Video round-up

Busta Rhymes – "Arab Money"

The expression apparently means "a shitload of money", as in really, really rich, like a middle eastern oil baron. Racially offensive? Meh.

This is bullshit. Busta's spent the past decade putting out another shitty album every other year or so and they've all got one single and who cares what else. The single's always got whatever sonic trend was fresh five years ago (in this case, way too much autotuner) and a pale attempt to come up with a new dance or catchphrase or whatever else. Here most of the video is spent drilling the "dance" into the viewer's head in hopes of igniting a new club trend. The brief live clip at the end makes it seem as though it worked. Busta used to be a pretty talented MC; it's a shame to see him now putting so much effort into a transparent bid to be disposable.

As for the video... why is there a director credit? I understand putting one on some special-effects-laden epic, but this one looks like the biggest line item in the budget was for catering. It leaves few if any lasting impressions, other than I notice Busta's waistline betrays few recent missed meals.

Morrissey – "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris"

Morrissey's 2004 comeback turned out to be one of the decade's most surprising and most welcome. The eight-year hiatus seemed to imbue him with a renewed passion both as a vocalist ("I Like You") and a lyricist ("This World Is Full Of Crashing Bores"), and he turned in some of his finest work since his mid-nineties heyday. Two albums later he seems to have fallen back into a rut. I haven't heard the new album yet, but if the single's any indication it won't be one for the canon. The riff is cute but inconsequential, while the lyrics come off like a rough draft. Other than the title (again, cute but inconsequential), there's not a single memorable line. For a guy who's set the bar as high as the Mozzer, this just won't cut it.

Mozzer's videos are almost universally shitty, as though the man can't be bothered to book more than a two hour shoot and the editor is left to make do with the few takes he gets. Moz lip synching in front of his bored looking bandmates/employees can ocassionally make for a watchable four minutes ("I Have Forgiven Jesus", for instance); the man is, after all, a fairly compelling performer. But this one reeks of a lack of effort.

Jonas Brothers – "Tonight"

I have a real weakness for teenpop, which, now that I think about it, started around the time I stopped eating sugar: coincidence or compensation? Having outgrown my youthful and foolish yen for some nebulous concept of authenticity, I've grown to appreciate a facile hook, no matter how prefab the packaging. I especially like this decade's dominant trend of replacing plastic synth-pop with plastic guitar rock, so the Jonases are OK with me. The singer's kind of weak, but what can you do?

Someone once pointed out to me that part of the formula for teenybopper hits is to have the chorus kick in at the 40-second mark; this one hits it right on the nose.

The video makes their concerts look like a blast. They jump around looking cute, spray the crowd with confetti and perform what look to be some fairly accomplished gymnastic moves. Not to mention the standard assortment of pyrotechnics and floating platforms. I'd totally go if somebody hooked me up with a ticket.

Incidentally, that gigantic black guy who follows them around and appears to be some sort of bodyguard? They have another video where he raps. I can't find the link now, hut it's worth watching. It has Robert Davi in it too. And David Carradine. Seriously.

Ladytron – "Runaway"

I like Ladytron. I like their new album. It sounds like the last one. And the last one sounded like the one before it, and that's OK.

This is at least the second single (or at least the second video I've seen), and I'm not sure it would have been my choice for a single, but it's alright.

The video's cool. It's simple, but with just enough of a how'd-they-do-that factor to the visual effects. Simple and effective.

Know what I notice though? There's four of 'em, right? Two chicks and two dudes. So I always figured they were like this electro-futurist andro-ABBA where the dudes play everything and the chicks sing. But I've only ever seen one of 'em sing, in any of their videos. The other one doesn't even lip-synch. She just poses. How stylised.

Rise Against – "Audience Of One"

This band is a perfect example of how splintered popular music has become. I have no idea who they are, but they have a bunch of videos. I feel like ten or fifteen years ago I would have known who they were because music media was more centralised; stuff like MTV and SPIN just covered everything. Now there's tons of these muscular/sensitive acts out there that sound exactly like this, like Seether for instance, and I've never heard any of them. Seriously, grunge is alive and well; check Billboard's Modern Rock chart if you don't believe me. Look at it! Incubus! Offspring! They still exist!

I have no doubt that this band is completely sincere and means everything they say, and the singer's got a strong, clear voice, and the song is well constructed and has good lead guitar work, and the whole thing does nothing for me. What can I tell you?

The video looks really meaningful, too. The singer doesn't look completely comfortable being a just-singer, almost like he'd rather be playing guitar, too, but his band already has two guitarists, and he's too nice to kick one of them out, so he secretly wishes one of them would just quit, but then they'd probably just have to get another one because the label wants him to be a just-singer. Speaking of which, that beard makes him look kinda old, and I'll bet the label's not too happy about that. "Fuck the suits," he thinks; "I'm keepin' the damn beard." And he juts his bewhisker'd chin defiantly.

Book review: Money For Nothing

Twenty years ago people watched music videos on television. The majority of MTV's schedule was filled out by music video programming, as was VH1's. Since then, the two have all but stopped showing videos altogether, MTV in favour of inane reality shows, VH1 to wallow in instant nostalgia.

The video has been driven to the Internet, where it is available on-demand, any time. But quality, of both sound and picture, is the price of accessibility. In the past few years, televisions have become exponentially larger and broadcasts clearer. Videos, conversely, have become smaller and blurrier.

Given the medium's decreased visibility and influence as a promotional tool, it seems fair to say that its peak era has ended. Which means the time is ripe for a history. I've written previously that it's too early to assess any all-time great videos as they continue to evolve technically and aesthetically. But I've read biographies of people in their twenties, so there's always room for a story-so-far.

Saul Austerlitz's Money For Nothing looked like just the book for the job but fell well short of my expectations. The subtitle is a bit of a misnomer: "A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes." History? Not quite.

