eMpTyV: Music Video Reviews

The Jacksons - Can You Feel It

2006-07-03T17:31:00.001-05:00

*** (of four)

Regardless of the plastic surgeries, the horrifying stories of alleged child abuse at the hands of their father (I wonder how Joseph Jackson feels about being the first motherfucker EVER to literally beat the black off his child?) and wardrobe malfunctions, the Jackson family has made some great pop music. I know I'm not the only one who's ever bounced my head to "ABC," "I want you Back" or "Dancing Machine."

This video from the early, early 80's (pre-Thriller) still somehow holds up - cheesy, outdated special effects and all. Also, lots of obnoxious sound effects are integrated into the song. Basically, the Jackson brothers are cast as benevolent beings sprinkling magic pixie dust from the skies above to the masses below, bringing love, peace and unity to the world. Yeah, pretty cheesy premise. (You mean to tell me that Tito is going to bring happiness to the masses of the world?)

Nevertheless, this is a poppy, feel-good kind of song, with a killer bass line (obviously sampled a few years later for Madonna's "Material Girl" and a number of other songs) and even though it's not my favorite song from the Jackson family, I'm certainly "feelin' it."

-Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

Paris Hilton - Stars Are Blind (2006)

2006-07-03T17:30:00.001-05:00

1/2 (of four)

My hatred for this spoiled heirhead knows no boundaries - from the top of her vacant head to the soles of her uglyass oversize feet. No suprise that I wouldn't like this video, which looks like outtakes from Anna Nicole Smith's TrimSpa commericals, with Paris traipsing around a beach in a bikini and making out with some himbo. The music is warmed-over reggae music, sounds a lot like an old UB40 song, and Paris Hilton's voice is Pro-Tooled to death. Britney and J-Lo are going to be so proud. Yecchhh...

-Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

Jamie Foxx - Unpredictable (2006)

2006-07-03T17:28:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

Jamie is singing to his woman about how "unpredictible" his lovemaking skills are. I don't know about that, but as for this video, from the double-letterbox format Hype Williams loves to use to the phoned-in Ludacris cameo to the obviously sped-up sample more than likely produced by Kanye West, oh no the fuck he's not.

-Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

UNKLE featuring Thom Yorke - Rabbit In Your Headlights (2003)

2006-06-06T22:33:00.000-05:00

***1/2 (of four)

I can spend weeks, it seems like, without ever happening upon a true high-quality music video on the major networks. That's when I break out my Directors Label DVD collections. Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Stephane Sednaoui - all are worth owning for any fan of the music video medium. Perhaps the briefest and most bizarre collection belongs to director Jonathan Glazer, whose most famous videos are Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" and Radiohead's "Karma Police."

"Rabbit In Your Headlights," from British trip-hop act UNKLE, is more a short film than a music video, with dialogue and sound effects frequently drowning out the music itself. A seemingly homeless man in a parka is walking through a highway tunnel, muttering to himself in traffic lanes. A few cars narrowly avoid hitting him, but soon the carnage begins - one car sideswipes the man, and he goes flying. But he gets back up, keeps walking and is soon nailed head on again.

Three or four more times this happens, and just when it appears he's about to collapse, he removes his clothing and continues walking. The next car that hits him - in the true money shot of the video - is demolished on impact, while the naked homeless man stands unharmed, arms outstretched in a Christ-figure pose.

The meaning of all this could be as complex as figuring out the metaphysical mysteries of the universe or as simple as enjoying the image of a man being hit by a car, but the cumulative visual effect of Glazer's video is miraculous and fascinating no matter how you approach it. And, if you're a fan of Radiohead, you're sure to enjoy the audio side of things as well.

Lil Jon featuring E-40 and Sean Paul of the YoungbloodZ - Snap Yo Fingers (2006)

2006-06-06T22:05:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

It's been well over two years, and you still can't go to a bar in the suburbs without hearing drunk white boys impersonating Dave Chappelle impersonating Lil Jon and his three one-word catchphrases. ("Yayyyuhh!!" "Ohhh-KAY!!!" "Whattt??!") He's become this sick, cliched comic icon, and even though Lil Jon's persona immediately leant itself to imitation, Jon shows no signs of adding anything new to the mix. He still rocks the huge sunglasses, the dreads, the gold chains, the platinum teeth and the chalice full of Patron. Still gleefully gets on everyone's nerves.

Still, there's something oddly endearing about this idiot, and his hoarsely shouted choruses and simple synth lines have an element of catchiness. You can't take Lil Jon's music seriously, but you know it's not meant to be taken seriously either, so you can't exactly hate it. It's just's some dumbass shit that's there to be endured and possibly even enjoyed through a chemical buzz of any sort.

Hype Williams, still in his double-letterbox phase, nonetheless leaves the top and bottom bars black for most of the "Snap Yo Fingers" video. The rappers and handful of dancers mug in front of a blue screen on an empty soundstage, while spastic color tracers surround them and multihued strobe lights flash. It's not intolerable or outrageous, just somewhere in between. And you can be sure you'll hear a "Yayyyuhh!!" an "Ohhh-KAY!!!" and a "Whattt??!" before the video's end.

Paul McCartney - Spies Like Us (1985)

2006-06-05T16:32:00.000-05:00

* (of four)

Boy, the '80s were rough on Paul McCartney - or was McCartney rough on the '80s? The entire decade just existed in this gleeful, talentless vaccuum for him. "Ebony and Ivory," Give My Regards To Broadstreet, "The Girl is Mine," the Christmastime he had that was simply wonderful. All big, steaming heaps of elephant shit. Add to the list another video of which I was completely unaware, the title track to Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd's road movie rip Spies Like Us.

Mind you, if you're 28 like me and were raised on the original SNL generation's string of bad comedies, you're likely to think of Spies Like Us as a cult classic in its own right. But you've probably never happened upon this McCartney promo video at 3:30 in the morning on VH1 Classic. The SLU video is almost unbelievably awful, and it was made with the full participation of Aykroyd and Chase, who ham it up on full-tilt Reagan-era coke buzzes.

The three rhythmless white stars converge on Abbey Road Studios (ah, the blasphemy of it all!) in a limo, a tomato delivery truck and a double-decker bus, all wearing disguises. Before the music even starts, we're treated to McCartney in a Snidely Whiplash getup and Chevy Chase in a trenchcoat wearing comic book glasses with a pair of eyes drawn on. SLU movie clips are spread throughout, all the while.

It only gets worse. The three stars head into the studio, where Aykroyd plays air guitar behind the soundboard, Chase pretends to play keyboard and McCartney dons a multicolored Bill Cosby sweater and plays every other instrument thanks to the power of '80s video cloning. That's Bass Player Paul, Drummer Paul, Guitarist Paul and Backup Vocalist Paul, and you'd never believe any of them was responsible for anything on the White Album.

McCartney abused the video cloing technique multiple times in the '80s, perhaps most heinously in the euthanasia-inducing video for "Coming Up." Chase, meanwhile, thought he was so fucking funny in the SLU video that he graduated to even less subtle physical comedy in the award-winning Paul Simon video for "You Can Call Me Al." And Aykroyd, well, he just kept a'rockin', thanks to a limitless supply of Bolivian nose powder and dozens of House of Blues franchises.

Chris Brown - Yo (Excuse Me Miss) (2006)

2006-05-26T04:19:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

The kitchen staff of the restaurant I work in is populated almost exclusively with African-American males between the ages of 17 and 50, and a frequent debate during downtimes is for the title of Greatest MC Ever. There was a heated argument going on a couple weeks back - one teenage kid thought Jay-Z was the best ever, while another one was arguing for Nas. Neither one would give way, and both were in fact yelling so loud the customers could hear them out front. And I managed to jump in with, "Guys, guys - I don't know why you're arguing about who's the best rapper. For my money, it begins and ends with Chris Brown." Which was the biggest laugh I've gotten in months from the kitchen brother crew.

If you're not familiar, Chris Brown is part of the next generation of Usher clones (Pretty Ricky, Young Jeezy) ready-made for TRL. He's like sixteen, light-skinned, just an okay singer and doesn't rap. Chris is more a choreographed-dance type of act, and over the course of the "Yo" video, he dances into the heart of a gorgeous-ass rented model who won't give him the time of day when she first walks past the shoe store he just got fired from. He follows her down the street, dancing with two guys he apparently doesn't even know, busts some more moves on the basketball court and eventually climbs into her back seat and starts making out with her.

That's not even the halfway point - we also have to suffer through a dance sequence on a black Cadillac hood and an Interlude That Has Nothing To Do With The Video. It's enough to make you wish Chris would just go back to working in the shoe store. Watching him try to squeeze some high heels onto a belligerent, 400-pound lady who swears she's a Size 7... now there's your video.

Boyz II Men - Thank You (1995)

2006-05-26T04:17:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

Okay, I just mentioned that I have a hunch Az Yet is doing shows at casinos across the country, but I know for a fact Boyz II Men - such a massive act in the early and mid-'90s - recently played the Bottleneck Blues Bar at the Ameristar Casino here in St. Louis. Well, not "played" so much as stood around with microphones and harmonized over the sounds of Plinko bonuses on the Price is Right nickel slots. A couple friends and I even considering seeing Boyz II Men at Ameristar, which would have been a killer high school nostalgia trip, but the tickets were something outlandish like $45 and they were missing one of their guys. I think the guy with the deep-ass bass voice whose singing always sounded like it belonged at the low end of a Bobby McFerrin backing track.

On the VH1 Soul channel, though, at two in the morning, the Boyz II Men boyz live on in all their squeaky-clean Motown glory. I always much preferred the doo-wop dance harmonies of "Thank You" to the formula treacle of "I'll Make Love To You," which got like five times the airplay. The video, like the song, is happy as hell - director Lionel C. Martin shows the guys visiting their old Philly neighborhood by Jeep. The barbershop, the pool hall, the park, the stoop in front of the old brownstone? Represented. Meanwhile, fourth grade versions of the Boyz run wild in the streets and discover the magic of their parents' 45-rpm records. "Thank You" is pure cheese, almost embarrassing and still damn near impossible to resist.

