Good Girl Gone Bad: Jhené Talks Inspiration Behind Creepy 'The Worst' Video
Even when Jhené Aiko is signing about heartbreak, she still manages to sound sweet, thanks to her airy, light vocal tone. But there’s very little that’s sweet, light, or airy about the video for her song “The Worst,” which is competing against tracks from Beyoncé, Chris Brown, and Luke James for the Best R&B Song Grammy this Sunday.
[Related: Jhené Aiko: Casting My Ex in New Video Was a No-Brainer]
In the song, Jhené grapples with her love-hate relationship with a former beau. In the music video, she portrays a murderous, scormed lover. The video captures her in a moment right after she’s committed a crime of passion. She’s in a bit of a daze, getting all glammed up as she anticipates the cops arriving to arrest her.
The singer-songwriter, who is “100 percent” involved in conceptualizing all of her music videos, tells Yahoo Music that she wanted to add elements of horror to the storyline.
"I didn’t want it to be a boring story," Jhené explains. "It would be boring if it was just like a date or something going wrong. I wanted it to be creepy in a way. I wanted people to think, ‘What exactly happened here? Why is she eating a peanut butter sandwich?’ Just sorta mysterious.
"When I do videos, I want them to be like me acting out things I really would never do in real life," she explains. "I would never kill a man and get dressed up for the police to come and get me."
Jhené and the production company pre-planned some of the concept, like starting the story from the middle, after the murder. But some of the scenes were improvised, including the moment she stops to make a peanut butter sandwich. “I wanted it to be something that people didn’t expect,” she says.
The concept derived from a twisted dream. “I don’t want to call it a fantasy. It was more like a vision: ‘Oh, I could just kill him right now!’ I’m not that crazy, that’s why I do it in my music. It’s sort of a Snapped situation,” she says, comparing the video to the Oxygen Network series that tells real stories about people who killed their significant others after experiencing mental breakdowns. “I wanted it to be creepy, like, ‘What is wrong with that girl?”
In addition to taking some inspiration from Snapped, she and her collaborators also watched a few Alfred Hitchock clips. “We watched them just to get a feel of the creepiness, but we didn’t necessarily use anything we watched in the Hitchcock films,” she says.
"The Worst" lyrics also reflect the psyche of a woman who is struggling to keep it together. The chorus includes phrases repeated for effect: "I don’t need you/I don’t need you/I don’t need you/But I want you."
"It was me battling my inner thoughts out loud," she explains. "I wanted to keep it simple with a lot of my music. I didn’t write that down. I just sat down and start recording myself and just saying whatever came to mind."
Aside from her music, Jhené has teamed with Pepsi to serve as the correspondent for their “Out of the Blue" campaign that sends fans to major music events. Jhené will be creating content for the program, including interviewing other musicians and going behind-the-scenes. "I’m sorta an ‘Out of the Blue’ type artist," Jhené says. "I really like to connect with fans. I want them to have a deeper look at what I’m doing. It is a cooler experience than just listening to your favorite artists."
"The Worst" appears on Jhené 2013 EP Sail Out. She recently released a video for her song “Spotless Mind,” from her 2014 album Souled Out.
