Video: MILCK, ‘Oh My My (What a Life)’

S.Lo on June 15th, 2018

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Southern California singer-songwriter MILCK (née Connie Lim) — who penned the unofficial anthem of last year’s Women’s March, “Quiet,” and orchestrated a flash mob performance in the nation’s capital that set the interwebs ablaze and spawned a worldwide movement — is stepping forward with another song of powerful pop reflection.

“Oh My My (What a Life)” and its video are deeply personal portraits of MILCK’s life, skipping through presumptions she’s had about where she’d end up in life: a rebel, a tortured artist, a writer for hire. “I thought I’d end up selling my songs to shiny pop stars with a million followers ‘cuz who would wanna see someone like me / singing about me / in hotel lobbies?” she sings. As revealed in a recent interview on NPR, these self-doubts were not out of place from the prejudicial barriers she faced before she had the momentum of a social movement. “I’ve been an independent artist for eight years. And I remember around year five or six, there was a person interested in managing me and he was kind of scratching his head. He’s like, ‘Well I don’t know how to break a Chinese American artist here. Maybe you should go back to China,”’ she shares, “And I kind of panicked because I don’t view China as my home. I view America as my home.”

Straddling two cultures — with both feet firmly planted on this side of the Atlantic — her new video shares her experience under her own terms. “… I dug deep to write this video concept, and we cast my real family, friends and boyfriend to play cameos in the video,”” she says. “The director and I also decided to use my native tongue, Cantonese, in the beginning… We shot the entire video in my hometown — the house we shot in is the actual home where I grew up in as a kid, and the theater is the one I performed in as a kid.”

The domestic scenes are typical American suburbia with universal childhood and teenage angst, with the specificity of negotiating two different cultures within the home and oneself. The conflicts, the self-deprecation and the questioning of self-worth that ensues is relatable, and MILCK finds a way to emerge from it all. The chorus reaffirms how after surmounting obstacles from within and without, she finally reaches a place of happiness and empowerment. By the middle eight, she’s “standing in the sun / singing her own songs of freedom.”

||| Watch: The video for “Oh My My (What a Life)”