The first chapter contains a brief overview of the medium's antecedents (the work of Oskar Fischinger and George Snader, Scopitones, Walt Disney's Fantasia) and pre-MTV development (A Hard Day's Night, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", the Residents). It's slight, but informative and interesting. So far so good.

The coverage of thirty years of music video as we now understand it, however, is limited strictly to Austerlitz's musings on meaning and symbolism. There are no interviews and seemingly very little research, just page after page of one- or two-paragraph synopses and analyses of every video that happened to catch Austerlitz's eye.

Which is not to say his observations aren't interesting; he seems like he'd be a fun guy with whom to sit around, watching videos and arguing about them. But for a book purporting to be a history of the medium, a few interviews could have gone a long way. Did Austerlitz even try to set up a session with, say, Mike Nesmith? Dave Kendall? Kevin Godley and/or Lol Creme? David Mallet? Tim Pope? Matt Pinfield? Fab 5 Freddy? I have a hard time believing that none of these people would have been willing to be interviewed for the book, and all of them have important stories to tell.

So instead of asking Sam Bayer how the video for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came about and what the ideas were behind it, Austerlitz simply explains that it "maintains the structure of existing institutions in order to twist them, pretzel-like, into a new, more accomodating shape." Anyone who's listened to the commentaries on Mark Romanek's Director's Label DVD knows he has plenty of insightful things to say about his own work. But when discussing Romanek's video for Johnny Cash's "Hurt", Austerlitz takes it upon himself to explain that "Cash's face is a punctuation mark to this series of images, its time-ravaged quality a synecdoche for the pocket career summary that follows."

Again, it's not that I find Austerlitz's observations especially lacking. Sure, the book drags a little in this format, but most of his commentary is interesting enough. It's just that without a single primary source, this isn't a history; it's a term paper.

I Want My MTV: The promo spot as short film in the DVD age

I think every American my age (early 30s) can remember a specific period in their lives when MTV mattered. Even if we weren't particularly fond of the more mainstream fare, there were always specialty shows (120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Alternative Nation/Postmodern MTV) that showed the videos we wanted to see, plus the occasional treat of an unexpected breakout success. Personally, I've never even had cable television, but whether it was getting tapes of last Sunday's 120M from J— every week or staking out the dormitory's TV lounge before the Star Trek geeks got there to make sure we'd get to watch 120M, MTV was always a part of my pop cultural consciousness from about 1989 to, say, 1994.

The secret to MTV's enduring cultural relevance was its blunt refusal to age with its audience. The channel continuously moved on to the latest flavour of the month while its audience replenished itself with a never-ending supply of teenagers. You don't grow up with MTV; you outgrow it. I haven't actually seen the channel in several years, but that's okay; I have little interest in it. As far as I know, they no longer even show videos, having long since relegated those to their satellite-only offshoots in order to make room in the schedule for Road Rules marathons and the like.¹

What's interesting about MTV's cultural hegemony is that my memories of it are just as much of the channel's branding as they are of the content. Other than ESPN, I can't think of any other specialty cable channel that's achieved that. And the secret to that lasting impression was, more than anything else, the ubiquitous promo spots that ran at the front and back of almost every commercial break. They'd come in groups of about a half-dozen or so, saturate the channel for a few months at a time, then vanish into the ether.

I recently picked up a used VHS tape called I Want My MTV. It's a 40-minute compilation of the aforementioned 30-second promo spots that ran during the channel's maddeningly frequent ad breaks. While it satiated my appetite for vintage MTV footage, it's also something of a cruel tease: it's non-chronological, woefully incomplete and devoid of annotation.² The DVD age has spoiled me.

What jumps out about the program more than anything is just how edgy MTV was. The spots are like the channel's main programming on fast-forward: a blur of disconnected images and broad cultural references. They weren't even ads so much as disorientingly brief experimental films with a corporate logo tacked on to the end. Do you remember the one where the little animatronic skeleton cuts that dude's high-top fade into an "M"? How 'bout the one where all the little doll-people get sucked out the window? The one where the butler keeps twisting his head into all manner of vague cultural artifacts, eventually settling on a sardine tin that rolls open to reveal the familiar logo?

The biggest disappointment was the paucity of spots I most wanted to see, and the reason I bought the tape in the first place. Do you remember Jimmy McBride, the Boston cabbie who regales his nonplussed fares with rambling descriptions of current videos? Four spots, not too bad. How 'bout the Sinatra impersonator crooning loungy versions of the latest pop hits? Two spots. Randee of the motherfucking Redwoods, people? Two spots. The video box even promises clips of Randee's quixotic (1988?) presidential campaign, but the tape delivers none of these. Could it really have been that much of a struggle to secure the rights to campaign theme song "Just Say Whoa!"?³

Who's gonna move into the White House?
Who's gonna have to mow the big green lawn?
Randee! Randee! He's the man we need!

Come on.

All of this leads me to my main point here: stuff that needs to be compiled on DVD, pronto. What follows is a partial list, stuff I thought of in the last hour or so.

• A complete collection of MTV promos
  Watching these on VHS is a painful reminder of what a perfect fit stuff like this is for DVD. You could organise it into groups (all the Jimmy the cab driver bits, stand-alone short films, Rock the Vote spots, etc.), include interviews and commentaries with the stars, directors, etc. These promos were an important stage in the evolution of visual branding into an pop-art form of its own, a shift from product awareness to simple brand reinforcement, and deserve to be properly documented.
• The complete Norm McDonald SNL Weekend Updates
  Due respect to Dennis Miller and Tina Fey, but Norm was the greatest Update anchor of all time, hands down. The fact that he baffled half the audience was part of what made him so great. I can remember countless moments spent in a dorm room full of drunk/stoned kids laughing our asses off while the awkward silence of the studio audience emanated from the television. Who can forget the episode after the OJ verdict was handed down?

  Ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is in. Murder...
  ...is legal in the state of California!

  Lorne Michaels, if you're reading this⁴, put this set out and I'll personally buy ten copies. I'm sure I can think of nine people for whom this would make a treasured gift.
• Get a Life
  Inexcusable. There are two four-episode DVDs out now, but the whole show needs, needs, to be reissued. One of the most bizarre shows ever broadcast on "network"⁵ television, Get a Life was a short-lived showcase for the self-humiliating talents of Letterman-alum/future SNL-other-guy Chris Elliott, one of the great comedy idiot-savants of his era. The second volume of the available DVDs, to its credit, does contain three crucial episodes ("Zoo Animals on Wheels", the one where he goes to the big city, the one with the model submarine), but for God's sake, where the fuck is the one where he hits his head on a disco ball and becomes psychic?
  Besides Elliott's persona, the show was notable for the fact that the main character dies at the end of at least a third of the episodes, possibly more. In the four episodes mentioned in the previous paragraph, he dies at the end of three of them.
• Shadow Chasers
  This short-lived 80s flop is just the kind of forgotten treasure that tends to find a second life on DVD. Think of it as a kind of proto-Firefly, although in terms of premise it was really a precursor to The X-Files. It's about these two dudes who investigate paranormal occurrences. One of them is the wacky, carefree American guy who always thinks it's the supernatural at work, the other is the uptight British guy who always thinks there's a rational explanation for everything. I think it lasted about a dozen episodes, and I'm pretty sure I watched all of them.
• A collection of presidential campaign television commercials
  Several years ago I saw a 30-minute-or-so program of these at the Museum of Television and Radio, and it was riveting. They had the Goldwater one where the camera zooms in on that kid's pupil and you see a mushroom cloud.⁶ They had several Gerald Ford ones, in none of which he was allowed to actually speak to the camera, a telling sign if I've ever seen one. A collection like this would be crucial for so many groups of viewers (political science students, advertising students, journalism students), it just has to come out sometime, right?

Tangents & Clarifications

1. It's worth wondering whether today's youth see MTV as anything more than a lifestyle channel. I haven't asked any. I can remember being in college when I heard that Curt Cobain had died. We didn't turn on CNN, we turned on MTV and got the news from Kurdt Loder. I wonder if any analogous cultural event would cause people to turn on MTV today. [Return]
2. The reason DVDs are so perfect for material like music videos and commercials (redundancy?) is the non-linear possibilty of its format. This is why I get so pissed off when artists release DVDs that are either (a) non-comprehensive or (b) non-chronological, and two of the biggest musical acts of the video age have done it. R.E.M.'s video collection doesn't include "Drive" or "Star*69", and U2's collection is in some random order. If the viewers want to re-order the videos or skip certain ones, they can! It's a DVD! These things shouldn't be artistic statements, they should be first and foremost archival. [Return]
3. Currently the great void of the YouTube era, by the way. [Return]
4. And I know you aren't. [Return]
5. This was Fox in the 80s, after all. [Return]
6. Memorably parodied on The Simpsons in the episode where Sideshow Bob tries to blackmail the people of Springfield into giving up television. If you've seen the episode I'm talking about, believe me, the campaign ad looks exactly like that. [Return]

Bjorn's video diaries: 02

A second-by-second account of the hottest videos of yesterday, today and occasionally tomorrow. In depth analysis of inconsequential details that even the director didn't give a shit about. Minutia writ large.

Today, we'll be putting My Chemical Romance's "Helena" under the microscope.

00:00

We open on a guy wearing black clothing and a lot of black eye make-up. Where shall we put him? Somewhere no one would be expecting. Oh, I know: a church. Really, is the whole thing going to be this obvious? I'm looking for subtle details here. The band aren't really renowned for their subtlety but still, this is too much.

00:03

Programs? For a performance of some sort?

00:04

No, for a funeral. Do funerals have playbills? I guess they must. I haven't been to one in a while, touch wood.

00:06

The guy swinging the incense looks really mall-punk. I mean they all do, but this guy's not above going the extra mile here. In what era was that haircut cool?

00:08

It's open-casket of course, so they can cast a tarted-up young goth nymph as the corpse. Not complaining, mind you.

00:14

The all-black-with-red-ties look is way over. We're talking baggy-shorts-with-long-johns over. I'm not here to argue about who got there first, it's just time to move on.

00:17

Excuse me? Dost mine eyes deceive me? Are those dancers I see? This video just went from boring and silly to delightful and silly. It's a fine line, you know.

00:21

The lead vocalist, who I believe is named Gerald something, appears to be simultaneously fronting the band (with a mic) as they thrash away before the altar and preaching from the pulpit (no mic) as the dancers take the place of the band. Worth noting: he's got a Shure SM-57 in the band shots, the sine qua non of shitty sound systems from bar to bar all across this great land. I thought gothy dudes were all way into bullet mics. Kind of a cool move I guess, like "Hey man, we have fat video budgets now, but we used to hit the road in a beat-up Econoline." Of course, to really complete the effect the guitarists would Peavey Bandit 112s, right? Or is that too pre-hitting-the-road, still-stuck-in-the-garage? This shit matters, people.

00:26

I've said it before, I'll say it now and at some point I will inevitably say it again: no video with choreography is completely without merit. I mean you just can't go wrong, no matter what kind of music they're dancing to.

00:30

I think Gerald uses a smaller mic so it won't get in the way of his face, which is remarkably pretty, gothy make-up be damned. The bullet mic would just get in the way of that adorable teddy-bear sneer. Of course, this theory begs the further question as to why he doesn't use one of Bob Barker's Price Is Right mics.

00:42

Too many quick cuts here. For God's sake, just let them dance!

00:45

I mean really pretty, and he knows it too. Just look at those eyes.

