December 13, 2008 –
Beyonce’s song, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) hit #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.
The video has become an internet phenomenon with thousands of homemade versions posted on YouTube. Beyoncé explained to The Sunday Times May 10, 2009 that the idea for the promo was a 1960s film of a Bob Fosse routine, Mexican Breakfast, which featured his wife, Gwen Verdon. She recalled; “I saw a video on YouTube. They had a plain background and it was shot on the crane; it was 360 degrees, they could move around. And I said, ‘This is genius.’ We kept a lot of the Fosse choreography and added the down-south thing – it’s called J-setting, where one person does something and the next person follows. So it was a strange mixture, kind of like the song, which is almost like a nursery rhyme, the ‘oh-oh-oh’s, and the sinister chords. So it’s like the most urban choreography, mixed with Fosse – very modern and very vintage. We’d spent all the budget on the video for (the previous single) If I Were a Boy, and with this song, we didn’t even have a treatment. So, it’s the least expensive video I’ve done. Not for a moment did I think, ‘This is going to be a movement.’“
The Haus of Dcaligari 