Bonnie McKee - American Girl

What this video is

Released in summer 2013, 'American Girl' arrived at a pivot point for female-forward mainstream pop: Katy Perry's Prism era was approaching, Miley Cyrus was mid-reinvention, and the Spring Breakers film aesthetic had saturated youth culture with sun-bleached, hyper-saturated Americana iconography. McKee, herself a key architect of the Perry hit-song machine (co-writing 'California Gurls,' 'Teenage Dream,' 'Last…

Why it matters

A crystalline artifact of early-2010s bubblegum electropop, 'American Girl' synthesizes the high-gloss production values of the Dr. Luke/Max Martin pop assembly line with the confessional, self-mythologizing lyrical mode of the era's female solo breakouts. As a music video, it represents the…

The director

Justin Francis is a music video and commercial director. He is credited as the director of the official 'American Girl' music video for Bonnie McKee (2013), confirmed by IMDb (tt33163686), Wikipedia, and multiple entertainment sources. He has worked within…