00:48

The whole congregation rises for the chorus: love it! They lip-synch along, too, as if their hymnals were suffused with all manner of charmingly disposable punk-pop ditties.

00:53

This Gerald character is one hell of an over-emoter, but every once in a while he gives the act a rest for a split second and you get to see just how pretty he is. You can't tell me that's not conscious. This guy just knows he's born to be a teen pin-up idol and has no qualms about using those looks to shift units. The make-up and the angry yelping are fooling no one, I promise you, least of all the band's nubile young audience.

01:15

It looks like, while none of the other band members get much face time in the video, the guitarist with the bushy red hair gets noticeably more close-ups than the other three anonymous schlubs. Funny, because he's easily the least gothy-looking of the bunch. It could be because he's the only other one singing, but I'm more inclined to think he's probably the primary songwriter, the Johnny Marr to Gerald's yelping Morrissey, the driving musical force in the band. One imagines him hunkered down in the studio with just the producer and engineer, fine-tuning guitar overdubs hour after hour till dawn and beyond, while his bands mates are off cavorting about in the manner of all such young rock stars, hanging around some swanky, exclusive after-hours lounge somewhere and sipping little white lines from the firm, ample bosoms of aspiring lingerie models. Ah, youth. Youth, fame and money.

01:26

The dancers are laying on the floor, contorting their bodies this way and that, while a bird's-eye camera captures them in the midst of what looks something like a preliminary training session for a synchronised swimming team.

01:27

Hey, there's the other guitarist! Man, I know it's normal to just feature the singer (and, in this case, one other guy), but this is ridiculous. Even the bass player got his little incense-swinging scene in the beginning; this guy might as well be a p.a. on the video shoot for all the face time he gets. I could watch this video a dozen times in slow motion and still not be able to pick that guy out of a lineup. Go ahead, fella, rob yourself a liquor store, no one's gonna find you.

01:46

See, even when the camera accidentally catches one of these guys they still probably have trouble convincing their friends that's actually them in the video. "Seriously dude, I'm in this band, I wear make-up and stuff. Look, that's— no, hold on... Okay there! That was me! Behind the really cute guy!" That's the third shot of the drummer in the space of about ten seconds and still for all I know they guy could be in witness protection with absolutely no fear of having his cover blown.

02:05

Gaaah! The corpse awakens! Should have seen that one coming I suppose. Seems like as good a time as any, too; I think we were running out of angles from which to show the other stuff. I mean it's just been band, dancers, singer, band, dancers, singer for a while now.

02:09

And what would you do if you suddenly woke up in a coffin at your own funeral? You would dance, of course. Particularly if there was a punk-pop band thrashing away nearby.

02:23

Okay, here's something I don't get. Since we're cutting between shots of Corpsetta from the waist up only and shots of her feet, and never getting a full body shot, I think it's safe to assume we're looking at two different people. They hired one rock video girl to be the face of death and the other to be the twinkle-toes of death. But why? I mean, if the face girl wasn't much of a dancer, why cast her? She's attractive enough, I suppose, but hardly one in a million. Someone in the band's girlfriend, perhaps? The Tawny Kitaen of punk-pop?

Same goes for the the feet girl: her face didn't look gothy enough? Find another dancer. I'm no expert on dance, but to these untrained eyes her skills don't really look irreplaceable. Which brings me to the weirdest part of this whole thing: feet girl can't even get up on her toes! Regardless of what she looks like above the waist, she's not even a good enough dancer to fulfill the role! I don't get this part at all.

02:21

Gerald's praying now; eyes closed, hands together, utterly adorable. These Catholic kids make the best goths. So much drama to absorb, so much heavy-handed symbolism to rebel against. I don't even know for a fact that he's Catholic, but I mean come on: look at this video. Do these guys look like Methodists to you?

02:30

Corpsetta's grabbed hold of the camera now, apparently believing herself to be in a Beastie Boys video.

02:37

Wait a minute, where did the flowers come from? Didn't she throw those away at the beginning of her little dance number?

02:38

And, finally, after running all the way down the aisle, she suddenly "re-dies", so to speak, then falls down and lands right back in the coffin whence she initially emerged. This makes no earthly sense whatsoever. I mean, she must have been at least fifty feet from the coffin. Why, oh why do I continue to look for logic and reason in rock videos? It's like factoring future scratch ticket winnings into one's grocery budget.

02:40

Right then, time to make our way to the cemetary. It's raining out, naturally. Would you have it any other way?

02:41

Well well well, looks like the dancers are coming along and they've got a little something worked out with their brollies. Suppose this is a clever tribute to Singin' in the Rain? Suppose anyone involved in making this video has ever seen Singin' in the Rain? Better yet, heard of it?

02:46

Hold on a minute: the band are acting as pallbearers. Fine, all well and good, but there's only five of them, and clearly six pallbearers. Who's the extra guy? A roadie? More to the point, which one's the extra guy? I'm thinking he must be one of the guys wearing hats on the right-hand side of the coffin behind the lead guitarist, but I can't say for sure. For all I know they may all be extra guys except the front two, and the other band members are off prancing about with umbrellas.

02:56

Look at Gerald emote! Screaming and grimacing! With all that rain messing up his hair and streaming down his face! And he still looks so hot! O—M—G!

03:04

When you really get down to it, the umbrella choreography's pretty half-assed. I mean, the stuff in the church was terrific, but now they're just coasting on past glories. No one's in synch and there doesn't seem to be any direction. They're all just waving their umbrellas around randomly, seemingly oblivious to one another. Suppose the choreographer got fired midway through the shoot? For being cuter than Gerald, perhaps?

03:22

And after they load the casket into the back of the hearse, Gerald peers through the little window dramatically for one last glamour shot. And really, can there ever be too many of those? Fade out.

Bjorn's video diaries: 01

A second-by-second account of the hottest videos of yesterday, today and occasionally tomorrow. In depth analysis of inconsequential details that even the director didn't give a shit about. Minutia writ large.

