The music executive FKA Twigs recruited actor/director Kevin Smith to play in the music video for “Childlike Things” couldn’t care less about whatever Eusexua is. The musician would describe it as a feeling, the kind that emerges after reaching euphoria on the dance floor. He would call it noise, just as he mangles the pronunciation of her name to FKA instead of just calling her Twigs like everyone else. Still, Twigs is content on winning him over — he has to approve whether she gets a budget to make the video we’re watching.
For the first half of the eight-minute long video, which was written by Jeremy O. Harris and directed by Jordan Hemingway, Twigs dances as though her life depends on it. She even told the executive she was 24, shaving more than a decade from her age in hopes that he wouldn’t write her off as quickly. When he tries to sneak away mid-performance, she snaps: “You can’t leave. Your figures and numbers don’t mean anything when you’re sweating on the dance floor, discovering something new for the first time. That’s that this is about — the thrill of it.”
Smith isn’t sold, even with the urging of the influencer Jake Shane, who also appears in the video. “No amount of witnessing you discover it is going to help you get on Spotify’s discover page any easier,” he says. “You want my best advice? Hoop up with a rapper, get your BPMs up, then we can try this again on day.” Twigs offers to do him one better: instead of getting a rapper, she recruits the daughter of a fairly disgraced one — North West. “Welcome to the stage the sartorial goddess, the raspy voice troublemaker and truth teller, producer and rapper extraordinaire. The one, the only, North West.”
With North West in the mix, the dance numbers go even harder, as if it’s Twigs’ last shot at getting this video made. It works — kind of. “Okay, it’s fire,” Smith admits. “But maybe shoot some short-form stuff, 15 seconds and get it up on all the socials. But I wouldn’t shoot a music video for it.”
The skit-like quality of the video leans into the thematic narrative of “Childlike Things,” which Twigs made after recalling lyrics she wrote as a kid. “It [needed] someone who has that tenacity, who has that strong point of view that you have when you’re 11,” Twigs recently said on Instagram about adding a collaborator to the song. “Then I saw an interview with North West, and she was so confident. It suddenly occurred to me that I would’ve loved to have a friend like North who could speak up for themselves.”
From Rolling Stone US
