Sam Smith’s latest music video is causing quite a stir, as the singer reveals their raciest look yet – sparking fierce debate on social media.
Samuel Frederick Smith (born May 19, 1992) is a singer and songwriter from England. After breaking out in October 2012 with Disclosure’s breakthrough single “Latch,” which peaked at number eleven on the UK Singles Chart, they were later featured on Naughty Boy’s “La La La,” which went to number one in May 2013. Smith won both the 2014 Brit Critics’ Choice Award and the BBC’s Sound of 2014 poll in December 2013.
Sam’s appearance in the new video has resulted in the star being attacked and trolled online, while others have rushed to defend them, claiming homophobia and fatphobia are to blame for those who appear to be horrified by Sam’s revealing appearance.
Sam’s music and personal style were far more conservative when they released their debut album in May 2014, the same month they publicly came out as gay.
Smith cavorts with a slew of bum-twitching, writhing sexy dancers in his new video – let’s not get into the song, which is a painfully generic flimsy soul confection. That sounds normal enough, you might say. What I haven’t revealed is that Smith is dressed in a lacey basque and has a full décolletage topped with silver nipple caps. That’s a risky move for a hefty, hairy thirty-year-old man built like the Pillsbury Doughboy. As the owner of a large male frame, I can attest that this is not the best way to present oneself to the public.
Occasionally, the video cuts to another outfit, a silver sequined creation (complete with headdress) that I believe is meant to evoke the timeless glamour of the mysterious east, but which unfortunately comes across as a tribute to the durability of Bacofoil.
The climax of this enthralling performance comes when Smith is sprayed from several different directions at the same time by what appears to be streaming urine.
Pop music, and particularly pop music stardom, has the incredible power to transform people into something they are not. My generation’s pop culture transformed Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual, and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet.
More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has made Ed Sheeran someone people want to look at and Adele someone people want to hear from when she describes her emotional ups and downs in great detail. But there are boundaries, and singer Sam Smith has done us a favour by pushing through them.