Today, we'll be putting R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" under the microscope.

00:07

R and an unknown cohort, resplendent in matching white fur coats, are introduced performing in what appears to be some kind of vast IKEA showroom.

00:11

The cohort, in a failed bid for a tiny sliver of the spotlight, steps to the foreground and attempts to lip-synch a line or two of a song he may or may not have actually heard before. One second later, a kindly editor mercifully relegates the remainder of his brush with stardom to the cutting room floor.

00:13

Revellers party in slow motion somewhere without a wall full of backlit blue bottles. Are they in the next room over from R? Awaiting his grand entrance, perhaps?

00:18

More (the same?) revellers pile into some sort of plush clown car parked at the foot of the kind of neon-stained tower one only thinks to build in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. The first-class IKEA shuttle, no doubt. The one they don't let riff-raff like you and I ride. Strictly for pop stars and their closest posse members.

00:24

The clown car is revealed to be a stretch limousine of some sort, which explains its boundless capacity for revellers.

00:26

The clown car has a neon sign in the window designating it "Club Jeeeep". Is there a club inside the clown car?

00:27

There is indeed. R and Cohort make their highly anticipated entrance, this time in colour-coordinated pro sports apparel: R in a nameless Boston Celtics jersey, Cohort modeling a Curtis Martin Jets number. R matches his jersey with a Celtics ballcap and, if I'm not mistaken, Celtics-green bandages on his hands.

00:43

R stalks the camera through a crowd of revellers. Watch as a man in a red Oilers jersey to his immediate right absent-mindedly grabs his crotch, as though unaware he is on camera.

00:46

R exhorts the listener to "bounce, bounce, bounce" while demonstrating with his hands. He has no trouble getting the revellers to join in with this simple gesture. The drinks are on R's tab and they've all been told they're going to be on TV, so presumably they'd all roll over and bark like chihauhaus if he told them to. Hell, I would.

00:54

R and Cohort are simultaneously in Club Clown Car and back at IKEA, where the fur coats remain very much in effect.

00:55

R and Cohort are not alone in IKEA; there are a select few women allowed, the inner harem, if you will. The rest are relegated to Club Clown Car, dreaming of the day R asks them to join him in his opulent private furniture studio.

01:01

In case you doubt the sincerity of R's intentions, he removes his sunglasses, and lip-synchs earnestly into the camera.

01:07

Club Clown Car is revealed to be a stretch Hummer. An invention which obviously followed from the realisation that Hummers are simply not obnoxious enough at their normal size. Does this seem needlessly extravagant? You try fitting a nightclub with a full-service bar and large dancefloor in the back of a Toyota.

01:13

And a DJ booth.

01:14

And enough headroom for some guy to be riding on someone's shoulders.

01:18

Oh, that's R. He's changed jerseys; now it's the Bulls. Cohort is offscreen, presumably changing into a Cardinals jersey to keep the whole same-colour-different-sport thing going.

01:22

Striding down the bar, absolutely owning the party.

01:25

And sitting at said bar? Cohort, a girl on each arm, still wearing his now-clashing Jets jersey, completely neglecting his cohort duties. I'm guessing he got replaced by the time R shot the "Playas Only" video.

01:33

We're back at IKEA but the outfits have changed, and this one's a doozy. R and Cohort are wearing brown basketball jerseys over white tees with matching brown tracksuit pants and red paisley bandannas. The jerseys both have the number 1 on the chest and, just above that, the only detail that differs on the two outfits: while Cohort's says "Bulls", R's inexplicably displays the letters "TLC".

I don't get it. R will give you tender lovin' care, girl? Or is it a tribute to Left Eye, who had passed away less than a year before this video was shot? So many questions.

Oh, and another thing: the bottles have changed. The decorative blue vessels have been replaced by what appear to be liquor bottles. Cutty Sark would be my guess, but I'm not nearly classy enough to possess any familiarity with whatever it is a guy like R drinks, let alone recognise its attendant bottle design from afar.

01:37

Meanwhile, back at Club Clown Car, R crouches down on the bar to throw a friendly arm around the shoulder of Cohort (who is still wearing that Jets jersey), as if to offer a sign of forgiveness for Cohort's failure to keep up with the costume changes. A hollow gesture no doubt. Cohort will still wind up browsing the help-wanteds come Monday. All this means is that R has decided to kindly forego the humiliating punishment of seducing Cohort's girlfriend and urinating on her. R's posse has no room for amateurs, my friend.

01:45

R at last gives up waiting for Cohort to catch up and simply changes back into the Celtics jersey.

01:46

R's facial expression when he hits this high note must be paused to be believed. How could anyone possibly doubt this man's sincerity? You can't fake that. He will freak you.

01:50

Again with the high note. Seriously, he looks like he's undergoing some sort of physiological examination. Cohort points to R and underscores the intensity of the moment with a "Yo, check this out" expression.

02:06

R pumps his fists in anticipation of the chorus, while Cohort stands around making the same pointing motion from the last scene. Can he even hear the song?

This leads me to a burning question: what exactly is Cohort's job? I mean I can see what he's doing, but like, what does he write on his 1040s under "occupation"? When people ask his mother, "So, what does your son do for a living?", what does she tell them?

In R&B videos of yore, an artist might be seen performing with backup singers or backup dancers. But Cohort is never seen dancing (and doesn't look like the kind of man who tries), and we established early on that he doesn't even know the words. All he seems to do is reiterate and emphasise the sentiment of R's earnest pantomiming, which I guess makes him a sort of "backup gesturer". Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. Wonder what it pays?

