There was a time when lackluster music videos featuring a duo of women doing licentious things would not have been permitted to be in any way lame. But alas, those days are gone, and to replace them we have Charli XCX’s latest video featuring Rita Ora, “Doing It.” While there’s no denying that XCX’s music is amazingly addictive and impossible not to at least deem a guilty pleasure, her video steez often leaves something to be desired.
Considering she was a part of that Clueless knockoff with Iggy Azalea and that Rita Ora, too, suffered from Iggy Azalea syndrome in the video for “Black Widow,” it’s no great shock that the collaboration between XCX and Ora would be a blender of pop culture images past, chiefly Thelma & Louise and Aerosmith’s “Crazy” with Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone. The latter, of course, is an untouchable work that nothing could ever compare to, least of all the tame narrative of “Doing It.” Neon lights are the height of iniquity in “Doing It”
Where Tyler and Silverstone end up stripping to get fast cash, XCX and Ora dance around in atrocious outfits and cowboy hats and hang out by the pool of a trashy motel with some old people. The sheer tediousness of it all is enough to make you immediately switch your YouTube video to “Crazy” (though, if this was the 90s, you could be more intense about it by defiantly changing the channel with a rough click of your remote). What “Doing It” serves to inspire is utter boredom, inciting the question: Where have all the bad girls gone? Trapped in the 90s with Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Silverstone and Tyler one supposes.
