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TL;DR:

  • An ironic Beastie Boys music video was an inspiration for Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”
  • The video also drew inspiration from multiple Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
  • The music video is about as popular as the clip for Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.”

The Beastie Boys had a huge impact on music videos. For example, they inspired the music videos for Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” In addition, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo influenced “Barbie Girl.”

Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ was inspired by the irony of the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’

During a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, director Peder Pedersen explained how he and Aqua came up with the concept for the “Barbie Girl” music video. “We had watched Spike Jonze’s video for ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys,” he recalled. “I love those crime movies and exploitation movies that they were referencing. It was an inspiration, since it had the Beastie Boys playing characters. 

“That was a good reference for me to say, ‘If we can go this way and have a kind of irony, we can go a long way,'” he remembered. “Our references for the looks were Hanna-Barbera cartoons like The Flintstones and Scooby–Doo. That made it look different from all the other videos.”

Aqua’s music video is about as popular as the clip for Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

Pedersen discussed the sequences from “Barbie Girl” in more depth. “In my view, the video needed to be like the song, cartoonish, that kind of feel,” he said. “That’s also what the group had in mind. We had a session where we went, ‘What does Barbie do? What kind of props does she have? Well, she has a house, a car, a horse, a hair dryer, a telephone, a dog.’ Then I went back and did a complete storyboard for it.”

Aqua’s approach to the music video seems to have paid off. Rolling Stone reports that, in February 2022, the clip was viewed for the billionth time on YouTube. This puts it in an elite circle of music videos, including those for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.” It’s interesting that “Barbie Girl” hasn’t inspired as many pop culture parodies as the former two music videos. Perhaps that’s because it’s a spoof already.

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How ‘Barbie Girl’ and ‘Sabotage’ performed on the pop charts in the United States

Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” became a big hit. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending a total of 16 weeks on the chart. That tune appeared on the album Aquarium. That album reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 50 weeks.

On the other hand, the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100. The Beastie Boys included it on the album Ill Communication. The record topped the Billboard 200 for a single week, becoming the group’s most popular album besides License to Ill. The former lasted on the chart for 63 weeks altogether.

Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” is one of the most famous music videos of the 1990s and it wouldn’t be the same without the Beastie Boys.

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