Music video: Rina Sawayama serves University project realness for "Cherry"

Rina dropped her lesbi-anthem in August, which was a perfect Summer into Autumn bop, and now comes the video which looks like a University art project. One of those ones where the students' ideas were bigger than the budget and the time they had to do it.

Gurl, I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you.

I live for some Rina and I still adore this song. But this music video was not the one. Rina's looks are great. The choreography is great. I like that she went with a concept that wasn't just a retelling of the song, but still captured some essence of it, even if that essence was just the video being queer artsy as hell. But the whole thing was just too rough around the edges. The cinematography wasn't that tight and the set was just dirty bedding and dust sheets strewn around. The look and the setting felt like it was for a photo shoot and then they decided, 'Fuck it. Let's shoot the video here too'. In fact, it's a shame this wasn't just a shoot, because Rina's looks were fashion editorial as fuck and would have looked better in perfectly captured stills for the likes of iD magazine, CR fashion book or Vogue than than they did for the music video. Some of those looks did not look good in motion.

The live performance that Rina did for VEVO gave me early 2000s Hype Williams realness and looked more like a finished music video than this actual music video.

I really hope that some where, somehow, Rina get some budget. Because it would be a real shame if she ended up dropping a fire LP that was dogged because it had no promo and got a bunch of raggedy music videos.