Teenage girls are a hugely influential consumer subset, determining what clothes, cosmetics, music and TV shows deserve to be called "cool." They're also an enigma: It's virtually impossible to know what teen girls truly want, especially given that they rarely know themselves. But if there's one thing girls are consistently drawn to, willingly or not, it's popularity.
That's one of the topics that visual artist Charlie White and electronica artist Boom Bip (aka Bryan Hollon) decided to explore in Music for Sleeping Children, their "teen pop album and public artwork." White and Hollon took real interviews with girls aged 12-16 and turned them into dance tracks. For "Georgia," a track about high-school social politics, they brought in an ad-industry star, Tom Kuntz, the MJZ commercial director best known for directing the first (and Emmy-winning) Old Spice spot with Isaiah Mustafa and this year's amusing DirecTV campaign, among many other successes.
Kuntz had a group of young girls dress up in variations of the same outfit—jeans and a baby-pink tee—and shot each one lip-syncing alone to the spoken-word piece as electronic beats play in the background. "A lot of people say that I'm really popular," the song begins. "It makes me happy, I guess."
Whether expounding on "losers" who think "they're really cool but they're really not" to girls "who are always looking for pity," any of the young women in the video could be the titular Georgia. And however trivial these thoughts may appear to anyone post high school, Kuntz manages to show how universal—and serious—they seem in the moment.
CREDITS
Charlie White and Boom Bip's Music for Sleeping Children, "Georgia"
musicforsleepingchildren.com
Directed by Tom Kuntz
Produced by Charlie White, Boom Bip, Lex Records, Believe Media
Here are the other four videos from the series:
"Mikayla and Melissa," directed by Molly Schiot
"Baylee," directed by Sammy Rawal
"Sabrina," directed by Star Rosencrans
"Isabelle," directed by Jacolby Satterwhite
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