02:10

I'm loving the little "stirring the pot" move he does for the line "Hot n' fresh out the kitchen." I also love the fact that the first line of the chorus announces that we are, in fact, listening to the remix. In fact, I love all remixes where they sing about how it's a remix. Lest there be any confusion about the matter, like, "Wait a sec, which one's the original and which one's the remix?" You forget these things sometimes, and thankfully R is there to remind you.

02:11

Wow. Excuse me, but wow. That gratuitous cornrow showcase is far and away the most out-of-left-field moment of the video. Did he really just throw in a tribute to his hairdresser? What's next, a close-up of his pedicure?

02:18

Ah yes, the white guy. Unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, woefully unfashionable glasses; this guy isn't even trying. He doesn't look nervous or anything, just utterly nonplussed. Disoriented by the throbbing basslines, surrounded by boisterous African-American revellers, pushed into a clearing amongst the mass of writhing, sweaty bodies... "Where the hell am I?", he wonders. Well, you can narrow it down to 49 other states, Dorothy.

02:23

And he dances! Of course. He can't help himself. "My shit is so damn funky," R exclaims, "Even white boys got to dance!" And who are we to argue? The evidence is right before us.

02:28

We cut back a few seconds later and he's still at it, and really getting into it. This is the moment for which he's been practicing alone in front of a mirror in his bedroom for like, years. The crowd gamely encourages him while maintaining their distance. After all, no one wants to be seen dancing with the white guy.

02:43

What's with the strange hammering gesture R and Cohort are doing back at IKEA? Do I want to know?

02:48

The song's winding down to the fadeout, R's giving us a bit of a coda, and takes this opportunity to remind us, once again that this is the remix.

02:52

I definitely don't want to know what that one's supposed to be.

02:53

It's the white guy! Again! He's having the time of his life! Well, he's waited years for this opportunity, for someone to just ask him to dance, and now that he's got it, by God, he's making the most of it. The crowd even seems to have accepted him at this point.

03:07

As the song fades out, we close on a shot of R in his brown basketball outfit back at IKEA, where he turns around to reveal the name Jam Master J sewn across his back. Which adds credence to my theory that the jersey is a tribute to those fallen: Left Eye on the front, JMJ on the back. Even when he parties to the breaka dawn, R never forgets to pour a little Courvoisier out. Or Crystal. It's the gesture that counts.

Hey, isn't that from... ?

A few weeks ago I wrote a brief post raving about the Pipettes' "Pull Shapes" which included a link to a video that wouldn't play the picture, only the sound. I didn't care about the video anyway, I just couldn't find any other source from which to stream the song. I've since found the video on YouTube, and it's terrible in kind of an interesting way.

At first I thought it was a knockoff of Spike Jonze's video (scroll down; fourth one from the top) for Weezer's "Buddy Holly", in which the band is digitally inserted into old footage. But after watching it a few times¹ I came to the conclusion the the singers had to be in the same room as some of the extras with whom they interact, so the footage must be original. What makes the video somewhat intriguing is that several of the characters appear to have motives and relationships that affect their interaction but are never explained; is the viewer meant to recognise them from somewhere else, or is the scene deliberately confusing?

As it turns out, there is something to "get". The video is, in fact, one big pop culture reference: it's basically a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from an old Russ Meyer movie. Ha ha, very clever. Problem is, the scene isn't particularly interesting on its own. It was clearly chosen just because it happens to have a band in it and the video's director (or someone close to the band) digs the movie. Not really a good enough reason to create an homage to it.

Now take the video for the Beastie Boys' "Gratitude". It's similarly based on a scene from an old movie, but also stands on its own as a cool video. Why? Because the imagery is interesting regardless, and because there's very little context in the surrounding film from which to remove it, i.e., there's no plot occurring throughout the original scene.

More specifically, a video featuring a band performing to a room full of people wearing gaudy outfits from the 1970s is mildly amusing on its own, but is basically little more than a jumping-off point for a more interesting idea, not the whole idea itself. It just can't stand on its own. On the other hand, a video of a band jamming on the side of a volcano, interspersed with scenes of them chilling around steaming pools of lava, is almost automatically awesome.² I mean you can't fuck that up. I could watch a Creed video in which they hang out on a volcano and I'd be like, "Man, Creed still rots, but that's a badass video."

In a way the Pipettes video is an example of what happens when cheap postmodernism in popular entertainment disappears into its own navel. The idea that something looks cool just because it's unabashedly lifted from something that came before is flawed for a couple of reasons: one, the "joke" doesn't hold up over the course of a three-minute music video. There were dozens of these referential jokes on The Simpsons ten years ago; there was no punchline, you just patted yourself on the back for recognising it and moved on, but they worked by being rapid-fire, and only took up a few seconds of the show. And two, the material being referenced has to look cool, funny, what have you, standing on its own, even if the viewer isn't familiar with the source. The Pipettes video just looks half-baked, like an idea that wasn't very well thought-out before the shoot began. If you haven't seen the movie, it's just a bunch of silly costumes.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. Don't ask me why. [Return]
2. You could also make an argument that any video featuring shots of the band's amps with the words "PINK FLOYD — LONDON" stencilled on them is at least halfway there already.[Return]

Instant history codified the video star

Poor Stylus. They try so hard to distinguish themselves from the mighty Pitchfork, only to have the latest countdown feature they've spent months working on pre-empted a few weeks earlier by the 'Fork, who did a far more half-assed and consequently better (not in spite of, because of) job of it, and once again they appear one step behind.

I'm speaking, of course, of the two sites' respective lists of 100 music videos. Both lists are essentially celebrations of the glory of YouTube, a topic that's been popping up quite often lately; Bill Simmons did a list of his favourites for ESPN.com, for instance (and you don't even need one of those bullshit subscriptions to read it). (Yet). The timing seems about right, if you think about it. People are getting over the initial shock at the embarrassment of riches suddenly available and are settling into a world in which YouTube is no longer a Godsend, merely an accepted part of everyday life in the wired world.

