I want to talk about the song Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) because there are so many intriguing things about it. I wasn’t familiar with Eurythmics at all before class this past week, so I looked them up and read about the songwriter duo Annie Lennox and David Stewart—they have interesting backgrounds, and genius.com does a decent job explaining the song by referencing from the duo’s biographies. To keep this from turning into a tediously long blog post, I’m not going to explain that part too much, but focus more on my reactions.

The electronic music style is probably what first got me hooked on the song because it is very catchy. I also liked the attitude in the singing style (appealing to R & B/Soul). As I listened more to the lyrics, I was catching on to a deep statement about something. The lyrics “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you” seem to imply a dark meaning, and I started to wonder what this was about.

The music video for this song was intriguing as well, so I want to talk more about the visual side of it. Here is a link to the video in case you want to see it before reading my thoughts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeMFqkcPYcg

The part of the video that was most dynamic to me was the way the duo acted. Lennox is the lead and speaks to the audience boldly through her intense eye contact with the camera and the seriousness of her demeanor as she sings. Her appearance is also quite bold with the orange hair, dark eyeliner, and black suit. Stewart is mostly shown using a computer (or the device that plays the music?) and doesn’t show much emotion because of goggles covering his eyes.

The rural scene where the duo are playing cellos is very odd. I was confused about the cows. Why are they in the video? I looked that up too, but didn’t completely understand it. I can bet that the milk bottle sounds we hear in the music are related to the presence of cows in the video.

I noticed throughout the video that there are a lot of intense close-ups on eyes—Lennox’s eyes, the cow’s eyes, the third eye, eyes peeking through masks, etc. I don’t completely understand what it means, but it certainly grabs your attention during the video. I think the eye imagery relates to what the lyrics are saying about people “looking for something”.

Overall, I thought this was a well-done video. I appreciate that there are things in it I don’t understand as well as things that make me look deeper into what the song means.