Az Yet - Hard to Say I'm Sorry (1997)

2006-05-26T04:13:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

A year and a half ago, on a Royal Caribbean cruise, I spent an entire afternoon working up a standup comedy routine about the ship and perfected a wicked impression of the Norwegian captain for the night's "Adult Karaoke / Talent Show." Only to be told by the hefty Jamaican emcee lady that standup and particularly impressions of the captain "will earn ya a boot overboard wit' no life vest!" So what did I do? I grabbed my buddy and signed up for a karaoke duet of Az Yet's remake of "Hard to Say I'm Sorry." The bar was set mighty low that night - our duet got a standing ovation, mainly from retirees, and the rest of the week had strangers coming up to me saying, "You're that guy that did the karaoke."

During that week in late 2004, I was more famous than R+B boy group Az Yet themselves. Who, I think, are currently on the casino-tour circuit, which isn't half bad for a group that had one hit that was a Chicago cover song. Peter Cetera, himself not long for the casino circuit, contributed vocals to the recording but is nowhere to be seen in the video. Wise decision - BET wouldn't have touched this shit with a ten-foot pole if it had included a 50-year-old Cetera emoting into the camera with clenched fists.

Director Bille Woodruff, who's been around forever and was - I think - behind every single Toni Braxton video, pulls the strings here. There's lots of washed-out color from across the wheel, and when the Az Yet guys aren't chilling with their girlfriends or shown from above, singing into a weird, elongated five-way mic stand, they're standing in boxes and rolling around town in their pimped-out '97 white Hummer. Which matches their sleeveless sweater vests.

Sounds happy, right, but there's drama afoot. One of the guys - not the one who looks like a Mr. Potato Head version of Don Cheadle, not the Jon B-looking one with the Prince stubble, not Usher's drunk uncle - pisses off his woman, gets a drink tossed in his face and sulks straight through the bridge and third chorus. The key to winning her back? He rolls up in the Hummer while Don, Jon B., Usher's uncle and other guy look on, and he gives her a dalmation puppy he stole from the Sublime guys. The shit works, too. Peter Cetera would be proud.

P.S. I always wished this remake would segue, like the Chicago original, into a funked-out version of "Get Away." No such luck.

eMpTyV index - 2005-2006

2006-05-26T04:10:00.000-05:00

NEWEST REVIEWS

Nick Lachey - What's Left of Me (2006)
"Aside from having your actors constantly flash sorrowful looks off-camera, how do you show the dissolution of a marraige without words? Well, if you said, 'By resorting to something completely cheesy and ineffective like showing their belongings fading into nothingness,' you win the Grand Prize. Which is a date with Nick Lachey himself. Don't worry if you're kinda chunky or smelly or a guy, Nick's cranked up the knob to "Super Desperate," and he's ready for your lovin'." [read more]

Hawthorne Heights - Saying Sorry (2006)
"I can't hear the band name Hawthorne Heights without picturing a primetime soap-opera knockoff of "The O.C." where the parents are adulterous, the kids are into drugs, and one of the main characters gets killed off in the season finale. Instead, what we're in for here is a bunch of dudes in nurse costumes, standing on fake clouds and playing music Billboard.com describes as "post-hardcore/emo-pop." To those of us in our late twenties, it's just a big, steaming pile of subpar Green Day, Blink 182, Third Eye Blind and Foo Fighters poop." [read more]

The Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car) (2006)"When I saw goober-looking lead singer Isaac Slade's adult face dissolve into the very similar visage of a little uniformed schoolboy, I thought I'd be in for another music video rendering of the outcast emerging triumphant. Imagine my surprise when this kid seemed to get along with his peers, who didn't even make fun of him for religiously studying sheet music for his piano recital. It's almost as if this video is saying that, if you study hard enough and are tenacious with your dreams, you'll amount to something. What the hell has happened to MTV?" [read more]

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eMpTyV EXTRAS

Total Request Live Episode Review - 03.20.06
"TRL, in its ninth or so year on the air, with Carson Daly long having since flown the coop, is every bit the rehearsed-hip, screaming teenybopper, braindead commercial plugfest it ever was. The MTV people have this phony-ass, self-serving shit down to a science..." [read more]

2006 Grammy Awards - Hours Two Through Four - 02.09.06
"Best Pop Vocal goes to Kelly Clarkson, who thanks Jesus and God but not Simon Cowell, the third member of the Holy Trinity. Clarkson does give a shout-out to Bonnie Raitt, who is then seen in reaction shot sporting a shit-eating grin on her face like, "Yeah, thanks, I'm here because I have songwriting and musicianship skills. You owe your career to a reality TV show on the fucking Fox network." [read more]

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RATING SCALE

**** = John
*** = Paul
** = George
* = Ringo
zero = Yoko

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REVIEWS BY ANDREW HICKS

2Pac - I Get Around (1993) ***1/2
50 Cent - Candy Shop (2005) *1/2
50 Cent - Window Shopper (2005) *1/2
Gregory Abbott - Shake You Down (1987) **
Trace Adkins - Honky Tonk Badonkadonk (2005) *1/2
Clay Aiken - Invisible (2004) *
All-American Rejects - Dirty Little Secret (2005) **1/2
All-American Rejects - Move Along (2006) **1/2
Fiona Apple - O' Sailor (2005) **
India Arie - I Am Not My Hair (2006) **
Armor For Sleep - The Truth About Heaven (2005) **1/2
Az Yet - Hard to Say I'm Sorry (1997) **
B5 - U Got Me (2005) *1/2
David Banner - Play (2005) **1/2
Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten (2005) **1/2
Beastie Boys - Root Down (1995) ***
Black Eyed Peas - Don’t Lie (2005) ***
Black Eyed Peas - It's Like That (2006) **1/2
Black Eyed Peas - My Humps (2005) *1/2
Bloodhound Gang - Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo (2005) **1/2
James Blunt - You’re Beautiful (2005) **1/2
Bon Jovi - Have a Nice Day (2005) *1/2
Boyz II Men - Thank You (1995) **1/2
Marc Broussard - Home (2005) ***
Chris Brown - Yo (Excuse Me Miss) (2006) *1/2
Busta Rhymes - I Love My Chick (2006) **
Mariah Carey - Say Somethin' (2006) **
The Carpenters - Close to You (1971) *
Cee-Lo - I'll Be Around (2004) ***
Chamillionaire - Ridin' (2006) **1/2
Cher - If I Could Turn Back Time (1989) **
Cody Chesnutt - Look Good in Leather (2002) **
Kelly Clarkson - Because of You (2005) *
Click Five - Just the Girl (2005) *1/2
Coldplay - Fix You (2005) **
Keyshia Cole - Love (2006) *1/2
Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise (1990) **
Phil Collins - I Wish It Would Rain Down (1990) **1/2
Sheryl Crow - Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) **
Jamie Cullum - Get Your Way (2005) **1/2
Billy Currington - Must Be Doin' Somethin' Right (2005) **
D'Angelo - Lady (remix) (1996) **1/2
Terence Trent D’Arby - Wishing Well (1988) **
Da Back Wudz - I Don't Like the Look of It (2006) *1/2
De La Soul - Ego Trippin' Pt. 2 (1993) ***
DHT - Listen to Your Heart (2005) *1/2
Dixie Chicks - Not Ready To Make Nice (2006) *1/2
DMC - Just Like Me (2005) **
Dream Academy - Life in a Northern Town (1986) **1/2
Hilary Duff - Wake Up (2005) *1/2
Missy Elliott - Lose Control (2005) ***
Eminem - When I'm Gone (2005) **
Evanescence - Bring Me To Life (2003) *1/2
Fall Out Boy - Dance, Dance (2005) **
Fat Joe - So Much More (2005) **
Field Mob - So What (2006) **
Foo Fighters - Best of You (2005) **1/2
Fort Minor - Where'd You Go (2006) **
The Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car) (2006) **1/2
From Satellite - A Hundred Days (2005) **
The Game and 50 Cent - Hate It or Love It (2005) ***
Genesis - Invisible Touch (1986) *1/2
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy (2006) ***1/2
Go West - King of Wishful Thinking (1990) *1/2
Good Charlotte - Hold On (2004) **
Green Day - Holiday (2005) ***
Anthony Hamilton - Can't Let Go (2005) ***
Jan Hammer - "Miami Vice" Theme (1985) *
Hawthorne Heights - Saying Sorry (2006) *1/2
HiM - Wings of a Butterfly (2005) ***
House of Pain - Jump Around (1992) ***
Alan Jackson - The Talkin’ Song Repair Blues (2004) ***
Janet Jackson - Got Til It's Gone (1997) ***1/2
Janet Jackson - When I Think of You (1986) ***
Michael Jackson - Another Part of Me (1988) **
Leela James - Music (2005) ***1/2
Jay-Z - Hard Knock Life (1998) **1/2
JD and Jay-Z - Money Ain’t a Thang (1998) ***
Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl (2003) ***
The Jets - Crush on You (1986) *
Jewel - Again and Again (2006) *1/2
Jack Johnson - Upside Down (2006) **
Howard Jones - Everlasting Love (1989) *
Mike Jones - Still Tippin’ (2004) **
Junior Senior - Move Your Feet (2003) ***
Juvenile - Slow Motion (2004) **
Toby Keith - Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (2002) zero stars
R. Kelly - Ignition (2004) ***
R. Kelly - Playa’s Only (2005) **1/2
Alicia Keys - Unbreakable (2005) ***
Korn - Twisted Transistor (2005) ***
Nick Lachey - What's Left of Me (2006) *1/2
Brie Larson - She Said (2005) *1/2
The Lemonheads - It's a Shame About Ray (1992) **1/2
L.L. Cool J - Control Myself (2006) **
Lindsay Lohan - Confessions of a Broken Heart (2005) *1/2
Ludacris - Number One Spot/The Potion (2005) **1/2
Madonna - Die Another Day (2002) ***
Madonna - Sorry (2006) **
Makaveli - Hail Mary (1997) **1/2
Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved (2004) **1/2
Ricky Martin - I Don’t Care (2005) *1/2
Michard Marx - Satisfied (1989) *1/2
Matisyahu - King Without a Crown (2005) **1/2
Mazzy Star - Fade Into You (1994) ***
George Michael - Father Figure (1988) **1/2
Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World (2002) ****
Alanis Morissette - Crazy (2005) **
My Chemical Romance - Ghost of You (2005) **1/2
Mya - Fallen (2004) **
Nappy Roots - Po' Folks (2002) ***
Nas - One Mic ***1/2
Me’Shell Ndege’Ocello - Pocketbook (2002) **1/2
Nelly - Grillz (2005) *1/2
Juice Newton - Queen of Hearts (1981) *
Nine Inch Nails - Only (2005) ***
Notorious B.I.G. - Warning (1995) ***
Outkast - Land of a Million Drums (2002) ***
Robert Palmer - I Didn't Mean To Turn You On (1986) **
Panic! At the Disco - I Write Sins, Not Tragedies (2006) ***
Sean Paul - We Be Burnin’ (2005) **
Tom Petty - It's Good To Be King (1995) ***
Pink - Stupid Girls (2006) **1/2
Poison - Something to Believe In (1990) **1/2
Pussycat Dolls - Buttons (2006) **1/2
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Dani California (2006) (2006) ***
Reliant K - Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been (2005) **
The Rembrandts - I’ll Be There For You (1995) *1/2
Rihanna - Pon de Replay (2005) **1/2
The Roots - Next Movement (1999) ***1/2
Santana featuring Steven Tyler - Just Feel Better (2005) *1/2
Leo Sayer - You Make Me Feel Like Dancing (1976) zero stars
Smash Mouth - Story of My Life (2006) **1/2
Will Smith - Switch (2005) **1/2
Snoop Dogg and Pharrell - Drop It Like It’s Hot (2004) ***
Soundgarden - Spoonman (1994) ***
Britney Spears - Do Somethin’ (2005) *1/2
Britney Spears - My Prerogative (2005) **1/2
The Specials - Ghost Town (1981) ***
Starship - Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (1987) *
Gwen Stefani and Eve - Rich Girl (2005) **1/2
Gwen Stefani - What You Waiting For? (2004) ***
Stray Cats - Sexy and 17 (1983) **1/2
Stryper - Soldiers Under Command (1985) *
Sublime - Date Rape (1992) ***
Switchfoot - Stars(2005) **
The System - Don’t Disturb This Groove (1987) *1/2
T-Pain - I'm in Love With a Stripper (2006) *1/2
Talking Heads - Wild Wild Life (1986) ***
Technotronic - Pump Up the Jam (1989) *
Temple of the Dog - Hunger Strike (1992) **1/2
Tone Loc - Funky Cold Medina (1989) **1/2
Toto - Hold the Line (1978) *1/2
Trick Daddy - Sugar (Gimme Some) (2005) ***
KT Tunstall - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree (2006) **1/2
Van Halen - Right Now (1992) **1/2
Suzanne Vega - Luka (1987) **1/2
The Veronicas - 4ever (2005) **1/2
War - Why Can’t We Be Friends (1975) **1/2
Kanye West - Heard 'em Say (B+W Version) (2005) ***1/2
Kanye West - Jesus Walks (2004) ***
Kanye West - Touch the Sky (2006) ***
White Stripes - Hardest Button to Button (2003) ***1/2
White Zombie - More Human Than Human (1995) ***
Saul Williams - Black Stacey (2004) ***
Vanessa Williams - Colors of the Wind (1995) zero stars
Mark Wills - Back at One (1999) **
Wreckx-N-Effect - Rump Shaker (1992) *1/2
XTC - Dear God (1987) ***
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Like a Surgeon (1985) ***
Yellowcard - Lights and Sounds (2005) *1/2
Yellowcard - Rough Landing, Holly (2005) ***
Rob Zombie - Foxy, Foxy (2006) **1/2

