In both my conversation with Caroline Rose and my review of her album Loner, satire played a big theme. Rose is a master of using satire in her music to get a point across while also crafting songs that are a joy to listen to. One of the prime examples of this is “Bikini,” a song that takes aim at the entertainment industry’s long and ongoing history of exploiting women and viewing them only as objects. Today, Rose released the self-directed music video for “Bikini” to further illustrate her point.
The video stars Rose as the sleazy, mustachioed host of the show. At first it’s just Rose showboating in character, a thing she’s very good at (the look she gives the camera at the end of the video is something to behold). When the chorus hits, the curtain behind Rose opens up to reveal the girls in said bikinis. Instead of the “Hollywood ideal” executives love, the girls in the video come in all different shapes, sizes, and colors.
This was completely intentional, as Rose explains in a press release. She says “A lot of my aesthetic tends to be very tongue-in-cheek, so I wanted to take a serious subject, in this case misogyny, and just sort of turn it around to laugh at it. I think satire can be used as an incredible tool to take the power away from the powerful when necessary. It was important to me to make sure the video was body positive. When we think of ‘girls in bikinis,’ the tendency is to see tall white models with perfect bodies. I knew that would be missing the point of the song.”
You can watch the video for Caroline Rose’s “Bikini” above. Watch it all the way to the end. Seriously, that look is something you need to see.
