Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun” Video Is An Homage to 00s Aesthetics, But Especially Madonna’s “Love Profusion” 

As MARINA recently said on the opening verse to “I <3 You,” “They’re all going to Y2K.” This message was received loud and clear by Zara Larsson via her new single, “Midnight Sun” (from her forthcoming fifth album of the same name). As the follow-up to Midnight Sun’s lead single, “Pretty Ugly,” it finds Larsson leaning into her more “ethereal” side. Not to mention her “Swedish pride” side (even if such pride is always ever-present in her pop stylings). 

In fact, while some might view the phrase “Midnight Sun” as something that an AI platform would shit out as a “poetic” term, the truth is that there is a midnight sun in Sweden. For the sun doesn’t even set at all in a certain part of the country during select months, therefore exhibiting an eerie “endless summer” quality. As Larsson puts it, “I really am proud of my Swedish pop heritage, so I wanted to write about a Swedish summer where the sun never goes down. I wanted the whole album to feel like it’s a summer night and it never ends. And it doesn’t matter if it’s December: the summer night will be there for you. It’s waiting for you, it will come back for you, and you will come back for it.” Sounds more like a threat than a promise, but anyway… 

As for the accompanying visual designed to lend that “summer-night-but-it’s-daytime” feel, Larsson once again teamed up with director Charlotte Rutherford (who also directed “Pretty Ugly”) to showcase the kind of “zen” (for Larsson is wearing a tank top that spells this out quite literally at one point) she wants everyone to achieve while living their best life during the summer. To help reflect that, Larsson and Rutherford mimic the froth and overall “pop” of early 00s aesthetics: bright colors, cropped tanks, low-rise everything, word and graphic tees and a tan so prominent it almost makes her look downright “Lindsay Lohan orange” (as though to emphasize that, she even sings, “Show my tan lines, low-rise”). Yet the video’s most 00s aesthetic of all is embodied by its resemblance Madonna’s 2003 video for “Love Profusion,” directed by Luc Besson. 

And while American Life, the album that “Love Profusion” hailed from, wasn’t much appreciated in the country that the record dissected (i.e., the Disunited States of America), it was more embraced in European countries like Larsson’s native Sweden. So there’s no doubt that the video could have infiltrated Larsson’s five/six-year-old mind when it first came out. Or maybe it was Rutherford (who was a more sentient millennial at that time—she would have been ten years old) who steered the creative direction toward this oft-underlooked gem in Madonna’s music video oeuvre. 

Whatever the case, the influence of “Love Profusion” is present from the get-go, with Larsson standing alone in the center of a clear blue body of water that very much deliberately gives “greenscreen effect.” Larsson’s (or Rutherford’s) predilections for this measured amount of “lo-fi-ness” are also present in “Pretty Ugly,” when the video starts out in a super blurry and pixelated format before Larsson and co. come into sharp focus. With “Midnight Sun,” however, there is a cartoonishness to the oversaturation of color, right down to Larsson’s primarily worn crop top that reads, “Sunkissed” against the backdrop of its sun, palm tree and ocean graphic. Madonna, in contrast, was in her “children’s book author era,” favoring below-the-knee-length floral-print dresses in general during the early 00s, which is why one of them showed up in the “Love Profusion” video. 

Wearing such a dress as she walks on sand and water (Madonna is, after all, as much of a savior as Jesus Christ to some), there are also moments where Ms. Ciccone “rests her arms” on the sea (though the jury is out on whether the form of eau Madonna romps around in actually contains salt), which the viewer is able to see via a POV shot that makes it seem as though they’re looking at her from beneath the water. Larsson also serves up pretty much the same exact shot during several instances in “Midnight Sun.” And while Larsson’s “special effects” favor the presence of multi-colored butterflies fluttering past her during such instants, Madonna is all about fish and fairies (as she quipped during the making of the video, “I always have a lot of fairies dancing around me”). 

Unfortunately, Larsson didn’t stick entirely to her imitation of Madonna, choosing to tack on some additional “creative flourishes,” like having the words “abundance,” “connected” and “awaken” flash across the screen. Even during her Ray of Light era, Madonna, at least, didn’t try to go clichély over the top with a certain “white girl take” on “achieving peace” (though one could argue that M’s off-the-beaten path form of that was pushing Kabbalah in most of her work since 1998). 

Larsson’s fellow underrated pop singer Bebe Rexha could see the Madonna correlation as well (even if not quite the right one), commenting on Larsson’s Instagram post about the video, “Yassss giving ray of light loveeeee.” Granted, there is one particular instance where the camera work does remind one of said video as Larsson “serves” against the background of some rolling green hills. But it’s really only a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. This occurring as the formerly mid-tempo pace of the track picks up to exude a much more overt “electronica” sound as Larsson belts the chorus, “It’s that midnight sun-kissed skin under the red sky/Layin’ on your chest like this/Hold me like the pebbles in your hand, initials in the sand, yeah/Summer isn’t over yet/Skinny-dipping with your heart out, it’s my favorite part now/We ain’t gotta tell no one/A never-ending midnight sun/A never-ending midnight sun.” The euphoria she exudes in this particular part of the song is what makes the listener believe in her underlying conviction that maybe summer really can last forever (at least “vibe-wise”). Just as Madonna has her own especially earnest vocals in “Love Profusion” (such as, “There are too many options” and “And the loooooove profusion/You make me feel, you make me know”). 

Around the midpoint of the video, Larsson kicks her 00s nostalgia into high gear by parading a shot of the type of Discman to rival the majesty of Mandy Moore’s in the video for “Candy.” And yet, at no point does Larsson actually don the headphones to listen to the Discman. Instead, she proceeds to stretch and pose in ways that Madonna herself would sanction (and has effectively done so by continuing to practice yoga and pilates). And for this “frolicking in the meadow” segment, Larsson still maintains devoted to her 00s sensibilities, complete with a new fashion statement that consists of low-rise booty shorts with the side straps of her thong showing and a crop top that now features a cherry graphic and the word “Connected” scrawled across it.

During the final musical breakdown of the track, Larsson goes all in on letting the “girlie graphics” flow. This means plenty of hand-drawn (or what appears to be hand-drawn) suns, horses, butterflies, flowers, dolphins, rainbows, stars—you name it, the gamut of Lisa Frank-approved imagery is there. And in the final scenes of the video, Rexha’s aforementioned “Ray of Light” connection does shine through. Namely, when the sun actually starts to rise behind Larsson and, in the final frame, when the viewer sees her looking totally spent on the grass in the same way that Madonna does on the dance floor at the end of “Ray of Light.” As though both women have given their everything. Not to anyone in particular, per se, but rather, to the camera—de facto, themselves. And isn’t that, in the end, who they should be “giving it to”? For if you’re not doing it for yourself, then who are you doing it for? That is, apart from doing it in service of the 00s aesthetic.