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I've made music videos based on Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and The Handmaid's Tale. I've built a community lip-sync video featuring Wiz Khalifa's mom and members of Anti-Flag. I've made a video that's nothing but kaleidoscope footage of my family, my pets, and my daily life. I've used activist protest footage alongside my music to make a point about abortion rights.
None of these were random creative choices. All of them came out of a framework I've developed over fifteen years of making music videos on an independent budget — a set of questions I ask myself before committing to a concept that involves referencing something outside my own work.
The upside of tapping pop culture, current events, or beloved stories in your creative work is real. You inherit an existing audience. You give people a hook to share the work with. You enter a conversation that's already happening rather than trying to start one from scratch.
The downside is equally real. You can date your work instantly. You can look like you're chasing relevance rather than making art. You can spend significant production resources on something that stops being shareable the moment the cultural moment passes.
Here's how I think about it — and here's what I've actually done, and why.
This is the first question and the most important. There's a meaningful difference between a cultural moment — something that has been building over time, that has layers of meaning, that will continue to be referenced and discussed for years — and a viral moment, which is hot for a week and then invisible.
A meme is viral. A show that ran for eight seasons and generated a decade of cultural conversation is a cultural moment. A trending audio clip on TikTok is viral. A film that has become shorthand for an entire political reality is a cultural moment.
I don't make videos around viral content. By the time the video is planned, shot, edited, and released, the viral moment is usually over. And even if the timing works, you've made something with a built-in expiration date.
Ask yourself: will anyone still be talking about this in three years? In five? If the honest answer is probably not, the reference might still work in a lyric — a passing nod, a single line — but probably shouldn't be the organizing concept for an entire video.
This is the question that separates a creative decision from a marketing decision dressed up as creativity. And audiences can feel the difference immediately.
If I'm making a song about feminism and I build a video that uses the visual language of a show that is literally about the systematic subjugation of women under a theocratic patriarchy — that's not a grab. The reference illuminates the song. The song illuminates the reference. They deepen each other.
If I'm making a song about something personal and spiritual and I throw a Game of Thrones reference in because GoT is popular — that's a grab. People can tell. It feels hollow because it is hollow.
Ask yourself: if I remove this reference entirely, does my work lose something essential, or does it just lose its hook? If it loses something essential, the reference is doing real work. If it just loses the hook, the reference is doing marketing work, which is a different thing with a shorter lifespan.
Independent artists make choices with limited resources. A high-production pop culture reference concept that takes months to execute and costs significant money needs to justify that investment over a meaningful time horizon.
If I'm referencing something that I believe will be culturally resonant for five or ten years — something people will still be discovering and sharing — that's a very different investment calculation than referencing something that's currently peaking and will plateau in six months.
The Mad Men video cost real time and creative energy. I made it because I believed — correctly, as it turned out — that Mad Men as a cultural reference point for conversations about gender, power, and workplace dynamics would remain relevant long after the show ended. I was right. That video still circulates. Still gets discovered. Still sparks the conversation I wanted it to spark.
Ask yourself: what is my realistic expectation for how long this reference will have cultural legs? Does my production investment match that timeline?
A great pop culture reference adds a new layer of meaning. A weak one just borrows visibility.
When The Handmaid's Tale became the visual vocabulary of abortion rights protest — when women started showing up to state capitol buildings in the red robes and white bonnets — that was not a coincidence. Margaret Atwood's novel and then the television adaptation had given a generation of people a visual language for something they were struggling to articulate. The show's imagery became shorthand for a political reality that felt, to many people, disturbingly close.
When I used clips from the show alongside "Rise," I was not decorating the video with popular imagery. I was borrowing a visual language that already had political meaning and connecting it to a song that was making the same argument. The reference amplified the message. It did not replace it.
Ask yourself: am I saying something with this reference, or am I just standing next to something popular and hoping some of its audience looks at me?
This one is practical but essential. Using copyrighted material — clips from television shows, recognizable music in the background, recognizable branded imagery — creates real risk on commercial platforms. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all have content ID systems that can flag your video, mute the audio, prevent monetization, or remove the content entirely.
Fair use provides some protection, particularly when the use is transformative — when you're making a creative or critical statement rather than simply reproducing the original. But fair use is a legal defense, not a permission slip, and the platforms don't adjudicate it — they just flag content and let you appeal later.
Ask yourself: have I thought through the distribution and legal implications of this reference? Is there a version of this concept that carries less risk without sacrificing what makes it work?
What's happening: Mad Humans is a feminist rap song about gender dynamics, workplace power, and the performance of femininity in professional spaces. For the video, I recreated the aesthetic of the television show Mad Men — the period costumes, the office setting, the visual vocabulary of a show set in 1960s advertising but understood by its audience as a commentary on power dynamics that hadn't entirely disappeared. The video puts a female rapper in that world, rapping explicitly about what the show depicted implicitly.
Why it works: Mad Men ran from 2007 to 2015 and generated sustained cultural conversation about gender, power, and the specific kind of masculine entitlement the show depicted. When I made this video, that conversation was active and the reference was immediately legible to a wide audience. More importantly, the reference did genuine thematic work — placing a feminist rap song in the visual world of a show about the exact power dynamics the song was critiquing created a productive tension. The video didn't just use Mad Men's aesthetic for visibility. It used it to make a point. That's why 244,000 views later it still circulates, still gets discovered, and still starts the conversation I wanted it to start. The show ended. The conversation about what it was depicting did not.