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REVIEWS BY LEON BRACEY

Amerie - 1 Thing (2005) ****
Bubba Sparxxx featuring Ying Yang Twins - Ms. New Booty (2006) ***1/2
R. Kelly - Trapped in the Closet, Parts 1-5 (2005) **
Khia - My Neck, My Back (2002) *
Madonna - Hung Up (2005) **
Pretty Ricky - Your Body (2005) *
Sean Paul - Temperature (2005) ****
Trina - Here We Go (2005) **1/2

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ANDREW'S ARCHIVE REVIEWS BY YEAR

2001
2000
1999
1998
1996
1994

Nick Lachey - What's Left of Me (2006)

2006-05-23T22:43:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

Jessica Simpson's embarrassed, heartbroken ex is attempting a comeback built on public sympathy not seen since Gloria Estefan's 1991 release "Coming Out of the Dark." But, while the Miami Sound Machine singer's chart-topping sympathy single was seen as the triumphant reemergence of a strong-willed woman who wouldn't let a wicked car accident get her down, Nick Lachey's sympathy comeback is just plain pathetic.

Have you read the recent Rolling Stone profile of Nick? He cries, he questions his manhood, and he's completely overshadowed personally and professionally by the gorgeous blond who dumped him on his ass. The RS article would have made Nick seem like the biggest loser alive if "George W. Bush: Worst President Ever?" hadn't been on the cover.

The difference is, you know if Laura left Dubya, instead of spending a month in his pajamas, crying into a quart of Ben and Jerry's, he'd get out there, play golf, bomb a brown-skinned nation and make up a few new words to console himself. Nick's reaction is to belt out emotional lyrics like, "I'm broken and I'm fading / I'm half the man I thought I would be." Even his pecs are pouting.

Nick, wearing one of Simon Cowell's black T-shirts, mopes around his poorly lit, blue/green-tinted mansion as his relationship dissolves in front of a TV crew. But any resemblance to persons living or dead in this video is entirely coincidental - the woman who's breaking up with Nick here (played by TRL host Vanessa) has brown hair, and she knows Chicken of the Sea is a brand of tuna, not chicken. See? They're nothing alike!

Director Ray Kay goes on autopilot throughout the entire affair. Aside from having your actors constantly flash sorrowful looks off-camera, how do you show the dissolution of a marraige without words? Well, if you said, "By resorting to something completely cheesy and ineffective like showing their belongings fading into nothingness," you win the Grand Prize. Which is a date with Nick Lachey himself. Don't worry if you're kinda chunky or smelly or a guy, Nick's cranked up the knob to "Super Desperate," and he's ready for your lovin'.

Pussycat Dolls featuring Big Snoop Dogg - Buttons (2006)

2006-05-23T22:41:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

The dust has long settled on the Spice Girls phenomenon, which opened the door for the rest of the TRL revolution, and the Pussycat Dolls - a burlesque dance troupe from L.A. - have all but replaced Posh, Sporty, Sexy, Dopey and Grumpy. However, where the Spices were determined to construct individual personalities, the Pussycat Dolls are indistinguishable from one another. It's just a sea of glistening, tight, sexy bodies writhing, moaning and grinding. I think I prefer this approach.

"Buttons" is nowhere near as obnoxious as the Emancipation of Mimi outtake "Stickwitu," or the Fergie outtake "Don't Cha (Wish Ya Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me)," which I've seen more fat girls sing without irony than any other Watch Me Attempt To Reassure Myself I Look Good song in recent memory. This track has more of a midtempo harem vibe to it, and the video puts it to quality, spankworthy use.

Veteran director Francis Lawrence decks out the entire video in shades of black and orange-brown, on a vast soundstage. The six PCDs spend four minutes making love to the camera and teaching seventh graders how to dance like strippers, while Lawrence cuts to interludes with a curiously windless wind tunnel, open flame, a ballet bar (the Dolls are limber, it should surprise you not to learn), rows of dangling gold bead-curtains and - yes, thank you, Lord! - black chairs.

All this is enough to make you forget Snoop Dogg is in the video, too. "Buttons" marks the first time I've seen Snoop officially credited as "Big Snoop Dogg" on an MTV title card. It's almost as if he desperately has to assert his masculinity in this roomful of chair-grinding knockouts. ("I'm big, I swear! All six of you can get an inch of my manhood!") Still, Snoop quickly gives up trying to earn any attention amid this Maxim lesbo-orgy and hides behind thick sunglasses and a black Unabomber hoodie and enjoys the show. Wise deshizzle, Snoop. Wise deshizzle.

Hawthorne Heights - Saying Sorry (2006)

2006-05-23T22:23:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

I can't hear the band name Hawthorne Heights without picturing a primetime soap-opera knockoff of "The O.C." where the parents are adulterous, the kids are into drugs, and one of the main characters gets killed off in the season finale. Instead, what we're in for here is a bunch of dudes in nurse costumes, standing on fake clouds and playing music Billboard.com describes as "post-hardcore/emo-pop." To those of us in our late twenties, it's just a big, steaming pile of subpar Green Day, Blink 182, Third Eye Blind and Foo Fighters poop.

The nurse guys play on their clouds, angels with too much eye makeup float above them, a little boy and girl play doctor and one of the band's girlfriends finds another chick's number in his jacket. While the guy and girl are fighting, the souls of each of them come up out of their bodies and hold hands, as if to say, "Our bodies and minds hate the fuck out of each other, but that doesn't mean our formless spirits can't hump like bunnies until dawn." The ethereal boning never materializes, and
neither does the watchability in this video from director Major Lightner, who should rightfully be busted down to "Private First Class."

The Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car) (2006)

2006-05-23T22:15:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

I'm stating the obvious and the already-stated-a-million-times, but we all know every kid who gets picked on in school dreams of becoming a famous rock star and showing all those little bully bastards who's boss. So, when I saw goober-looking lead singer Isaac Slade's adult face dissolve into the very similar visage (same criss-cross, vertical hairstyle and everything) of a little uniformed schoolboy, I thought I'd be in for another music video rendering of the outcast emerging triumphant.

Imagine my surprise when this kid seemed to get along with his peers, who didn't even make fun of him for religiously studying sheet music for his piano recital. They were all laughing with him, not at him! Then the kid has the opportunity to cheat on a standardized test, and he doesn't. Instead, he finishes the test, takes center stage in his school's empty auditorium and belts out the chorus to this song. And gets a glimpse of his illustrious future - playing in a band and performing to packed crowds.

It's almost as if this Elliot Lester video is saying that, if you study hard enough and are tenacious with your dreams, you'll amount to something. What the hell has happened to MTV? And, for that matter, what's happened to me? I used to dismiss pap like this out of turn. Instead I'm singing along and hoping the kid gets to hold onto his lunch money after all. Man, am I old and soft.

Busta Rhymes - I Love My Chick (2006)

2006-05-22T06:44:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

Busta and Gabrielle Union play Mr. and Mrs. Smith, an upscale couple first seen undergoing a marriage counseling session. During which they insist they have no problem getting along. No fighting. But, very much like the 2005 Brangelina movie of the same name, the Smiths are on different sides of the law, and the video (directed by Busta with Benny Boom) delights in showing the pair locked in silly-ass forms of combat. None of it is to be taken seriously, and none of it's particularly funny, so mainly we're on overfamiliar blockbuster turf. High-budget eye candy without much inspiration to back it up.

Busta, dressed in camouflage, rolls in on some kind of off-road dune buggy while Gabrielle is hanging out in her desert Unabomber shack. Busta proceeds to blow that up with a bazooka, and back in civilization, she retaliates by running him over with an SUV. Let's see, Gabrielle also chases Busta around the living room while wielding a sword, and he throws sofa cushions at her. Then they make out wildly and assure coy, curious neighbor Dr. Dre that everything's fine at home, just before the mansion is blown to bits by the feds.

There's no "To Be Continued" title card superimposed at the end, but you can be sure that, if Brad and Angelina make a Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2, Busta will make an "I Still Love My Chick" video. And producer Will.I.Am will put together another beat that apes The Neptunes, with him singing the bridge and everything.

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy (2006)

2006-05-22T05:16:00.000-05:00

***1/2 (of four)

As I professed in a review about a month ago, I'm a huge Cee-Lo fan. I also loved the Danger Mouse Grey Album bootleg, so to have the two team up as Gnarls Barkley - well, shit, I'm all ears. The leadoff single, "Crazy," is a breezy, ethereal piece of electronic soul you can sing along to like a kid and still respect like an adult. I'm willing to forgive the dumbass band name and maybe even buy the album. In a store, like we used to do.

The "Crazy" video, from director Robert Hales, perfectly suits the transient, otherworldly feel of the song. It's sparse and involved at the same time, a series of symmetrical, moving ink blot images on a white backdrop. Most feature a pair of Cee-Los singing the lyrics in profile while splotches of ink morph into varying abstract images. Danger Mouse, looking like Matisyahu's swarthier older brother, cameos from time to time, as do cartoon beetles, spiders and birds. Use of color is judicious and sparing, and the entire affair is guaranteed to blow your mind in a completely harmless way.

Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone - Ridin' (2006)

2006-05-22T04:39:00.001-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

Chamillionaire has one ass-dumb song in "Ridin'," but I dare you to listen to it once and not walk around the rest of the day with its chorus on a repeat loop in your head. Having just watched the video, I'm in for about ten more hours of Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty Trynna Catch Me Ridin' Dirty. It's a good thing I'm not in school anymore.

"Ridin'" is about that quintessential element of the black American experience known as Being Pulled Over All The Time For No Goddamn Reason. I live in an area that's low on crime and high on police staff, and it's practically a guarantee that if your skin's darker than Burnt Sienna in the Crayola box, you'll be late to work about twice a week while Officer Scraps from the K-9 unit is sniffing out your car. And Chamillionaire, with his pimped-out ride, tilted baseball cap, black skullcap and dog collar bracelets - not to mention, the chorus of this song is blasting out of his car speakers at full volume ALL THE TIME - makes a sweet target for John Q. Law.

John Q. is played in this video by Deebo, so you know he's a dirty cop. He chases some anonymous posse member on foot, pulls over Chamillionaire and then stakes out his warehouse, which is part chop shop, part pawn shop, part nightclub and part hair salon. All I know is, I've never seen a rap video booty dancer change the oil on a stolen car before. That's got to at least be a misdemeanor. But wait: Chamillionaire sends Deebo packing by presenting a permit for the giant warehouse, which is official headquarters of his Chamillitary. Yes, you heard me right. Chamillitary.

BRANCHES OF THE CHAMILLITARY
Charmy
Chanavy
Chair Force
Charines
Chanational Guard

Poison - Something to Believe In (1990)

2006-05-22T03:39:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

Six or seven years ago, around the time of my college graduation, "Something to Believe In" and Poison in general were guilty pleasures of the tallest order. This existentialist power ballad came into my life at a personal crossroads and loss of faith, but I viewed the entire affair (that is to say, my existence and this Poison track) with tongue firmly in cheek. Yes, it was with full, knowing irony that I waved my fucking lighter from Row DD of the Riverport Ampitheater while half-drunkenly singing along on a warm June night in 1999.

When you think about it, it's kind of appropriate that "Something to Believe In" was Poison's last big radio hit. Within months, the Seattle revolution would blow through and leave Bret Michaels & Co. wondering why God had forsaken them in favor of flannel. Michaels is one somber, big-haired bastard in this video, too - even his giant Axl Rose headband is a funereal shade of black. He, C.C. Deville and the other guys act as grown up as one can while wielding bright blue guitars and wearing red paisley berets on a black soundstage.

Meantime, the uncredited director cuts in lots of moody black-and-white shots of cemeteries; homeless folk; psychotic Vietnam vets who resemble Bob Seger, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, respectively; Evil Hollywood; and, my favorite, the grinning visage of the deposed Reverend Jim Bakker. As you know if you happened to watch the Poison "Behind the Music," Bret Michaels was a charter member of the PTL Club - he was as disappointed as anyone to find out he could no longer ride the body slides at the Heritage USA theme park.

Stryper - Soldiers Under Command (1985)

2006-05-17T00:23:00.000-05:00

* (of four)

I've always considered myself fairly well versed in the annals of Stryper videography. (Somewhere) I have my very own VHS copies of the Christian hair-metal concert extravaganza Stryper Live in Japan* and the hourlong pseudo-documentary and music video collection Stryper: In the Beginning. I was a Christian school kid, after all - in the days of Motley Crue, Poison and Metallica, I was allowed to listen only to music bearing God's stamp of approval. My favorite band, from the ages of 10 through 13 or so, was Stryper, with a Bible-believing bullet. I even saw them in concert last fall, at an all-night bar in East St. Louis called Pop's.

Imagine my surprise, then, to turn on VH1 Classic and stumble upon a rather primitive-looking video for "Soldiers Under Command," the title track to Stryper's second album. The entire affair is on autopilot from the beginning, with a mix of studio rehearsals, concert performances, roadies unloading yellow-and-black stage equipment**, a Sam Kinison-lookalike producer concentrating on the soundboard, and the entire band eating Chinese food backstage. The hair is huge, the costumes have to be seen to be believed, and the song itself is embarrassing. And instantly takes me back to fifth grade. VH1 Classic performs an odd public service, to be sure.

* = I think they're still popular over there.

** = Favorite Shot: The hoisting a hundred feet in the air of the giant "666" with the red circle and line through it. The devil is not welcome at a Stryper show.

Junior Senior - Move Your Feet (2003)

2006-05-16T22:24:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

The "Celebrity Playlist" section of the iTunes Music Store is one dangerous place for my credit card. I never thought I'd find myself morbidly curious to learn what tracks Jay-Z pumps in the McDonald's drive thru or which Spacehog song Liv Tyler and her husband make love to most often. Instead, I'm downloading all kinds of weird shit (my favorite playlist so far: director Robert Rodriguez) via celebrities. That's how I got to know and love - in a very odd way - this British dance-pop song from Junior Senior. Which, if memory serves correctly, comes courtesy of the Celebrity Playlist of one Weird Al Yankovic.

"Move Your Feet" has dub elements of '70s funk and disco, '80s new wave and '90s electronica, and is catchy as hell despite having no verses and a seven-word chorus. The video, from Shynola, is a charming but extremely low-budget animated effort with all the quality of an 8-bit video game. If you're a fan of pixels, check out this hodgepodge of drunk squirrels, singing hotdogs, banjo-playing children, frowny-faced burning toast, dancing robots and, of course, the guys of Junior Senior themselves. It's strange, it's childish, and if it's good enough for Weird Al, it's good enough for me.

Soundgarden - Spoonman (1994)

2006-05-16T22:09:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

During my state-mandated government class one Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Dehart wheeled in the TV/VCR cart from the AV department and dimmed the classroom lights. I figured we were in for another kitschy 1970s "How a Bill Becomes a Law" presentation, but instead we spent the 52-minute class period watching a VHS time capsule of Dehart's appearance on a local public-access cable talk show.

