Ne-Yo - Go On Girl

What this video is

Released in December 2007 as the fourth and final single from Ne-Yo's second studio album Because of You, 'Go On Girl' arrived during a peak moment for polished, cinematic R&B video production. Hype Williams, who had already received the MTV Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award in 2006, brought his signature cinematic vocabulary to a song Ne-Yo publicly framed as a male-empowerment counterpart to Beyoncé's…

Why it matters

A key artifact of mid-2000s mainstream R&B visual culture, documenting Hype Williams' adaptation of his maximalist 1990s aesthetic into the HD-digital era via selective monochrome and controlled color accent. The video demonstrates the genre's embrace of cinematic restraint as a marker of artistic…

The director

Harold 'Hype' Williams (b. August 1, 1970, Queens, NY) is an American music video director, film director, producer, and screenwriter. Educated at Adelphi University, he rose through graffiti and early rap video production to become the defining hip-hop/R&B…