What's happening: This one is structurally different from the others. Rather than a thematic alignment between the song's content and the referenced material, the Game of Thrones remix is a recap — a song that works through the events of the show as its subject matter, set to original music with the show's visual language. It's explicitly a fan creation, positioned as a recap tool as much as a piece of music.
Why it works: Game of Thrones at its peak was one of the most discussed shows in television history, generating weekly conversation among an audience of tens of millions. Recap and analysis content around GoT had genuine sustained demand — people were searching for ways to process and discuss each episode, each season, the full arc of the series. A musical recap is a distinctive and memorable format within that conversation. The video isn't trying to be something it's not — it's a love letter and a creative response to source material that I engaged with genuinely. That authenticity reads. At 12,000 views it's not the biggest number, but it found the audience it was made for, and those viewers were specifically looking for this kind of creative GoT engagement. The lesson here is that fan creative work has its own logic — you're not trying to reach everyone, you're trying to reach the community that loves this thing as much as you do.
What's happening: "Rise" is a feminist anthem about resistance, bodily autonomy, and refusing to accept the erosion of rights that had been won by previous generations. For the video and the accompanying social media campaign, I cut footage from The Handmaid's Tale alongside footage from real abortion rights protests — the red robes and white bonnets that had become the visual language of that movement showing up at actual demonstrations, mixed with the show's imagery of the same aesthetic in its fictional theocratic state. The line between the show and the reality was deliberately blurred.
Why it works: This is the case study that most clearly illustrates the difference between borrowing visibility and borrowing meaning. By the time I made this video, The Handmaid's Tale had already become something beyond a prestige television show — it had become visual vocabulary for a political movement. Women were wearing the costumes to protests. The image was appearing on signs, in news coverage, in political organizing. When I used that imagery alongside "Rise," I wasn't reaching for a popular show's audience. I was plugging into a living visual language that my audience was already using to talk about exactly what my song was about. The reference didn't just amplify the song — it located it within a real political moment in a way that gave it urgency and specificity beyond what the song alone could achieve.
The legal question is worth acknowledging here. Using clips from a copyrighted television show involves real risk, and I navigated that carefully in terms of how and where the content was distributed. The transformative nature of the use — protest footage alongside fictional footage making an explicit political argument — provides some fair use footing, but anyone attempting something similar should understand what they're doing legally before they do it.
What's happening: This video — which has since come down from YouTube, which is its own lesson — featured community members, friends, family, and fellow artists members of Anti-Flag and Peachy, Wiz Khalifa's mom, lip-syncing along to a song that was explicitly a political response to the Trump era. The concept was community participation: the video's power came not from production value but from the breadth and diversity of the people involved, each bringing their own identity and community to the frame.
Why it works — and what it teaches: This one is complicated because the video is no longer findable, which illustrates something important about content involving specific political figures and the platforms' evolving relationship with political content. The lesson isn't that you shouldn't make work that takes a political stance — "Rise" still lives on YouTube. The lesson is that content specifically organized around named political figures has a different relationship with platform longevity than content organized around political issues. "Trump" in the title and concept made the video more vulnerable to platform decisions in ways that a song about abortion rights as an issue was not.
The community lip-sync format itself is a genuinely powerful creative strategy worth separating from the platform longevity question. Inviting your community — artists, family, friends, people whose presence in the frame says something about who you are and who you stand with — into your creative work builds something that is specifically yours in a way that high-production-value solo videos often aren't. The video functioned as a political organizing tool and a community document as much as a piece of music promotion. That's a different thing and a valuable thing, whatever happened to the specific file.
What's happening: In Tune is the inverse of everything I've been describing. No pop culture reference. No borrowed visual language. No political moment. Just: kaleidoscope treatment applied to footage of my actual life — family, pets, daily moments, the texture of existing as myself in the world. The video is an aesthetic rendering of ordinary intimacy.
Why it works: It works because authenticity is its own kind of reference point. In a media landscape saturated with production value, staged moments, and borrowed aesthetics, footage of someone's actual life — their actual kid, their actual dog, their actual morning — reads as real in a way that cuts through. The kaleidoscope treatment gives it a visual distinctiveness that prevents it from being simply a home video, but the source material is genuinely personal. Audiences who connect with this kind of video aren't connecting with a reference or a concept. They're connecting with a person. That connection is different from what you build with a clever pop culture reference, and in some ways it's deeper.
The question of whether to put your actual life in your creative work is its own conversation — with its own considerations around privacy, family consent, and the particular vulnerability of making your personal world publicly visible. But as a creative strategy, the personal video can do something that no amount of pop culture referencing achieves: it makes you irreplaceable as the subject.
Looking back at all of these, the common thread in the ones that worked is that the creative choice — whether referencing a television show, borrowing a protest aesthetic, or showing footage of my actual dog — was doing real work in service of the song. The reference wasn't the point. The song was the point. You've spent the time writing a song to connect with your audience, but the right reference casts a wider net and invites more people to join your audience. People who are likely to connect with it, but they're not your core followers so they might not know it yet.
The creative choices that age well are the ones where you could defend them on purely creative grounds, not just on marketing grounds. If the only answer to "why did you do this?" is "because it was popular," that's not a creative choice. It's a bet on someone else's cultural momentum.
Your work has its own momentum. The references you borrow should serve that, not substitute for it.
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