On the video, the younger version of our bald teacher had long, unwieldy hair and a thick salt-and-pepper beard, and he revealed himself to be a master of spoon percussion. Mr. Dehart was a spoonman way before Chris Cornell and the boys cut this song about it. And, after turning the lights back up, he told us all the secret was to sand down the bowl end of the spoon. The duller the bottom of the spoon, the easier the process of rhythmically smacking them together. Useful info, to be sure. I never did learn how a bill becomes law.

Mr. Dehart lives on in my memory thanks to VH1 Classic's Rock Fest show, which polishes the dust off this old Soundgarden video from time to time. Director John Smithey shows the band in color-tinted photo stills, which the camera roams up and down and side to side, documentary-style.

This visual collage holds up just fine for the length of the video, but the star of the show is the Spoonman himself, a mohawked, crazy-eyed homeless man named Artis who putters around a barren loft, soloing on the spoons and apparently developing all of these still photos of Soundgarden in his darkroom, stalker-style. I have a feeling if we took a look in Mr. Dehart's darkroom, we'd see zero pictures of Soundgarden and about 300 pictures of Buffalo Springfield.

SMARTASS COMMENT FROM MY ORIGINAL REVIEW, 12/94:
"I don't know about you, but I think alternative music could definitely use more spoon solos."

Yellowcard - Rough Landing, Holly (2005)

2006-05-11T23:41:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

My first experience with a Yellowcard video yielded a short, rude review. The second time around, with "Rough Landing, Holly," director Marc Webb has given me a video that's held my attention. The Alan Cumming-lookalike lead singer spends four minutes stuck in an episode of "Quantum Leap" on crystal meth, except that he's only in the same place for like three seconds at a time, has no mission to accomplish and doesn't have the help of Al or Ziggy.

The Cumming doppelganger is first seen lying in bed, where he sets down the book he's reading and gets sucked into his bright red comforter. Travels through some sort of silk comforter vortex and ends up in the bed of a hot, slumbering brunette. Whose husband is standing at the dresser with a pissed-off look on his face. Cumming escapes out the bathroom window and reappears crawling out of a manhole and onto an empty street. Ten seconds later, he's in a Chinese nightclub. Twenty seconds after that, he's running down an empty school hallway.

One crack house, one briefcase of holy water, one underwater poker-game sequence, one hospital visit, one youth riot and one bizarre kissing game later, we're left with one of the more visually compelling videos on the MTV Hits channel's current playlist. Sure, it apes the far superior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and sure, the song is indistinguishable pop-punk, but it adds up to a damn entertaining package.

Da Back Wudz featuring Caz Clay - I Don't Like the Look of It (2006)

2006-05-11T01:29:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

"What do you get when you can't write a song? / Steal someone's work and you call it your own." Practically ensuring Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl is spinning like a top in his grave, hip-hop act Da Back Wudz (never heard of 'em? me either...) builds an entire track around one line from the "Oompa Loompa" theme song. Just one more entry in the "Whistle While You Twurk" subgenre of dirty South rap songs built around kids' movie staples. Just wait till Lil' Jon gets ahold of "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo."

In the Fat Cats-directed video, a shorty brandishing a golden ticket is allowed entry into the Rowdy Candies factory, which more closely resembles a chop shop. Children wearing magenta Oompa Loompa wigs roll big-rimmed tires around and polish the chrome while the Back Wudz rappers do their thing (one of them's wearing Johnny Depp's white Wonka aviator glasses), and a handful of bored-looking hotties just barely dance. One of them paints a red car blue. It's outlandish shit, yeah, but it's not near as fun as it rightfully should be. I don't really like the look of it.

Tone Loc - Funky Cold Medina (1989)

2006-05-11T01:26:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

The people at VH1 Classic are perverts tonight. First comes Stray Cats jailbait anthem "Sexy and 17," then two songs later, Tone Loc's ode to date-rape drugs, "Funky Cold Medina." Meet a hot girl out at the bar? Already bought her a couple drinks and nothing's happening? Slip her some Funky Cold Medina, and she'll be panting on you in no time. (Speaking of "panting," Tone Loc makes it clear in the first verse that Funky Cold Medina is effective on dogs, too. Makes them hump your leg and stuff. Just keep that in mind. I don't think that's something they mention on the label.)

This grainy-ass video just pretty much tells the story of the lyrics - hot girl succumbs to Loc's Medina in a bar, Loc's dog humps his leg, Loc unknowingly takes home a transvestite man and, my personal favorite, Loc ends up on "Love Connection" and has his date immediately chasing marriage. Other nice touches - the bubbling beakers of green Medina juice, the dialogue ballons ("Tone Who?!") and the guy walking down the club hall with a turntable-scratch setup hanging around his neck. Aged well? Why, no, it hasn't.

Stray Cats - Sexy and 17 (1983)

2006-05-11T01:25:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

Years back, when I worked as a movie theater usher, one of the off-duty security cops would spend entire shifts telling us the age-of-consent laws for different states. Hawaii? Eighteen. Arizona? Sixteen. North Dakota? Four and a half.* It was from this perverted-ass cop that I learned my home state, Missouri, allows men of any age to stick it to seventeen year olds. So it's not at all creepy for me to call up the local '80s radio station and dedicate this Stray Cats song to "the entire eleventh grade girls' gym class at Parkway North." Not creepy in the slightest.

"Sexy and 17" comes from the infancy of MTV, and as such it's full of all the overdrawn sight gags and wooden choreography of Reagan Administration-era videos. The funniest shit, for reasons intended and unintended, is at the beginning, when the leather-jacket-and-undershirt-wearing Stray Cat rockabilly rebels pop up in a prep school class. Brian Setzer and the boys are sitting among a roomful of lookalike shirt-and-tie student automotons, as they (i.e. the Cats) taunt the old lady teacher, who keeps turning around just as they duck back behind the automotons. Poor, befuddled lady. She's just trying to teach a geometry lesson.

The rest of the "Sexy and 17" video shows the Stray Cats spreading mayhem around the stately old prep school, culminating in a locker-slamming brawl between the Cats and the Squares. There's also concert footage from inside a bar, and there's Setzer's love interest "Marie," who is first seen from behind, brushing her teeth and wearing nothing but one black stocking and some skimp-ass underwear. If you've got a TiVo, go ahead and freeze frame this stuff. I'll wait, don't worry. Not creepy in the slightest.

* = Yeah, keep your kids away from North Dakota. They do things different up there.

Dixie Chicks - Not Ready To Make Nice (2006)

2006-05-10T06:27:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

Remember like three years back, when Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks told a London concert audience that she was ashamed that George W. Bush hailed from her home state of Texas? Remember how that sparked a huge outcry afterward? I laughed my ass off when I saw local karaoke DJ break his Dixie Chicks Soundchoice disc in half, mid-show, and announce that the Chicks were traitors to our country and essentially also sonic terrorists.

Which I thought was absurd. Not the part about destroying Dixie Chicks karaoke discs, but his reasons for doing so. Me, I'd pay top dollar to ensure I'd never again hear six drunk bachelorette party girls giggle their way through "Goodbye Earl." When I saw the karaoke guy shatter his Dixie Chicks CD, I was wishing I could convince him that Meat Loaf, Gloria Gaynor, Bon Jovi and Celine Dion were also a bunch of president-hating, anti-American assholes. Celine's from Canada, for chrissake. They're liberal as hell. Let's get a bonfire going and burn up all this shit. Grease soundtrack, you go get in the pile too! I know you voted Kerry.

Well, now the Dixie Chicks have responded to that whole controversy, at a time when the president has a 32% approval rating and America is still in Iraq with no exit date in sight. This should be easy for Maines and Co., but instead of finding any meaning or true feeling in this song and performance, I'm spending four minutes wondering if Natalie's forehead got bigger. I think the stress of the controversy grew it out about three sizes.

The video? A bunch of quiet, performance-art nonsense. Maines is wearing a white dress, her hands are dirty, and she smears black tar all over the dress. The religious figures and elderly gossips are all standing in the shadows, buzzing with negativity. The other Chicks are trying to hold Maines back from her rage. Then there's a passionate violin... er, fiddle solo, and Maines whips out a boxcutter, hijacks a plane and flies it straight into the house of that jerkoff karaoke DJ.

K.T. Tunstall - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree (2006)

2006-05-10T06:23:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

This video has more uses than any in recent memory of the "She'll only come out at night" camera shot from the beginning of the Hall and Oates video for "Maneater." You know that shot I'm talking about - where the camera is close-up on a right-profile shot of Hall, then he spins his head dramatically toward the camera to convey immediacy and alarm. Well, K.T. Tunstall does this head-swivel at least eight times in "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," and it gets old, well, just before the first time she does it. Otherwise, director Sophie Muller supplies us with plenty of dark-room shots of Tunstall playing an enormous acoustic guitar and bass drum that threatens to swallow her whole. And she beats on a snare drum and a tamborine. She's a one-man band, just like that Sgt. Pepperoni guy who used to wander around Six Flags when I was a kid. I have immense respect for you, K.T. Tunstall.

Jack Johnson - Upside Down (2006)

2006-05-10T06:21:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

I like Jack Johnson, I have to state that up front, but "Upside Down" has the unfortunate timing of appearing on my TiVo the day after the David Blaine-in-an-aquatic-bubble media circus finally came to a gaspy, Guess I Can't Hold My Breath For Nine Minutes head. Because after seeing clips for days of Blaine floating around his water bubble and staring out at the world, knowing he was as bored with his stunt as we were, now here's Jack Johnson spending the first half of his video lip synching from underwater with his acoustic guitar at his side, getting warped the crap out of.

