In October 2018, Maroon 5 released a star-studded music video for their single “Girls Like You” featuring Cardi B. Now, almost exactly six years later, the video has joined YouTube’s Billions Club.
The video has a simple setup: the camera rotates around Adam Levine as he sings the track, but each time it spins around a new famous woman is lip syncing the track at his side. The cameos range from athletes to activists, actresses to models, and singers to politicians. We first see Camila Cabello, later followed by fellow singers Jennifer Lopez, Mary J. Blige, and Rita Ora. We also see actors Millie Bobby Brown and Beanie Feldstein, comedians Sarah Silverman and Tiffany Haddish, athletes Danica Patrick and Chloe Kim, activists and politicians Amani Al-Khatahtbeh and Ilhan Omar, as well as models Ashley Graham and Behati Prinsloo, the latter appearing with her and Levine’s daughter, Dusty Rose.
The video’s director, David Dobkin, shared how he and Levine assembled such an impressive cast. “We wrote personal letters to each and every one of these individual women, and we very carefully curated the group,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “This is the list of people that we were inspired by, who said yes and actually were able to make it.” He additionally shared it took almost five months in total to make the video, and five days of shooting.
On the importance of the video to him, Dobkin said, “not every project lends itself to be able to do this kind of thing. Music videos are very special because you’re taking a song and you’re assigning it a visual, and if you’re doing it well, you’re assigning it a meaning that’s hopefully as big and beyond as what the song is intending. And this certainly was one of those cases.”
Order Maroon 5’s V on vinyl here.
