaceship in Scream, Kylie Minogue suspended in that impossible white futuristic space in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the Spice Girls inventing an entire visual language around themselves, or George Michael’s Fastlove and Outside being treated as highly produced events. You could often identify a video from a single frame, which is an extraordinary standard.
It was not simply the result of bigger budgets but of an attitude toward pop itself. A single was an opportunity to create an image, a character, a fantasy and a moment. The video had to compete for attention alongside television, magazines, radio, MTV and everything else occupying people’s cultural bandwidth, and there was real pressure to make it count.
Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn (1997) remains a perfect example. The brilliance of that video is almost easy to overlook because it is so simple: Natalie performs in a room while the supposed reality of the video gradually falls apart around her, the camera eventually pulling back to reveal the artificiality of the set. The whole thing is clever without screaming that it is clever, and Natalie herself looks like a star. That last part matters. The styling, lighting, cinematography and direction all work together to elevate the artist; she is not merely documenting herself existing. The production is creating an image of Natalie Imbruglia.
Compare that with Beautiful Love. There is something almost anthropological about watching it: a famous pop singer wandering around a pretty English village in ordinary clothes, holding a coffee, wearing an astronaut helmet and dancing into what looks like a consumer-grade camera. She looks like someone who has crash-landed in the Cotswolds and is now attempting to understand human civilization through the medium of acoustic pop. And that is the strange thing: the weirdness is not necessarily the problem. Pop has always benefited from weirdness. The problem is that the weirdness no longer feels designed.
The great pop videos could be bizarre, camp, ridiculous, extravagant or completely nonsensical, but they were usually bizarre on purpose. Somebody had an idea and then assembled an army of people to execute it.
Today we increasingly get the opposite: something that feels spontaneous, casual and authentic because it is, essentially, spontaneous and casual. The technology has improved enormously and production has become easier than ever; anyone can now shoot something in 4K on a phone that would have required a television crew twenty-five years ago. And somehow the results can feel smaller. That is the paradox. We have more technical capability than ever and less visual ambition.
Part of this is undoubtedly economics. The old music-video ecosystem was supported by an enormous commercial machine in which record labels were willing to spend serious money promoting singles because music television, physical sales and radio could turn a successful song into a global phenomenon. But it is also cultural. The internet changed the way pop works. We moved from the era of the music video as finished object to the era of endless content: TikToks, Reels, Shorts, behind-the-scenes clips, lyric videos, acoustic versions, live versions, dance challenges, snippets, Stories and posts. The artist is no longer required to create one definitive visual statement; they are required to keep producing. And perhaps that is what has been lost: the idea of the definitive pop moment.
In the 1990s a great pop video could feel like an arrival. You saw it for the first time and immediately understood that something had happened. The song, the artist, the styling, the choreography, the imagery and the cultural moment fused together. You did not simply consume it; you remembered it. That is why so many videos from that era remain lodged in the collective memory. We can still picture them decades later: the silver jumpsuit, the school uniform, the red room, the desert, the choreography, the wind machine, the ridiculous car, the impossible hairstyle. They became cultural objects.
And perhaps the most depressing thing about Beautiful Love is that it reminds you how difficult that actually is. Creating an iconic music video was never easy. Throwing money at something does not automatically make it iconic. For every Torn or Can’t Get You Out of My Head there were dozens of expensive videos that disappeared almost immediately. But at least they were trying. They were trying to create something that would look spectacular on television, something people would talk about at school or work the next morning, something that might become inseparable from the song itself.
Watching Natalie fling that coffee cup around a Cotswolds village makes you realize how much of that ambition has disappeared. It is not really about nostalgia for the 1990s. It is about missing the sense that pop culture was allowed to be larger than life. A pop star was supposed to look like a pop star. A music video was supposed to look like a music video. And sometimes there was something wonderful about spending an absurd amount of money, assembling fifty professionals and building an enormous fake world simply because someone thought a three-minute song deserved it.
We have never had more sophisticated cameras, never had easier access to filmmaking, and never had more ways to distribute a video. And yet, somehow, we ended up with Natalie Imbruglia wearing a helmet and wandering around the Cotswolds with a coffee.