On the heels of Daughter From Hell’s lead single, “Hit the Wall,” Gracie Abrams has kept the momentum going with “Look at My Life.” A track that can also easily be described as equally “emo”/self-pitying. Except, with “Hit the Wall,” there was slightly less of a reference to the privileged nature of Abrams’ life and more of an attempt to “everywoman-ize” herself through highlighting her mental health struggles. However, “Look at My Life,” as the title suggests, is much more specific to the “unique” situation Abrams has found herself in. Not just in terms of becoming an “it girl” on the singer-songwriter front (an easy contender for being considered the “next Taylor Swift” even more than Olivia Rodrigo, who favors a more rock-oriented, less Joni Mitchell-inspired sound), but also as a result of her nepo baby status. A status that not only comes across in the song, but also one that she discusses in an “I acknowledge it, so it’s fine” kind of way on The New York Times’ Popcast.
During said interview, she brought up how “the nepo stuff is obviously in the discourse, like, appropriately… Of course that’s been a part of the conversation and I, like, think about the privilege there and it’s, like, I had a safety net. And that allowed me the ability to experiment and concentrate and I had, like, the gift of time to dedicate to doing this thing I love. I wasn’t growing up afraid financially and that’s, like, the biggest deal.” Said in the manner of someone who clearly doesn’t fathom what a “big deal” it actually was—otherwise she probably wouldn’t have put it in those words. The kind of words that sound as if they were “carefully crafted” as some kind of “Notes app apology.”
Just as it sounds carefully crafted for Abrams to make a big production about her fear of losing the spotlight despite also resenting it. It’s the former sentiment that shines through in the very first lines of the song, “How long have I got/In the hot light till the shine rusts?” And yet, despite not wanting “the shine to rust,” Abrams has difficulty with what’s actually required of fame as well, also adding, “No, you don’t need to come over/‘Cause I’d crowd please and I’m tired/Slowly morphed into a poser/Barely know her anymore.” Though she seems to know “her” well enough to know what kind of video she would like to make to go along with this song. One that kind of does put her in the poser category since she’s doing a lot of Beyoncé-in-the-“Hold Up”-video posturing with a baseball bat (which itself is a rip-off of Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All).
Before that oft-repeated scenario, Mitch Ryan (fresh from directing Olivia Rodrigo’s “Stupid Song” video) starts Abrams off in a car, driving down the open road as she smokes a cigarette and uses a tangible map as if she’s in the 90s. By the twenty-second mark, she’s already framed within a different context, walking through an abandoned liminal space dragging a baseball bat across the floor. In another “flash-of-a-moment”-like scene, Abrams is seen running with a can of gas in hand before Ryan cuts back to her sitting in the middle of that empty building with the bat. He then shows what she was doing with that gas can when, in the next scene, she’s standing in front of a dumpster fire. A none-too-subtle metaphor for how she seems to view her life, singing the chorus, “But oh well, look at my life/Bet you can’t tell but it’s kind of a bad time/A new spiral every night/Bawling my eyes out, no, but I’m so fine/Yeah, I might just shut up and drive [how very Rihanna]/Hope I don’t crash and blow out the headlights/My nightmare actualized [or as Billie Eilish would say, “I had a dream/I got everything I wanted/Not what you’d think/And if I’m being honest/It might’ve been a nightmare”]/Got what I wanted, it doesn’t sit right.”
And, talking of something not “sitting right,” Beyoncé also has a similar feeling on “Hold Up” when she sings, “Something don’t feel right/‘Cause it ain’t right.” Though, in her case, she was talking about a cheating husband, whereas Abrams seems to be talking about getting what she wanted—being famous for her music—not sitting right. Though, at the root of that (and something she would be less likely to admit) is the fact that it probably doesn’t sit right because of how it was attained. That is to say, through the benefit of being a nepo baby. But, again, since Abrams thinks (like most other nepo babies, Hailey Bieber included) that, by addressing it head-on, she can exempt herself from the backlash that goes with it, it’s unlikely she would truly think this is the reason fame (for something she’s doing, rather than the inherited fame of being J. J. Abrams’ daughter) isn’t sitting that “right” with her. But then, of course it is. Otherwise, she would retreat from the spotlight, Garbo-style (or Chappell Roan-style in the months that followed her Lollapalooza Brasil debacle).
For the time being though, Abrams would prefer to publicly lament her fame. And also exorcise her rage and frustration about it with a baseball bat, waiting to do so until the one-minute-forty-second mark when she finally smashes her first mirror in the abandoned building, an indication of the analogy she’s hoping to make, which is that the image of herself (and the one that other people have of her) doesn’t necessarily align with the reality. And in between that mirror-smashing, Abrams dances in front of the dumpster fire, as if embracing “the mess.” Something Beyoncé surely does as well, complete with having some of her own fire-exploding moments toward the end of “Hold Up.”
As for Abrams, she wields yet another visual metaphor in the form of putting out the dumpster fire with an extinguisher. As if wanting her audience to know that, no matter how “bad” things get, she can still manage any situation. Foil any crisis. For that’s “the price” one must pay for fame, after all. A price that’s certainly become steeper in the decades since privacy became all but impossible to have.
But, in the end, rather than seeking to prove she can “handle it all,” Abrams uses this video as a means to show that she’s seeking escape from the pressures and pratfalls of fame, taking to the abyss of Mother Nature after getting her baseball bat jollies out of the way. Indeed, she runs through a dirt field (after “fetching the bolt cutters” to cut open the chain-link fence that leads to them) so that she can finally reach her destination: a hot air balloon that will take her up into the sky and far away from the problems of fame and fortune down below. Which means Abrams has only added to a growing list of famous people who seem just as discontented with their lives as “ordinaries.” So, sure: stars, they really are “just like us.”
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