Johnson does hold his breath for a good verse or so before the director cuts away to Curious George swimming up to him. Then the real-life ex-surfer singer and the cartoon monkey stare at each other for a few cutesy seconds and Johnson spends the rest of the video sitting Indian style (or is it "Native American style" now?) in front of a blue screen. Lots of cartoon stuff here, and Johnson's in full "Zippidy Doo Dah" mode, so the sap factor is high. If that sounds good to you, well, you probably already have kids at home and a big soft heart and don't want to hear the story of how I pulled the tail off my gerbil when I was twelve.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Dani California (2006)

2006-05-10T06:18:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

It's good to have you back, Chili Peppers. What's it been, six years since your last video? Missed you guys. And here you are, mugging it up in your version of that subgenre of music video known as Impersonate The Greats. You've seen Phil Collins and Phil McCartney put on their Buddy Holly wigs and Eminem do his best Dope Show-era Marilyn Manson. You even probably cracked up when David Lee Roth shoved the Billy Idol impostor into the electric wires in "Just a Gigolo."

So you guys got together and talked about all your favorite rock and funk acts over time, the ones who influenced you, the ones you wished you could have been, the ones who you figured passed the torch on to you. You didn't want to leave anyone out - Elvis, Hendrix, P-Funk, the Stones, Iggy, Bowie, Sex Pistols, Prince, Motley Crue (fucking Motley Crue?!), Nirvana, Green Day. And, let's be honest, you guys all kind of wished you had the cultural relevance of any of the above acts instead of frequently seeming on the novelty or mush-ballad side of music.

But don't get me wrong, you guys are impossible to dislike. I've always been in your corner. And I like "Dani California," the song and the video. Sure, you mug it up hardcore - on an almost cutely fierce level - but it's obvious that, unlike Roth slamming Idol into the electric wires, you guys made this video out of love and reverence. You got to do a lot of wardrobe changes, take a lot of fun pictures and just generally goof off on the same black soundstage all day. The result is a gleeful mess that almost makes me forgive the fact that you put out a double album.

Mariah Carey featuring Pharrell and Snoop Dogg - Say Somethin' (2006)

2006-05-10T06:07:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

It's unfathomable to me that Mariah Carey has managed both to nab and sustain this miraculous comeback of hers. I mean, Mariah's been riding the Emancipation of Mimi album for a fucking YEAR now. At this point, she's in Thriller and Rhythm Nation territory, releasing - what is this, the nineth single? Mariah's all over the MTV Jams channel at 4 a.m., slobbering on the ballsacks of Neptunes producer Pharrell Williams and Snoop Dogg, who's been phoning in his guest shots for the last half-decade and still manages to be bankably charming in videos and commercials and on talk shows.

Veteran director Paul Hunter brings us a high-society tale of paparazzi chasing our quasi-interracial celebrity couple (Pharrell and Mariah, who will henceforth be known to tabloids as "Phariah"), who roll around Paris or Venice or, I don't know, America* in the back of their fancy car. Then Mariah writhes in a bikini atop of a bunch of suitcases and Snoop stares through sunglasses at her cameltoe while sitting with his back to a bunch of safe-deposit boxes. The video degenerates from there - Mariah singing sensually into her Razor phone, Pharrell in a wife beater, Snoop looking around frantically for the half-ounce of Maui Wowie he had in his pocket when he arrived at the shoot...

* = Seriously, the peak of my geographical knowledge was ninth grade, when I knew what "mercator projection" meant and could name all the state capitals and continents. Now I can only name four of each, and I sure as hell don't know if Phariah is cruising around Europe or Iowa in this video.

Nappy Roots - Po' Folks (2002)

2006-05-10T06:04:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

About three seconds into this Darren Grant/Rich Newey video, we realize we're deep in rural Kentucky. No Wal-Marts, no traffic lights, but they do have three Starbucks. And everyone gets along, claims the homeless-looking old black man in the prologue. Cue what the closed-captioning guy refers to as "relaxed funk guitar music," as the anthemic sing-along chorus to "Po' Folks" kicks in.

This song is cool as hell. The Nappy Roots crew seemed to have so much promise and appeal here - little did the rest of us know that the album itself was loaded with mediocre, skip-over songs. It's an unassuming group, too. The NR guys hang out in and around a beat-up double-wide trailer home. One dude doesn't even seem to mind that he's using a toilet for an outside-sittin' seat. There's gonna be a lot of whittlin' going on, too, I imagine.

The Roots walk down the streets of their home town en masse, wave to the preacher, sit on hay in a pickup truck, cross the bridge, walk around the woods, go fishin' and pay their respects to relatives buried in the cemetery. Really, these guys give the entire tour of their corner of Kentucky. I spotted four discarded, rusty refrigerators and everything.

Grant and Newey also toss in interview clips between verses, featuring lots of happy black country folk and some of the most tooth-missin'est, Deliverance-looking peckerwood motherfuckers you've ever seen. All of whom proclaim their love for their surroundings, and some of the down-home pride is actually contagious. As a damn poor person myself, I like to see people who can find the joy in life despite not having shit. I know I for one have popped a huge grin every time the electricity has gone out while I was in the middle of taking a shower in a bathroom with no window.

Pink - Stupid Girls (2006)

2006-05-03T01:54:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

I kind of like "Stupid Girls," and it kind of annoys me. It's not that the video doesn't successfully hit its (very obvious, very easy-to-attack) intended target - the brainless-anorexia image sold the world over by TRL divas, supermodels and other vagina-possessing whores of the media. It's more that Pink, during her seven-year tenure on MTV, has been guilty of every crime she's accusing her pop rivals of.

I've got Pink's midriff and cleavage burned just as deep in my brain as Britney's or Christina's or Mary Kate's or Ashley's. During the scene where Pink's sitting at the bowling alley with her black beret and turtleneck on, looking demure and intellectual, and her boyfriend ends up staring at the big-tittied bubblehead who's rolling the ball on the next lane over, I'm thinking to myself, Bitch, I remember you in the "Lady Marmalade" video. Don't act like you don't play ball with our shallow, shallow culture.

That's my main objection, you understand. Still, director David Meyers, who has helmed his share of softcore MTV shit, treats us to a mostly fun four minutes of Pink going off on body-image insecurity. We see her alternately acting like the self-assured, dignified lady president; desperately vying for the attention of men obsessed with stacked, skinny women; puking in the bathroom sink ("I totally had more than 300 calories today!"); doing the hip-hop ho thing; preparing to undergo cosmetic surgery; and, in the video's best sequence, parodying the "Boots Are Made For Walkin'" Jessica Simpson car-wash striptease.

The pot is accusing the kettle of having an eating disorder and selling out, which rings a little false, but "Stupid Girls" is definitely worth a watch. And, ironically enough, for a video that vilifies MTV's shallowness, this Pink clip is really quite spankworthy.

Jewel - Again and Again (2006)

2006-05-03T01:53:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

Jewel is like the Terminator. Every time I think I'm rid of her, she grows a metallic claw, crawls up the trunk of my car and attacks me one more time. I thought the death of the Lilith Fair craze would lead her back to obscurity. No such luck. Then I thought her wrong-headed blend of folk and adult-contemporary techno beats would prove her undoing. Wrong twice. Jewel keeps coming back again and again, as this song's title asserts. Interestingly enough, the hook even rips off Fiona Apple's "again and again and again and again" line from "Fast As You Can."

Now, Fiona I can handle reappearing every few years. Jewel just gets on my nerves, and this Matthew Rolston video - with its country houses and cornfields and soft-focus shots of Jewel lying in the grass in some kind of wedding-dress sleepwear - is a dead ringer for a Summer's Eve commercial. Appropriate, considering new Jewel singles always give me that not-so-fresh feeling. Get me some vinegar and water, stat!

Smash Mouth - Story of My Life (2006)

2006-05-03T01:52:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

Almost as inconceivable to me as the fact that it's 2006 and I'm watching a brand new Smash Mouth video on VH1 is the fact that I'm watching a brand new Smash Mouth video and it's not a cover song and it's not on the fucking Shrek 3 soundtrack or something. Smash Mouth would have been dead on instant arrival if not for cover songs on movie soundtracks: "Can't Get Enough of You Baby" from Can't Hardly Wait, "Why Can't We Be Friends" from BASEketball (yes, BASEketball), and of course that goddamn Monkees remake from Shrek 1.

So many reasons not to like Smash Mouth, and yet when the weather gets warmer and the days longer and I start to dwell on faded summer memories, this fat bastard and his cronies always deserve a spot on my playlist. They've got a handful of guilty pleasures, and now "Story of My Life" somehow enters the eschelon. It's harmless and mildly catchy, with a low-budget Steve Harwell video that's actually fairly charming on the first few views. Which, let's be honest - a few is all the views we're gonna get.

As the video opens, the band is playing in an empty motel parking lot. (Yes, this is what it's come to...) The fat bastard heads up to his room and finds out Smash Mouth is holding new auditions for lead singer, and apparently Florence Henderson is the front runner. So F.B. gets mad and decides to walk in on all the neighboring rooms, where strange sexual goings-on are going on and nuns and pimps are playing harps. Makes scant sense, but this is the story of this guy's life, that's all I know.

Kanye West - Touch the Sky (2006)

2006-05-01T17:16:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

I've never been a huge fan of Kanye West's self-importance, rampant egomania and abject inability to look intellectually impressive in a magazine interview, but somehow Kanye keeps putting out quality singles and videos. And I can't fault him for that. "Touch the Sky," a 1970s nostalgia trip from director Chris Milk, is all washed-out yellows, purples and roses as Evel Kanyevel (yeah, I know) heads in a vintage limo with girlfriend Pamela Anderson to the Arizona desert to leap the Grand Canyon (or some similarly enormous canyon) in a red, white and blue rocket.

But Kanyevel can't just perform his stunt, no. Before the rocket launches, he must contend with several bouts of Unnecessary Drama. First when Pam, in the naughty nurse coochie-cutter jumpsuit, sulks in his trailer, concerned for his safety. Begs him not to get in the rocket. Then, while a reporter is asking Kanye to defend his comments about President Nixon ("Richard Nixon doesn't care about sane people"), up shows a monster afro'd Nia Long to claim she got her ass left for a white girl. Which, shit, Nia's cool, but what guy's gonna turn down the chance to get with Pam, rampant venereal disease carrier or no?

