I guess since Taylor Swift’s cameo-riddled “Bad Blood” music video was so popular, the people at Tidal thought that it would be a good idea to create one of their own. Unfortunately, Madonna’s new “Bitch I’m Madonna” Tidal-exclusive music video only serves to remind us why everyone hates the music streaming service, and packing a bunch of big names into the video does nothing to help it.
There are a lot of reasons to be nauseated by the video for “Bitch I’m Madonna” — she dresses a bunch of six year-old girls up in “Like a Virgin” costumes, there is a bathtub girl fight involving pasties, Madonna uses a broom at one point because, lol, cleaning your own home — but perhaps the biggest reason is the people who are in it. “Bitch, I’m Madonna” is rife with guest appearances from musicians who have recently been behaving with questionable artistic integrity. Beyoncé (prepare for sacrilege) and Nicki Minaj shared an exceptionally lazy music video through Tidal last month, for which the theme seemed to be a giant “fuck you, you love us, you’ll watch us eat cheeseburgers or make duck faces or just do nothing, even.” It’s not as though glamour and excess are a new presence in music videos from major pop and hip-hop artists, it’s just that for this particular group of pop and hip-hop artists, it seems like a particularly tone-deaf choice. Tidal’s biggest PR problem is that it’s message of “by artists, for artists” is corrupted by the general perception that the only artists it is directly benefiting are already super rich and super famous.
