Check it out

The music video for Will.I.Am and Niki Minaj’s new song Check It Out really uses words and images in conjunction. The whole video really plays with design concepts and abstraction. The video begins with an announcer who introduces the song in a very Japanese game show way to a military-esque audience. The audience is all in the same black outfit and have sunglasses on, they all move at the exact same time and express no emotion. Then Will.I.Am and Niki Minaj come on and they are in these bright futuristic outfits that really contrast the dark audience and while they are singing bright Korean words pop on to the screen. The two singers really embodied the whole robotic aesthetic with both their singing voices not sounding like real ones and the way their bodies moved on the stage. Despite the singers robotic ways, the audience too were very robotic, almost more so than the singers because there was no color or movement from them. The whole idea of the words popping out was interesting because as only and English speaker, I couldn’t read what they were saying, but I understood the lyrics being sung, but to a Korean speaking person they couldn’t understand the singing, just the popping words. This really made the video very global in the sense that it crossed cultures with both the words and images in the video. The mixed medium had a strong affect on the video because the words emphasized certain points in the song, even if some couldn’t understand either the lyrics or the popping words.