Little Mix: If it's black & white, it must be classy

There's a thing called Selective Desaturation and it's everywhere.

You probably know it best from Schindler's list. It's the technique Stephen Spielberg used to make a little girl's red coat the only element of colour in a black and white movie. When you saw the same coat discarded in a pile at the end of a movie, it was a powerful and disturbing statement.

But the technique has become a horrible cliché. A gimmicky shorthand for "art" that's particularly prevalent in wedding photography. Weirdly, it's always the bouquet they leave in colour, which only steals focus from the bride and groom.

Next to jump on the bandwagon are Little Mix, who have gone all moody and monochrome for the video to DNA. I suspect the director was hoping for a hyper-real Sin City colour palette, but without Robert Rodriguez's production budget, everything just seems washed out. Poor Jesy looks like they've just rescued her waterlogged corpse from the bottom of the sea.

The song, on the other hand, is still excellent, with harmonies up the wazoo and the best musical S-S-S-S-Stutter since My Generation.

Little Mix - DNA

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