Jody Watley - Real Love

What this video is

Released in March 1989, 'Real Love' arrived at the precise intersection of Black pop's crossover dominance and the ascendancy of fashion-literate music video auteurism. Jody Watley, a Grammy-winning Best New Artist of 1987 fresh off her Shalamar tenure, used this video to assert a high-fashion identity largely unprecedented for Black female artists of the era — an aesthetic strategy she has described as aligned…

Why it matters

A landmark in late-80s R&B video production, 'Real Love' codified the high-fashion music video grammar — runway blocking, graphic typography, chiaroscuro portraiture — that would define the aesthetic vocabulary of early-90s R&B and pop videos. Its Fincher-directed cinematic ambition demonstrated…

The director

David Andrew Leo Fincher (born August 28, 1962, Denver, Colorado) co-founded Propaganda Films in 1986 and built his reputation directing music videos throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s before transitioning to features with Alien 3 (1992). He is a…