Close Textual Analysis of a Scene & Employing an Intersectional Analytic
By Karina Morales-Pineda
Music Video: Nice to Have – 070 Shake (4.42)
“It’s nice to have someone to hold you
Tell you they chose you
Someone you can’t fool ’cause they know you
Nice to have someone to love you
Come to your bed in the night when you’re alone
It’s nice to have someone to love you (Mmm, mmm)
Ayy, it’s nice to have someone to love you”
For my short analysis, I chose the music video for “Nice to Have” by 070 Shake (Danielle Balbuena, she/her), one of my favorite experimental and alternative R&B artists, for her unique sound and cinematic production. The song is about missing and yearning for a particular kind of love and appreciating it when you finally find it. Although 070 Shake has never defined her sexuality with labels, she has publically dated women and uses “she/her” pronouns in her lyrics.
Short Description:
The music video begins with a slowed-down and paused-in-time traffic jam caused by an accident far ahead, inside a busy tunnel. There are brief, slowed shots of the people inside every car. Inside, the people varied randomly by race and age: an older couple, families with only one parent, a younger couple fighting, a group of teenagers running around, a woman holding a baby she just birthed in the car, a lesbian couple making out on the roof of the car, kids singing, an older couple kissing in the public transport, a couple fighting while holding a gun with a “just married sign” on their car, someone eating in there car alone.
Dannielle is seen alone in all her shots, between the shots of other couples. Two dogs in her backseat once accompany her; another shot shows her alone on public transport, and one shows her alone driving and singing. These shots continue up the traffic and eventually to the accident site.
In the accident, Dannielle is bloodied and across the hood of a car that has crashed into a pickup truck full of flowers; a third wall is dropped at this point, and the camera is turned to the set workers of cameras, lights and sounds. The sound is slowed and reverbed in a chopped-and-screwed style, showcasing snippets of Danielle and immediately returning to the familiar faces of the couples, cars, and families, this time only highlighting the happy moments.
Short Analysis:
Age was the most noticeable diversity in the shots of the random people/couples/family. There was a mix of joy and chaos across all ages, from the newborn child crying to the old couple kissing. There were a few queer couples scattered around, exhibiting different types of physical affection. However, most of the couples were heteronormative, with a mix of female and male-presenting pairs. There was not anything hypersexual or objectifying about the scenes of kissing in public. Gender was always questioned at the beginning of her career; for her androgynous style, I did not find this fluidity explored in this music video, apart from Danielle herself. I would not change much from the shots of the random subjects, in and out of love. Showing Danielle injured and alone felt like the song came with the urgency of carpe diem. Each shot gave each family or couple the entire screen for some moments at a time, and even returned to the same characters at the end. This made each one feel like an important subject, especially the older couples showing affection. Because Danielle is private about her sexuality, I understand why she was not one of the subjects in and out of love. This music video is from 2019, and this is no longer the case, as Danielle has since showcased her queer relationship with Lily-Rose Depp in a newer music video, making her relationship the subject of her love songs. The portrayal of some same-sex affection as something normal and insignificant by an artist who writes about loving women without defining her sexuality is very queer to me as a consumer, even if Danielle does not define herself that way.
One reply on “Nice to Have – 070 Shake”
What stood out to me in your post, and in the video itself, is how much loneliness and stillness 070 Shake inhabits in contrast to the relational world around her. The choice to place her outside of the “love scenes,” even though she’s the narrator of the yearning, creates a sharp and evocative distance.
While I don’t read “Nice to Have” as making an overt political statement, I do think there’s something quietly powerful in the way 070 Shake moves through the video alone. This emotional distance reminded me of the subtle and intimate storytelling in Mosquita y Mari, where queerness isn’t declared or labeled outright, but is felt in the silences, in the glances, and in the in-between moments.
Ellise Fuchs’s interview with Aurora Guerrero gets at this — the idea that “most of us don’t need to put labels on it.” Guerrero talks about telling queer stories that come from a place of lived experience, where identity is felt but not always named. I see that same energy in 070 Shake’s work. Her queerness isn’t presented as spectacle or conflict—it’s just there, embedded in the emotional tone and visual choices of the video.
I appreciate that you name the normalization of same-sex affection here as inherently queer—even when it isn’t labeled as such. It’s a reminder that queerness isn’t always announced with rainbows or declarations—it often exists in the pauses, the glances, the unspoken choices. 070 Shake’s refusal to define herself, and her careful curation of intimacy, feels like a form of soft resistance—a way of claiming space without surrendering to the pressures of categorization.
Juana María Rodríguez, in the introduction to Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, explores how desire can show up in nonverbal ways—in gestures, rhythms, longings that don’t always fit neatly into categories. While Danielle doesn’t place herself in a couple or a romantic situation in this video, her presence carries that kind of queer longing. She’s watching, remembering, aching—but without performance. That absence of labeling or clear narrative might actually be the most honest expression of queerness here.
So even if I didn’t initially read the music video as especially “deep” in a traditional symbolic sense, I do think its quiet mood, its attention to emotional nuance, and its refusal to clearly define or display queerness reflects the kind of queer gesture Rodríguez and Guerrero both talk about—small, subtle, and still deeply felt.