The Girl Standing in Front of You: The Burning Want of Roisin Murphy’s Overpowered
A look back at the pop singer’s fashion-heavy videos from her second album, released 10 years ago.
The recurring joke behind Roisin Murphy’s visual direction during the Overpowered era sticks out bold as its main props. Here’s the pop singer, participating in daily activities while wearing the most elaborate, flamboyant designer outfits. The LP sleeve of the record features her as a crimson ball of fur seated in a hole-in-a-wall diner, and the singles also picture her in busy locales with even busier fashion.
The music videos capture the jumbled mix even better. The clip of the title track follows her in a checkerboard-patterned poof coat, riding a double-decker bus home straight after her gig. Brief moments like an overdressed Murphy brushing her teeth while seated on the toilet goes for an obvious laugh. But the real joke inside the situational comedies of Overpowered comes from a more heartbreaking place.
The cruel humor behind the Overpowered visuals is not from how noticeable Murphy is but how she remains unseen despite the effort. The easy reward of the “Let Me Know” video comes from seeing a cape-wearing Murphy giddily striking moves in a cozy diner-turned-discotheque. Though she confidently twirls the fixtures like a seasoned performer, all the others in the eatery mind their own business. “Let me know when you’re lonely, baby,” she sings with a flirty wink to grab the attention of whoever is in her sights. Pan out just a little from her world, and it’s apparent she dances by her lonesome for no one in particular.
The singles of the album likewise feature attention-calling characters on record who remain wholly invisible in the eyes of those they try to impress. And these people put on their best performance of a new self to prove they’re no longer the old person the other knew before. “That was a girl I used to be,” she assures later in “Let Me Know”; “Me, a new me,” she starts in “You Know Me Better.”
The video for “You Know Me Better” hits the deepest out of the three. Murphy hangs around her apartment alone in various outfits, all statement pieces worthy of attention, but she doesn’t look alive nor colorful as her clothes. “What a waste of an outfit,” her body language communicates instead. The clip concludes with tears of eyeliner rolling down her cheeks.
A sense of history deepens the pain of the characters in Overpowered. “When I think that I’m over you, I’m overpowered,” Murphy spells it out in the title track. The romance of “You Know Me Better” similarly has taken on some time. “How many years can we keep going on this way,” she asks in the song’s bridge, where she’s seen tearing up in the video. How more obvious does the hint have to be? And how many more times can she get herself to try?
The only scenes where I find Murphy without a worry from these heavy questions in any of her videos are when she’s absorbed in the moment: the diner disco of “Let Me Know” or when she’s taking stroll while taking a quick bite in the title track. Yet it’s only a matter of time something snaps her back to reality with her no longer able to suppress that want for attention. After she dances without a care alone in her home in “You Know Me Better,” she crashes back on her couch with yet another elaborate outfit, this time also with a black wig. Her face once again looks a little disappointed.
