Now more than ever, it’s important to heed the advice of one Nicki Minaj and keep an eye out for Selener. Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco released their first joint album, I Said I Love You First, this morning. The early singles have found Gomez in a laid-back, acoustic pop sort of space, and the latest, “Younger And Hotter Than Me,” arrived this morning with a particularly affecting music video.
In the clip, Gomez wakes up in a living room covered with dust sheets. As the camera pans out, it’s revealed that this isn’t her living room but a film set, and that at least some of the stars working on it are tween actors. Gomez offers a slight smile to a terrified-looking girl dressed (unsubtly) as a princess in the bathroom. She grabs a donut and watches some different children rehearsing a dance routine, then grabs a lunch with Blanco before he gets in his car. She stays at work, and returns right to the set in storage before tucking herself into bed. “We’re not gettin’ any younger/But your girlfriends seem to/Someone else/Was I someone else?” she sings. It appears you can never really go home again.
Of course, Gomez was a child actor; before popping up on Disney Channel’s slate and anchoring The Wizards Of Waverly Place, she started appearing on Barney And Friends when she was just nine or ten years old. If we’re to take this song and video as a direct reference to that history, it would appear that the experience has left Gomez with anxiety over being replaced by someone, well, younger and hotter. Fortunately for her, most of the other music we’ve heard from her lately has focused on how in love she is with Blanco; her single “Sunset Blvd.”, which unignorably shares a name with a movie about a fading actress in an obsessive relationship with a writer, is about making a man famous by loving him and how people are calling the cops because they’re getting naughty in the middle of the famous thoroughfare. At least it sounds like Hollywood can be fun, too.