As you know if you've read the articles, the sites took two different routes: Stylus, as is their wont, presumably went through a painstaking voting process¹ in which everybody submits a list, finalists are narrowed down, everybody watches the finalists and re-votes, and eventually the definitive list emerges. Pitchfork's list, on the other hand, appears to be the fruit of no more intensive deliberation than a late night at the office and a few six-packs. Other than wisely disqualifying any video on the Directors Label DVDs on the grounds that most of those are both too obvious and too well-known, there seems to be no overarching logic to the selections or the running order other than "Aren't these cool?"

And that, in a nutshell, is why Pitchfork's list works so much better than Stylus's on so many levels. First of all, part of YouTube's appeal is that it's so disorganised; you start out looking for something specific, then wind up stumbling all over the treasures strewn temptingly about. Before you know it, it's five-o'clock, you've accomplished nothing, and you go home.² Pitchfork's list reflects this perfectly.

Secondly, music video, and the Stylus list really highlights this, is just too narrow a field to support a best-of list this long. Surprising as this may seem given the age of the medium, the canon is still under construction.

The Directors Label thing is a big problem. 29 of the 100 videos on Stylus's list can be found on these seven DVDs³; six of them in the top ten alone. Are these seven guys really responsible for almost 30% of the best videos ever? Truth is, while the popularity of the series certainly inflates these directors' representation, that number's probably not that far off. There just aren't that many truly great music videos, or for that matter music video directors, out there.

Thirdly, I also noticed that the Stylus list skews pretty recent, an imbalance which at first I chalked up the the relative youth of the site's stable of writers. A few of the blurbs referred to the writers' having first seen videos from the mid-90s while in their pre-teen years. After all, how else do you account for the absence of so many 80s classics like "Hot for Teacher"? And for God's sake, where the fuck is fuckin' Devo?!?

But on further reflection I've decided that age is only part of the reason; in addition, there probably are more good videos, and better ones, being made in recent years. The medium only really came into its own as an artform within the last fifteen years or so; MTV only began showing director credits in what, '92 maybe? What makes a list like this different from a music list is that a list of the best singles or albums or what have you of all time inevitably skews older as critics are inclined to value originality over other factors. Thus, earlier works are showered with plaudits like "pioneering" and trailblazing". Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is routinely cited as the greatest rock album of all time, but very few critics or rock fans will tell you it's their favourite album ever; most won't even point to it as the best Beatles album. It earns its place at the top of the heap because of its historical significance, and because of how many musical ideas appeared there first.

Videos are the opposite: they grow consistently more daring, more imaginative, more expensive. Unlike with all genres of music, no one points to one particular era as a "golden age" of music video, one against which today's videos just don't hold up. Yes, there are visual ideas which recur in many videos, long-established sets of cliches and conventions, and someone must have done it first. But no one is arguing that the early videos did it better.

For this reason more than any other, this list just wasn't ready to be compiled. Until the day that someone says "You know? Videos used to be so much better," we're just not there yet.

The most glaring difference between the two lists, besides the fact that the Pitchfork one has a lot of older clips (again, the age thing), is that the Pitchfork one is just more fun, evidenced by the fact that they weren't afraid to throw on novelties like the ultimate Is-this-supposed-to-be-funny? classic, Journey's "Separate Ways", or laughably sentimental rubbish like Lionel Richie's "Hello". There's even a few that Stylus probably would have declared ineligible, like David Brent's jaw-droppingly brilliant cover of "If You Don't Know Me By Now". And there's a few that Stylus should just be downright embarrassed about having overlooked, particularly Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots".

If anything, you could even argue that what makes Pitchfork's list better is, ironically, the same thing that usually makes me prefer Stylus's underlying aesthetic: the unabashed embrace of pop. While Stylus is always eager to celebrate disposable top 40 singles for the addictive sugar rush they can so reliably provide (and rightly so, in my view), Pitchfork built their reputation on their indie-snob attitude (and let's face it, there's a place for that). But with these lists, Stylus makes the mistake of trying, with a few notable exceptions, to be the stuffy gatekeepers of true video art. Pitchfork, on the other hand, haven't forgetten that, more often than not, music videos are just flat-out stupid. And that's why we love them.

Tangents & Clarifications

1. Having briefly written for Stylus, I speak from experience on two counts here: one, their list-making procedures really are these completely convoluted multi-stage projects, which is why I don't doubt for a second that they began working on this long before the Pitchfork list was posted. Seriously, their annual Best Singles of the Year list takes like a month to compile, all in the name of true democracy, and invariably results in readers posting comments in which they accuse the editors of some image-cultivating motive behind their supposedly intentional placement of some crappy pop song at number 78, inexcusably ranking it ahead of some obscur-o hipster twaddle at number 79. "your just tyring to makea piont here, arnt you?" Seriously, every fucking time.

   Two, the Pitchfork-envy is absolutely palpable on Stylus's internal message board (at least it was when I was there), which is why I'm sure that getting scooped on this must have just killed those guys. Shame, too. Personally I rather prefer Stylus's brand of criticism and I'm not just shilling for them, either.[Return]

2. Speaking of which, I suppose I should have warned you at the outset that perusing either of those lists individually, to say nothing of tackling both back-to-back, will utterly annihilate your day. Perhaps it's already too late, in which case sorry about that.) [Return]
3. In addition I counted that I own six more on other DVDs (and the Dylan one on VHS!), which I mention not to show off how vast my DVD library is (it isn't), but to reinforce the point that this field is pretty narrow. If I own copies of 36 of the top 100 videos, either a list isn't warranted or the list makers need to watch more videos. By contrast, I owned copies of I think 4 of the videos on Pitchfork's list including, again, one on VHS. Two more random stats:
   1. Number of videos that made both lists: 11, I think, though I may have missed one
   2. Total number of Juvenile videos between the two: 3, with no overlap [Return]

Another piece of my childhood, gone

After 42 years, the BBC chart show Top of the Pops is going off the air. And it's not being retired with dignity or anything like that, it's just getting flat-out cancelled. For low ratings. I mean, come one, man. The BBC is like the UK's national network; surely presenting the weekly pop charts, particularly in a country in which they mean so much to so many, must count as some sort of invaluable public service. Is it really just about the ratings? Is that what we've come to?

