I just finished watching the new video for Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You”. The song itself is okay, but the video? It isn’t what I expected. I’d read it was “cute” and “fun”, which sounds like the real Kelly Clarkson. The Kelly in this video? Not so much. What might have been an attempt to portray the “fun” of a dysfunctional relationship ended up being a disturbing glimpse at two people who shouldn’t be together. It’s more like “My Life Is Guaranteed to Suck With You In It”.
The Kelly in this video is an immature mess straight out of reality tv. (A “Beautiful Disaster” perhaps?) It seems whenever the Kelly in this video gets upset she basically drops her boyfriend’s belongings in the toilet or out a window for kicks and then laughs in his face about it. Sure, Video Boyfriend tries fighting fire with fire by throwing some of her clothes out the window. But CrazyVideoKelly is more than up to the challenge and ready to up the ante by sending a goldfish bowl sailing out the window. But not before the timely intervention of Video Boyfriend, who stops the damagefest only long enough to scoop the little fish out of the bowl and into a glass of water. That is, I think it’s water. Maybe it’s vodka. If not, he’ll probably be chugging the stuff regularly in order to cope with this emotional child’s tantrums.
I can see this guy at the next tenants meeting. “I’m sorry for those of you who slipped on the broken glass and aquarium gravel in front of the building last week, but my girlfriend was having a really bad case of the Mondays.” And the tenants would say, “Actually this meeting is an intervention. Dude, you’ve got to get out of this relationship!”
Seriously, I was hoping the younger version of Kelly at the beginning of the video would show up during the fight in the apartment much like in the “Because of You” video and show Kelly how unhealthy her outbursts are, and there are better ways to resolve conflicts.
But, heck, all the near-fatal car accident at the end seemed to do was get her turned on.
I kept asking myself what had the guy in this video done to deserve this treatment. The men in other Clarkson videos like “Low”, “Never Again” and “Since You’ve Been Gone” deserved some retribution. But this guy?
Would he be thinking his life would suck without Kelly? What song would sum up his feelings? The Offspring’s “Self Esteem”? Perhaps there’s a song out there titled, “Stop Treating My Soul Like Toilet Paper”.
I also thought about the trashing of personal property in this video and “Since You’ve Been Gone”, and it made me see the latter video in a whole different light. What if the relationship Kelly had had with the ex in “Since You’ve Been Gone” had been much like the relationship shown in “My Life Would Suck Without You.” Suddenly, Kelly isn’t a woman scorned as much as a hot mess that had been dumped because the guy found a more stable woman to be with; and Kelly just couldn’t resist trashing the guy’s stuff one last time.
When the guy comes home to a trashed apartment, he isn’t so surprised. He just thinks, “Oh, Kelly’s been here. I hope the goldfish managed to survive this time.”
