mgk Sheds Light On ‘cliché’ In New Vevo Footnotes Segment
The artist explains his new video in the latest installment of Vevo’s annotation series.
A lot of thought clearly went into the fun, dance-heavy video for mgk’s new single “cliché.” The latest entry in the Vevo Footnotes series lets viewers in on the stories behind the scenes.
When the “cliché” video dropped in May, mgk fans delighted in its winking parody of pop video tropes, especially the silly but skillful dance routines developed with choreographer Sean Bankhead. Director Sam Cahill and mgk unpack those references and provide stories from the set in the new clip for Vevo Footnotes, a video series that functions like Pop-Up Video crossed with Genius annotations.
mgk begins the segment by discussing the inspiration for the video’s opening carwash scene. He affirms it’s a callback to the boy band parody in blink-182’s “All The Small Things” video and reveals it was filmed at the same car wash where Britney Spears’ “Pretty Girl” was shot a decade earlier. “We wanted ‘cliché’ to be a summer song as that is exactly how the record felt,” mgk writes. “That led us to the car wash.”
“The choreography on the truck bed scene was a tricky one,” Cahill writes. “We were originally going to do the truck scene practically, but the dancers and mgk would have to be harnessed in, limiting their ability to move and spin. Which led to us doing it on a green screen where they had the full ability to execute the choreography as it was intended to be.”
As for the final scene, in which mgk and a woman dance in a motel parking lot in the pouring rain, the artist says, “The weather that day was freezing, so acting like it was a ‘sexy’ vibe when we shot it was hilarious in hindsight.”
Produced by mgk with SlimXX, BazeXX, Nick Long, and No Love for the Middle Child, “cliché” is a genre-blurring hit that pulls in elements from synth-pop, pop-punk, and more. And as mgk explains in another annotation from the Vevo Footnotes video, when he wrote the song on his guitar in his living room with some friends, it sounded like a country song.
“cliché” is the lead single from mgk’s forthcoming album Lost Americana, due out Aug. 8.