As a young lad, I lived in London for a few years in the early 80s¹, where I followed the pop charts obsessively. I would buy some music magazine² the day it hit the stands so I would know the results before they were broadcast every Thursday. I actively rooted for songs I liked over ones I didn't, as though the bands were sports teams or something. I can recall being particularly invested in the success of Duran Duran, whom I found incredibly cool. In contrast, I lived for the weeks when Wham! did not make it to number one. My sister liked Wham!; they were for girls. Being a boy, I was into tougher bands. Like Duran Duran. I'm older now³.

There was only one TV in our house⁴, so the evening's entertainment choices had to be debated and settled upon by the kids, and every Thursday I insisted on TOTP. My younger siblings, who didn't care nearly as much about pop music as I, would occasionally be tempted by some imported American tripe over on the ITV network in the same time slot. Street Hawk, for example, essentially a Knight Rider knock-off revolving around a futuristic arsenal-equipped motorcycle, springs to mind as one such point of contention. Fortunately, for both myself and for the public at large, the show was quickly cancelled, and TOTP resumed its unopposed rule of Thursday nights.

I can still distinctly remember some of the singles I saw "performed" on TOTP for the first time, like the Smiths doing "What Difference Does It Make?" and Depeche Mode's "People Are People", and years later, back in the US, felt lucky to have witnessed moments some of my high school peers would have killed to have seen.

My plan in writing this post was to track down a few YouTube.com posts of classic performances (and they are myriad) and link to them with a bit of wry commentary. But viewing these grainy videos exposed a rather surprising universal trend throughout the performances: most of them are terrible. (You're welcome to sift through them if you like.) Bad sets, bad lights, bad studio audiences dancing, bad pantomiming. And the worst part: guests on TOTP don't actually play. The singers sometimes sing (and sometimes not), so it's not just a lip-synch show, but the instruments aren't plugged in. In fact, the only really good TOTP performances I've seen are ones by snotty bands taking the piss out of the show. If you've ever seen Nirvana's Live! Tonight! Sold Out!⁵, you'll certainly remember the band's withering desecration of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", in which Cobain sings in a shitty Jim Morrison impersonation while Novoselic and Grohl hop around and make no attempt to pretend they are actually playing. And the Stone Roses video retrospective features the band's rendition of "Fool's Gold" during which Ian Brown holds the microphone over his head, flaunting the fact that he's not singing a word⁶.

So with that in mind, is it really so bad that the show is gone? Is it really necessary, or is it one of those institutions that has long outlived its usefulness and now gets by on reputation alone, like CBGB's? I say the former: England needs TOTP. The singles chart still means something to British music fans⁷, and the show continues to represent a career benchmark for British bands great and small. With the loss of first John Peel and now TOTP, to what shall young Britpoppers aspire? And what will the kids watch on Thursday nights? Even Street Hawk is but a memory.

Tangents & Clarifications
1. Which, as you probably know, was a terrific time to be a pop music fan in the UK. If you didn't know, read this. [Return]
2. I can't remember what it was called, but it had glossy photos, puff-piece Q&A's, and lyrics to the latest hits. Can you imagine? [Return]
3. Though, curiously, heterosexual. Just a little tidbit for the whole nature/nurture debate. [Return]
4. Y'know, in the UK you have to pay for a TV license. Just to have rabbit ears and a regular ol' TV. That's how they fund the BBC and provide the public with much-needed news programming like Top of the Pops. I don't know whether it costs extra to have multiple sets in the house, nor do I know whether that's the reason we had only one. [Return]
5. It's unbelievable that this still isn't out on DVD. But not a travesty. The travesty is that this still isn't on DVD. [Return]
6. Incidentally, if you've ever heard live recordings on which he actually sings, you know this was the right call. [Return]
7. Contrast them with their American counterparts. Do you even know what the Number One song in the US is right now? Do you care? Click here to find out, then come back. Have you ever heard the song? Better yet, have you heard of it? How 'bout the rest of the top ten? [Return]

We love you too, Wayne

Stoked. The Flaming Lips promo clip retrospective DVD VOID came out this week. Picked it up along with Fearless Freaks.

The one thing that jumped out at me more than anything else was the universal shittiness of the videos. They're all pretty low budget, but that's no excuse. I mean, they're not terrible, just wholly unremarkable. Not a single one is significantly more interesting than staring at a shiny object while listening to the Flaming Lips. Which is to say, cool, and fun, but nothing I'd be jonesing to do again or, for that matter, recommend to anyone.

They're almost all co-directed by Wayne and the Lips' pretty-much-official visual archivist, one Bradley Beesley (he also directed Freaks, and has been filming the Lips for years), and there's certainly an overarching aesthetic evident. Most of the videos feature chaotically pantomimed performance footage, grainy film, washed-out lighting, jarring edits and often what appears to be drawing and/or etching on the film itself. Again, it's cool to look at, but there's rarely a discernible point, or even a particularly riveting image.

This is a classic example of art without vision, of someone making a video with little more of an idea than "Just make it look fucked-up and it'll be cool." Wrong.

Having said that, I will doubtlessly watch it again many times and, as I did yesterday, probably sing along at high volume.

Also, quick positive note on Beesley: he may be a lousy video director, but he's a fine documentarian. Freaks is extremely well-conceived and executed. Beesley allows a compelling story to tell itself rather than getting in the way as a filmmaker, and the results make for very rewarding viewing. Recommended.