PinkPantheress Girl Like Me video

When Madonna released her second single (and the title track) from Ray of Light, no one was quite expecting such a departure from the aesthetic of the Chris Cunningham-directed “Frozen.” Then again, considering Madonna was prone to reinventing herself “faster than the speeding light” during this album cycle (switching it up to a black-haired “screen goddess” in the spirit of Joan Crawford for “The Power of Goodbye” and then to a geisha look for “Nothing Really Matters”), it should have come as no surprise. But what did, to many viewers, was the “novelty” of the time-lapse footage culled together by Jonas Åkerlund, who Madonna gravitated toward for his work on The Prodigy’s 1997 video for “Smack My Bitch Up.”

Yet it wasn’t The Prodigy that “Ray of Light” as a video took its inspiration from, so much as Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi. Specifically, the sped-up scenes that occur within the first twenty minutes of the experimental documentary, complete with the “whizzing back and forth” traffic on the freeways and a light-up dance floor filled with people. So it is that, in her way, PinkPantheress is making another iteration of Koyaanisqatsi (much to Mr. Reed from Heretic’s dismay) by essentially creating her own 2020s version of “Ray of Light” by way of the “Girl Like Me” video (released almost exactly a year to the day after Fancy That came out on May 9, 2025). Which has such a strong influence from creative director Lauzza that PinkPantheress listed her alongside her own name in the video description credits.

Granted, the video itself is directed by Laurie Lotus (marking her debut as a director), who makes the most of her first foray, starting with the curtain pulling back on PinkPantheress to reveal she’s lost none of the British aesthetic sensibilities she was showcasing in the Zara Larsson-featuring video for “Stateside”—which can best be described as nothing more than an “aesthetic-off” between the two.

But PinkPantheress offers a slight bit of “plot” here by opening the video with Davina McCall as a talk show host holding the Fancy That album in her hand as she says, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve exhausted my Fancy That era, so, hey…fancy another one?” In many ways, it channels Jimmy Fallon introducing PinkPantheress for her “TV debut,” as he called it, particularly when the camera zooms in on her album. As do the “boxes” that PinkPantheress appears in with her backup dancers, which look pulled from that stage performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. And as she and her dancers—“The Pinkettes”—Ava McAuley and Nerita McFarlane do their jigging, a three-piece marching band walks in the foreground, the camera then homing in on the drummer “beating it” in perfect time to the Basement Jaxx-sampled rhythm before cutting to the clapping hands of the audience in the talk show studio also doing so in time with the beat.

However, it’s at the thirty-second mark, when PinkPantheress appears in an outdoor setting on a very London block that the neo-“Ray of Light” video vibes start to more fully crystallize. For, although the scenes are not “sped up” in the same straightforward, time-lapse manner that they are in Madonna’s, there is a jarring effect to the way that the backdrops behind PinkPantheress are accelerated while she stays at a normal pace (that is to say, at no pace at all). This being particularly marked while she stands at a bus stop and the structures behind her joltingly move past while she remains stationary.

What’s more, it’s also in the spirit of “Ray of Light” for other “characters” a.k.a. men and women on the street-types to appear and also be at the mercy of this surreal tempo of existence. One that ultimately mirrors how much of our time is experienced at an accelerated rate due to the many ways in which society forces people to function in their day-to-day lives. Even when the activities involved ought to be theoretically “enjoyable.” But since it’s all so rushed, there’s little “zen” to be had (whether jump roping, painting one’s nails or having tea and a biscuit—all of which are activities shown in the video). So maybe that’s part of why PinkPantheress keeps repeating the Basement Jaxx phrase, “Let it all go.”

Here, too, Madonna enters the comparison with that line in that it reminds of her urging her listeners at the beginning of 2005’s “Future Lovers,” “Let’s forget your life/Forget your problems/Administration, bills and loans.” In other words, “Let it all go” so that you might find some semblance of peace in this perennially “speeding up” world. Worse still, unlike the straightforward speeding up in “Ray of Light,” the 2020s have shown that it’s all speeding up in a disjointed, erratic manner.

So no wonder musicians like PinkPantheress and her recent collaborator, FKA Twigs (who finagled the former as a feature for “Wild and Alone” on Eusexua Afterglow), look to the past—especially sonically—for comfort. Indeed, it was Twigs who modeled so much of Eusexua after the sound of Ray of Light (not to mention Addison Rae with Addison). Whereas PinkPantheress, whether she’s aware of it or not, has tapped into Madonna’s visual language from that era. Turning it into something that the current decade can better understand—which is that there’s no rhyme or reason whatsoever to keeping up with the tempo of the present. So maybe it’s better if you dance to the tune of your own song (a larger metaphor for how there’s no such thing as monoculture, ergo a shared collective experience, anymore…which is why everyone truly is living in their own reality).

This is precisely what PinkPantheress does, as further intensified by appearing in miniature with a giant metronome behind her. And as the video comes to a close, that element of “scale” comes back into play when a giant hand appears to reach out for a terrified PinkPantheress before Lotus cuts to the “life-size” PinkPantheress sitting backstage and waiting to go on this talk show as she fiddles with a miniature-shaped building that seems designed as a Rubik’s cube, with its twisty-turny construction. Because oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to live in this surreal existence called 2026. Which makes existence in 1998 look positively sane and “slow-paced,” despite the “Ray of Light” video’s intent to get across a message the contrary.