There’s a quote that often gets attributed to Brian Eno despite Eno lifting it from composer/trumpet player Jon Hassell: “What is it that I really like?” More recently, Zane Lowe has repurposed that question a few times in his famed Apple Music interviews as simply, “What do I like?” This being a question that Lowe relates to the importance of a musician’s “taste” in terms of the songs they make. And now, of course, the videos as well. During his 2025 interview with Addison Rae, which came out two days before Addison, the subject of her taste as it relates to making the record comes up. As it also does during Lowe’s interview with Troye Sivan about She’s the Best.
And with this subject, Lowe lays the groundwork for Sivan to express how much women have had an effect on his taste, with Lowe probing, “One of the things I think that people now really respond to [with] you is your overall taste. But the trick is, like, ‘what do I like?’ As Brian Eno says. ‘What do I like?’ When did you first ask yourself that question, going way back? When can you honestly say that you actually thought, ‘I like that’? And I want to tell people about it or I want to experience that and help others experience that.”
Sivan’s main answer (after mentioning an early impression of Janet Jackson’s “Together Again”) is, “I remember [Lily Allen] being, like, the first person that I was like, ‘Oh wait, songs can be, like…funny and smart?’ You know, like, that made me want to write lyrics.” He then adds that “Amy Winehouse was exactly the same thing” for the cultivation of his taste and enthusiasm for wanting to write cheeky lyrics. But when it comes to Sivan’s latest video, “FF,” it seems apparent that another pair of “pop girls” that were often pitted against one another in the 2000s have infected Sivan’s consciousness here. Those pop girls being, of course, none other than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
For it’s their early-era video aesthetics that permeate Sivan’s “FF,” once again directed by Gordon von Steiner (who also came correct with the videos for “She’s the Best” and “Party”). This time around, Sivan and von Steiner enlist the help of Swiss actor Felix Mayr for a shoot that takes place in the gay paradise known as Fire Island. Though, for as much of a “gay totem” as Sivan is painted to be, surprisingly, it was his first time visiting said milieu, telling Vogue of filming the video, “It was my first time going, and it reminded me a bit of Australia. It’s shockingly beautiful and there’s so much history there. I wanted to tell a love story, and it felt like such a beautiful place to do that. Also, after the mammoth video that we made for ‘Party,’ I think Gordon and I wanted to make something that represented ‘FF’ and the more interior side of the album. We wanted to make something simple and filmic and hopefully very beautiful.”
That it is, intermixing plenty of “wish you were here” scenery with the chemistry displayed between Sivan and the stand-in he has for an as-of-yet-to-be-known love that will be “fucking forever” (and yeah, it also has the added meaning of literally having sex forever—something that only Sting seems capable of). The phrase that gets abbreviated to “FF” for, presumably, the purposes of radio airplay. To be sure, “FF” is very much “single material,” especially as it shows a “softer side” of Sivan after the more hard-edged likes of “She’s the Best” and “Party” (and no, “soft” and “hard” aren’t meant to be innuendos). Something Britney Spears also did with her 2000 ballad, “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know,” released as the fourth and final single from Oops!…I Did It Again in 2001.
To show Spears’ own “softer” side after hits like the album’s title track and “Stronger,” “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know” was also complemented by a sensual, monogamy-friendly video shot in Key Biscayne by none other than Herb Ritts. In fact, Spears was fortunate enough to be among the few pop icons to secure Ritts for directing a music video, joining only a small group of others including Madonna (who popped Ritts’ music video-directing cherry with 1989’s “Cherish”), Janet Jackson, Tina Turner and Mariah Carey.
Ritts’ talent for creating a cinematic and almost painterly look for every frame is part of what brought “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know” to life when it otherwise might have remained another “stale” (read: trite) ballad from Spears’ early oeuvre (think: “E-Mail My Heart” and “Dear Diary”). The same goes for “FF,” which when taken in without the video, might not have as much depth to listeners. However, when given the boon of visuals that take place in an exclusive, picturesque setting with hot, well-toned men romping around together, well, then the song becomes “iconic.”
And that all starts with an opening scene of Sivan looking up at Mayr from the bathtub like he’s a god to be worshipped while the latter lets the water from the shower pour over him. So it is that the theme of “FF” is immediately established—which is that Sivan is looking for the kind of relationship that straight women themselves have romanticized for centuries. What Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman refers to as “the fairy tale” (that word “fairy” having a potentially riskier meaning when it comes to two gay men in a relationship). And no, that doesn’t mean a “fairy-tale ending,” but rather, the actual fairy tale of getting to live out your days with the person who makes you feel like, well, a princess.
That’s certainly how Sivan seems to envision it based on the “FF” video, which alternates between lush color scenes and wistful, romantic black-and-white ones. Among the first such scenes being a cast of crabs shown scuttling around the interior deck that makes it briefly feel like a nod to Annie Hall—except that was lobsters, and Sivan probably wouldn’t be the type to make a Woody Allen allusion in this climate (besides the fact that Allen’s work is about as hetero as you can get [Lily Allen’s, on the other hand…]).
However, an allusion he would definitely make—and has before—is to Christina Aguilera, whose very first video, “Genie in a Bottle,” is also all over the aesthetics of “FF” (though the message about “waiting” to give in to “temptation” is not—with Sivan instead joyfully declaring, “Gone are the days of waiting for pleasure”). Complete with, like Spears’ “Don’t Let Me Be the Last to Know,” offering a beachside backdrop. In her case, that beach was in Malibu, not Key Biscayne. And yes, she actually looks more “Malibu Barbie” than Britney in this particular visual, which casts her in the same kind of dramatic shadows that Sivan and Mayr are in throughout “FF.” There’s even a moment when Sivan, perched on a sandy dune, seems to be recreating his own mise-en-scène of Aguilera doing the same in the Diane Martel-directed “Genie in a Bottle.”
So while he might have also told Vogue, “On the last album [Something to Give Each Other], we had a lot of fun creating this kind of boy version of Christina Aguilera or something, with the chaps and straps. This time, I think because of the nature of the album and where I’m at in my life, I just wanted to feel comfortable, and like I was more centered in myself,” the fact remains that even “centered” Troye still can’t help but channel Aguilera. As Aguilera, in her way, channeled him by showing up to a Mistr event for the second annual National PrEP Day celebration at The Abbey on October 11th. In the “FF” video, Sivan is shown casually popping a Mistr-brand PrEP pill, all as part of destigmatizing gay sex and its longstanding association with being “risky.” As well as destigmatizing the concept of prioritizing one’s sexual health in general. The founder of the Mistr brand, Tristan Schukraft, is even thanked in the credits at the end of the “FF” video.
Though, of course, who Sivan really might have wanted to thank in those credits is Spears and Aguilera, who, with their own “sexy beach videos,” lit the sand-covered path for Sivan to do his own riff on it. And, luckily for the sake of his “taste credibility,” it’s one with just as much melodrama and sensuality.
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