Selena Gomez & The Scene - “Love You Like A Love Song”

We start out in an Asian karaoke bar, where some guy is finishing up a horrid performance that could make bunnies cry. The hostess comes out, waving around a microphone bigger than her head and shoving the loser off the stage, and then proceeds to announce that our next contestant will be Selena. Yay! I never would have guessed that she would sing in her own video.

Selena trots up on stage so we can get a better look at her, and I’m stunned by the amount of hair that poor thing has to deal with. (How does she even hold her head up? I guess kids really are stronger these days.) Anyway, Selena starts singing, pretending to look at the little karaoke teleprompter even though she surely knows the words to her own song by this point.

We zoom into the video that is accompanying the scrolling words, and it starts out cheesily enough, with some couple bathed in pink light whilst standing on a beach. (We get a quick shot of the audience in the bar, and it’s composed mostly of older men, which makes things a little creepy since Selena appears to be about 7 years old, but we’ll try to not worry about that right now.)

Back to the video, where we see that it’s apparently Selena and Jesus on that beach, with him playing a sitar and gazing mystically in the distance, while she sprawls on the purple sand and reaches toward the camera with 3-D hands that are kind of cool. (Wait, is she begging us to rescue her? Possibly. Sitar music can really get on your nerves.)

Oh good, Jesus ditches the instrument so he and Selena, in her harem outfit, can stroll along the beach and hold hands. They pause and face one another, with Selena singing to him beseechingly. Is she applying for an Apostle opening? Surely she’s read the brochure on what happened to some of the original cast.

Back to the karaoke bar, where Selena is singing and managing to not fall off of her super high-heel clogs, a talent that comes from many years of starring in Disney sitcoms. Then once more to the video, where Jesus has found his sitar again and Selena has managed to find a hula hoop, so everybody has a hobby and it’s all good.

Another visit to the karaoke bar, with shots of the old men in the audience and Selena making an expression to indicate she has just realized how old they are. The video changes to images of (we’ll assume) Selena doing a Max Headroom / Grace Jones impersonation, complete with sparkly glasses and silver lipstick. (There seems to be an issue with the technical side of the playback, but no one seems to care other than me, so once again we’ll just let questionable things go.)

We check in on Jesus and Selena, and since they seem to be doing fine (Selena can really twirl that hoop with style), it’s time to see what they did with the rest of the budget for this video. We cut to an Amadeus / Elton John bit of business, with some guy in fancy dress playing a triangular purple piano, upon which Selena is relaxing whilst wearing a ginormous powdered wig (girl really loves the big hair) and singing into a teensy-tiny microphone the size of a cotton swab.

This goes on for a while, with Selena warbling and the guy hired as the piano player getting a little too invested in his role. (Dude, just pretend to play the piano and wait for somebody to yell “cut”.) Selena doesn’t mind, letting her partner be flamboyant while the odd Grecian busts placed around the room stare at her and don’t say anything.

The video changes to Selena doing a Lisa Loeb tribute, with the cat-eye glasses and the smart but innocent prom outfit. She’s perched in a 50’s convertible while a greaser paramour is driving her around, obviously checking out her wares more than he’s checking out the road. Lisa pretends to not notice what he’s doing, especially when his glasses turn into double-images of Selena’s lips and the scrolling text turns into Japanese. (I have no idea. I haven’t seen the script.)

Back to Selena in the bar, with multiple monitors behind her showing the Grace Jones character. Then they start jacking around with these monitors, giving us little snippets of all the fun people we’ve met here on Sesame Roll Street. We also get shots of the audience, to remind us that everybody in this video is older than Selena.

Okay, we’re changing things up again. Now we’ve headed out to field somewhere, with purple waves of grain being caressed by the wind and a mariachi band standing under the lone tree on this plain. (Well, they’re dressed in the mariachi style, but they’re playing instruments that are clearly non-mariachi, so I’m not sure what the statement is here.)

Selena, as usual, doesn’t mind the visual discordance, and instead chooses to pick up a light saber that just happened to be lying nearby, and proceeds to swing it at a pinata (in the shape of a heart, awww) that just happens to be hanging from the only tree for miles around. After nearly decapitating several of the mariachi men, she manages to score a direct hit.

This act of violence (I have never understood the concept of teaching children to beat an animal with a stick in the hopes that they will be gifted with cheap candy) leads to an explosion of animated bits of something or other filling the air. Selena appears pleased with this development, and proceeds to do a dance of victory even though she is still wearing the requisite pinata blindfold and could easily trip over a cameraman and tumble down the hillside. She’s a risk taker, that girl.

Selena ditches the blindfold, and continues to cavort about among the mariachi men, sporting vibrantly-pink lipstick that can be seen from Utah. Then we start to wind things down, with a final run-through of all the various Selenas and her playmates. Everyone is still having a swell time, and the lecherous men in the audience are behaving themselves, so it’s all good. Karaoke Selena finishes up the song, then she and her hair take a bow. The annoying hostess runs up to snatch away the microphone before the next AARP bus pulls up outside…


Click Here to Watch the Video on YouTube.