Anyway, he does get his girl stuff sorted out and climb into the rocket. And you'd be surprised that, with a king-sized ego like Kanyevel possesses, he allows his rocket to arc a hundred or so feet above the canyon and then take a fiery 180-degree nosedive into the canyon, to the overdrawn expressions of grief on both Pamela and Nia's face. Unless maybe he thinks he's indestructible. Either way, sitting in the Oval Office with a distinct smile as he watches the footage on broadcast television? Yup. Tricky Dick.

India Arie - I Am Not My Hair (2006)

2006-05-01T16:39:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

I write movie, music and book reviews for a site called Toxic Universe that nobody really goes to but its own writers. So, yeah, I read other people's reviews on there, too, and when I saw the video for India Arie's "I Am Not My Hair," I thought of a TU review written by Bobby Lashley. Who points out that India spends so much time selling her image as someone who doesn't care about image that she sometimes forgets to make good music to go along with it.

"I Am Not My Hair" is a perfect example of anti-image as image. India already devoted half a verse in her debut single "Video" to proclaiming that her brain and her muse both operate independently of her hair, and now she's taking the concept to an extreme. So if anyone's interested in knowing how India has worn her hair from the age of nine on, you should check out this song. Seems like this lady is pretty hung up on the follicular side of things.

Indeed, while frolicking on a white-backdrop soundstage in this Barnaby Roper video, India toys with every piece of fur she finds in the wig closet. We get the "natural" look (a headband obscuring a Statue of Liberty-crown fan of naps), the Lil' Kim stripper weave, the demure Carmen Miranda look complete with giant flower and - most jarringly - the 1982 Joan Jett, "I Hate Myself For Loving You" hoosier rocker look. Me personally, I like the Miranda makeover best while expecting never to see India sport it again. That would be too much of an image to fit the anti-image image.

India is also joined by R+B singer Akon, who has sold his image in a similar one-note fashion. This is the guy who writes songs about being in prison and having to deal with parole officers. I'm a big fan of the ad-libs in his song "Locked Up" - "I been locked up / Cigarettes are currency / Locked up / Wear an orange jumpsuit / Locked up / Jell-O for dessert on Thursday / Locked up / Got a job in the library." These two could keep a psychiatrist busy all week:

INDIA: No, I insist, I really don't care what my hair looks like.
PSYCHIATRIST: You've been saying that for three days straight.
AKON: What about me? I went to jail!
PSYCHIATRIST: We'll get to you in a second, Akon.

Panic! At the Disco - I Write Sins, Not Tragedies (2006)

2006-04-25T12:16:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

This is the kind of thing I normally make fun of hardcore - pop-punk with goth-synth pretensions, in a video where everyone's dressed in clown makeup. I don't mean raccoon eyeshadow, I mean full-fledged circus greasepaint. But there's something about this Panic! At the Disco tune that gets me, if just because I've been waiting for a pop song to stick the word "goddamn" in the chorus.

The scene? A wedding. One family's side is empty, the other is wearing sad-mime makeup. The ceremony is proceeding normally when the lead singer - who looks like Ashton Kutcher as a lipstick and mascara-wearing circus ringmaster - reaches the song's chorus and more circus people burst through the "---damn door." This startles the o.g. mime-clowns, and the preacher doesn't know what the hell to do. This is worse than when the best man loses the rings.

Only the beginning, I'm afraid - some kind of biker strongman, chap-wearing Freddie Mercury blows (oh, he blows alright) his angel dust on the attendees. He has a magic wand, too, and he starts siccing it on random people. Instead of all hell breaking loose, everyone starts ballroom dancing. Someone plays an accordion. The bride cries and storms out. She'll be kissing one of the makeup mimes in a minute, to the groom's severe chagrin.

It all reads pretty ludicrous on paper, and it's all over in three minutes, but "I Write Sins" - the song and video (courtesy of director Shane C. Drake) - has an irresistible quality. Rarely has tragedy at the altar been this mesmerizing, demented and out-and-out goofy.

Fort Minor featuring Holly Brook - Where'd You Go (2006)

2006-04-25T12:07:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

During the two-minute intro to this video, which is of the, "I'm an American soldier, I signed up for the financial security and job training and now - whoops! - I'm stuck in Iraq fighting a corporate war," variety, I searched the Internet for the lyrics to "Where'd You Go." Which are of the, "You're my man, now you're gone, I wait around for you to call, when you do I have nothing to say," variety. And which I expected to hear from the mouth of a soulful black woman. Imagine my surprise when those lyrics sprang forth from the mouth of a big-eared white-boy rapper.

Watch the entire video, and you'll discover Fort Minor is a side project of Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park. Who has elevated adolescent whininess to an artform. The "personal" note at the end of the video thanks the three families who allowed their deep, empty loneliness to be exploited on MTV. There are the parents of the Iraqi soldier, there's an only child who is the "man of the house" now that Daddy's gone and spends all his time cleaning and wishing for a twin brother, and there's the wife of a baseball pitcher who loves the offseason and hates spring and summer.

All the while, Shinoda's walking through all their houses, rapping about how inadequate he feels when his wife goes on business trips. Lord have mercy. The whole thing makes me feel like I have a cold heart - yeah, my Dad left when I was barely in kindergarten, but I got over it. Many independent, gut-wrenching years later. We all have our coping mechanisms, sure, but most of us don't feel the need to subject the public to pseudo-emotional Evanescence outtakes.

Keyshia Cole - Love (2006)

2006-04-25T11:43:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

What's this girl still doing here? I thought we voted her off "American Idol" like three seasons ago.

All-American Rejects - Move Along (2006)

2006-04-25T11:42:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

The "Dirty Little Secret" guys are back, and the secret this time is the video director can't get enough of lead singer Tyson Ritter. Who spends about two-thirds of the video standing in front of the camera, lip synching his ass off, while the director chops and screws the backdrops and Tyson's outfits a frame at a time. We get office job shirt-and-tie Tyson, surgical-scrubs Tyson, crucial-football-game Tyson, stood up for dinner date button-up Tyson, subdivision t-shirt Tyson, family-gathering polo Tyson, girlfriend-leaving striped-shirt Tyson, hall-of-records tweed-sweater Tyson, cop-writing-him-a-ticket white-novelty-tee Tyson and several others.

These are, I guess, the crucial and mundane moments in this guy's life, repeated ad nauseum. Or they represent his different sides or different motivations. I don't fucking know. I'm out of college, I no longer have to look for deep metaphors where they shouldn't rightfully exist. Even the director gives up after awhile, closing the video with a full minute and a half of standard band performance footage, with lots of enthusiastic rented TRL kids jumping up and down in the background. This is our only chance to learn that the All-American Rejects drummer eerily resembles Conan O'Brien.

The Jets - Crush on You (1986)

2006-04-20T04:10:00.000-05:00

* (of four)

I was the child of a single working parent, so I spent all my elementary school summers at a Christian day camp. We'd climb into that non-airconditioned yellow bus every afternoon and head out to the park or zoo or bowling alley or skating rink. The last location is where I first (and second and third and fourth, etc.) heard "Crush on You" by The Jets. It was in heavy rink rotation at the time, along with "Bad Boy" and "What Have You Done For Me Lately," and I remember Donna, the little girl with Down Syndrome, singing it straight to my brother. With feeling.

Appropriately enough, this is one retarded-ass song and video, and it hasn't aged well. The Jets were a teenage Samoan family act - I've given up counting, but there are at least eight of them. The boys all sport the DeBarge geri-curl look, while the girls have color-coordinated sweaters, leotards and sport coats purchased from the wardrobe closet after the sitcom "Square Pegs" was canceled. (Sarah Jessica Parker superfans will know what I'm talking about.) One of them is wearing a bolo. Another sports a pair of purple Converse.

"Crush on You" is one of those videos where, if you've seen the first 30 seconds, you've seen the whole thing. (Shit, the backing track of the song never changes either, so if you've heard 30 seconds, you've heard the whole thing.) It's filmed on one vast but sparse soundstage with a black backdrop, haphazardly placed scaffolding and a few lopsided red flourescent light bumbs. Occasionally, the bass player tries to look tough while lip synching the chorus into the camera. It doesn't work out too well for him.

2Pac - I Get Around (1993)

2006-04-20T04:09:00.000-05:00

***1/2 (of four)

2Pac came up in the Digital Underground posse, but Shock "Humpty Hump" G and the boys barely gave him any mic time. Instead, Shock gave 2Pac the best beat of his career for "I Get Around," a super-smooth, organ and bass-heavy loop that practically shouts "summer jam." A baker's dozen years later, the song and video both hold up as quintessential party hip-hop with two guest verses that ensure that Shock G and Money B will be remembered for more than just the songs on Sex Packets. And, of course, "Kiss U Back." That ass-dumb song.

Well, shit, what do we have here anyway? The camera roams a pool party out back of someone's mansion. 2Pac - who I honestly think wears nothing but boxers and golds the entire time - and the D.U. guys are surrounded by hotties in various stages of undress. There's barecue, chips and booze. A few people jump in the pool, but Pac is more concerned with showing off his six-pound cordless phone and running from the pair of big nasties that chase him through the entire video without ever huffing and puffing. No small feat.

Small budget? Yeah. Unoriginal concept? Yeah. Hell of a lot of fun? Oh yeah. And I'll love this song until the day I die.

Makaveli - Hail Mary (1997)

2006-04-20T04:08:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

"Hail Mary" was made just after the death of 2Pac, and unlike every other posthumous Pac video that's packed full of the same video clips and stills, this one actually attempts to tell a story of its own. A horror story with a gangsta twist. A young black man who can't act is in his prison cell, talking to his older, wiser cellmate. "I was set up, O.G.!" claims the YBMWCA. "Revenge has a funny, funny way of settling the score," responds the OWC.

Cue shots of a cemetery where - you guessed it - the recently deceased Makaveli is buried. You know he and the YBMWCA were friends because they're seen in a picture together. Cue a bolt of lightning, straight through Makaveli's tombstone. Cue a simultaneous bolt of lightning straight through the picture of Makaveli and the YBMWCA.

What follows is three minutes of a Final Destination-esque pursuit of the Real Killers by fate itself, or perhaps just the unseen ghost of Makaveli. Three gang members are playing video games on a big screen TV in a mansion. They get split up. One gets run over by an unmanned car. The other gets a chandelier dropped on him. The third ends up in the pool with an electrically charged cable headed straight to the water. Revenge has been served.

"Hail Mary" has a spooky beat and a haunting chorus, but the lyrics are mostly about going crazy in the ghetto and killing people. Revenge and the penitentiary are mentioned like once, but director Frank Sacramento (who cut his teeth on a couple of Hootie videos just prior), with his dark, blue-tint visuals, took the concept and ran with it. It's half-cheeseball, half-appealing and, paired up with a song this good, the video's pretty easy to get through.

Field Mob featuring Ciara - So What (2006)

2006-04-20T03:20:00.000-05:00

** (of four)

I was going to hold off reviewing "So What" until I got a solid feel for it, but while idly writing and cruising MySpace tonight, the MTV Jams channel aired this Field Mob video four times. It's the Jam of the Week, you understand. "So What" even appeared in the middle of a block of 2Pac videos, just long enough for the late Mr. Shakur to spiritually bitch slap all three members of the group from beyond the grave.

"So What" is some softball, back-and-forth, "he said / she said," pop fluff that would suit the Black Eyed Peas well. It also kind of reminds me of the City High, "I'm a stripper, it's the only way I can make money / Shame on you for being a stripper, there's other ways to make money," song "What Would You Do" from 2001. Long story short, it's catchy but completely lightweight and - if you hear it four times in as many hours - pretty fucking annoying in the end.

Ciara, first seen gossiping on the front porch with three friends, has heard some things about her man. Who shows up to refute the shit in the front yard. He's not a ho, for one. The happy couple can't even go out clothes-shopping without female strangers getting their gossip on. They're just jealous, claims the Field Mob rapper. Then they go to an outdoor basketball game at night, he gets her a puppy, and the video repeats again in an hour.

Cee-Lo featuring Timbaland - I'll Be Around (2004)

2006-04-20T01:30:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

I love Cee-Lo and have since the "Closet Freak" video. Yeah, see, I'm not that down - I didn't know he was in Goodie Mob, didn't know who Goodie Mob even was until after I'd already bought Cee-Lo's first album. But, shit, I'm down enough to have seen Cee-Lo in concert in 2002 at the Gargoyle, which is basically a tiny room in the basement of the Washington University student lounge. Maybe 150 people in the crowd, singing and rapping along to "Gettin' Grown" and Cee-Lo's verses on "Git Up, Git Out" and "In Da Wind."*

Anyway, "I'll Be Around" is from Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine, his second album. Which renders that last paragraph completely moot. Of course. With Soul Machine, Cee-Lo had the budget to bring in big-budget producers of the moment - here, Timbaland is at the helm. Shit, with all the special effects in the Missy videos, I never noticed how goofy and uncomfortable Tim looks on camera.

Cee-Lo, meanwhile, is the epitome of ironic smooveness. He rides to a party held at his own "Love Shack" (which completely looks the part from the outside) in a Rolls or Bentley or something that has a sexy lady as chauffeur, a guy playing trumpet in the front passenger seat and a dog with a blonde weave in the back seat with Lo. By "dog," I don't mean "ugly bitch," I mean "panting canine," "licker of own genitals," "etc."

Most of the video takes place in the shack itself, where the party spills from the main room back to the kitchen, where a trombone player does his shit amidst the dirty dishes. Timbaland roams the party, while hot girls dance and little kids stare in from the outside. The vibe, as always, is one of comfort, fun and positivity. There's even graffiti on the wall that says "Be Nice or Leave." The whole thing reminds me of the scene in the Wash U student lounge basement back in 2002. Good old Cee-Lo.

* = Oh, and I have a white friend named Brian who's like 5'2" and bottom-heavy who looks just like this dude. That has to count for something.

Richard Marx - Satisfied (1989)

2006-04-20T01:26:00.000-05:00

*1/2 (of four)

Watch enough VH1 Classic late at night, and you'll be able to chart the Flood Stages Of The Richard Marx Mullet. Catch the early videos, like "Should've Known Better" and "Hold Onto the Nights," and you'll see the low-tide Marx Mullet, which stopped just above his shoulders. Check out "Right Here Waiting" or "Satisfied," and you're smack in the middle of high water. This Marx Mullet calls for a full evacuation and rescue effort. It's some Category Five shit.

But the "Satisfied" video is funny to watch for more reasons than just the Marx Mullet. You see, while Marx only charted #1 when he was singing tender ballads, it's rock songs like this that contain his unbridled adult-contemporary energy. "Satisfied" is all about determination - so, while we watch Marx make love to the camera from the empty factory set, we get to watch people from all walks of life say Fuck the status quo and reach for their dreams.

The dishwasher hurls a dinner plate like a Frisbee and jettisons the apron that's been holding him back. The temp secretary removes her glasses, opens the window and watches all the Important Papers fly away, while cracking a smile.* The underdog kid challenges the local pool shark to a match and actually beats him! The amateur boxer is so fired up his trainer has to pull him back from the punching bag, lest it explode from the force of his furious fists. Powerful stuff, you understand.

* = Then she goes up to the roof and frees all the pigeons, which I think is a little over the top even for this fucking video.

Suzanne Vega - Luka (1987)

2006-04-20T01:22:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

As far as '80s Top 40 hits about child abuse go, "Luka" is one of the better ones. (Barely missing the cutoff - Arnold Schwarzenegger's classic dance groove, "You Hit De Kid [I Hit You]" from the Kindergarten Cop soundtrack.) You remember Luka - she lives on the second floor, she has bruises all over her face because she's clumsy, she tries not to talk too loud, and she tells everyone she just walked into the door. She's ashamed to admit her daddy beats her with the iron cord, but we know the truth. And so does Suzanne Vega.

The video, if you ignore the perky animated closeups of the acoustic guitar and the abused kid's legs walking down the street, is actually fairly poignant and not too dated after two decades. Most of the video is subdued blue-and-white shots of Vega looking forlorn and fragile, walking down the streets of San Francisco. The abused child shows up every now and then, and you can barely see the bruises on his face. See, Daddy knows what's up. You have to leave the bruises where no one will see them. The "Luka" video is entertaining AND educational.

Rob Zombie - Foxy, Foxy (2006)

2006-04-20T01:12:00.000-05:00

**1/2 (of four)

The name of Rob Zombie's new album title, Educated Horses, is all up in the chorus to "Foxy, Foxy." Listen closely - Rob is singing about horses and relationships. That's right, in six short years, he's abandoned his old pal Satan and become domestic. No goth makeup, no pentagrams, just snips, snails and puppy dog tails. This is some soft-ass, generic shit, and my soft ass actually kind of likes it. Then again, I never took the whole White Zombie thing seriously in the first place. And neither did Rob.

The video opens with slo-mo shots of horses running wild and free through their barb wire-fenced territory. Just outside the corral or whatever, a jean-jacketed Zombie and his band play for an audience of no one. Oh, just wait, though. A blue Camaro with red and yellow flames pulls up, a girl with a "Foxy, Foxy" t-shirt gets out and summons cars and vans full of hotties to the show. Rob has cowgirls watching him and everything. This shit's probably playing on VH1 right now, and all of Rob's old fans will have no choice but to buy the new Avenged Sevenfold album. Tragic.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Like a Surgeon (1985)

2006-04-20T00:49:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

I like the Weird Al video for "Like a Surgeon" for the same reason I like the Airplane! and Naked Gun movies - I'm a big fucking dork. And a part of me really goes for cheeseball sight gags. There's one about every two-and-a-half seconds in the "Surgeon" video, and the song itself gets points for not being about food or television, Weird Al's two most beaten dead horses.

It's even kinda morbid subject matter for such a wholesome parody singer, this song about a tragically inept physician. The first shot has Doctor Al walking into a flatlining patient's room, hitting the EKG machine a couple times and, when that doesn't work, beating the dead man's chest. His pulse kicks right up, to the exact tempo of the song's beat. From there, gags involve fingers being cut off, chainsaws being used for surgery, an orderly slipping on a still-beating heart that fell on the floor and Al pulling a bunny out of a man's chest cavity. Shit, a guy's eyeball even pops out of his head and gets screwed back in by one of Al's band members.

That's not even the really funny part of the video. The best comes in the second half, when Weird Al manages to rip off every pseudo-sexualized Madonna dance move from the "Like a Virgin," "Burning Up" and "Lucky Star" videos, while sporting hairy midriff and all. There have been some definite lowlights in Weird Al's career (he's got a parody to "Hot in Herre" about doing his laundry, for pete's sake), but when he's on, he's on. And I'm a big fucking dork for enjoying it.

Bubba Sparxxx featuring Ying Yang Twins - Ms. New Booty (2006)

2006-04-18T22:45:00.000-05:00

***1/2 (of four)

I've always been indifferent about Bubba Sparxxx because so much of what he's done has been derivative. His first hit, "Ugly," was nothing but a retread of the vastly superior "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliott. Now, the beat to "Ms. New Booty" is nothing but a retread of David Banner's "Play." Hell, look close enough and Bubba seems kind of like a watered down, paunchier version of Paul Wall.

I really wanted to hate this song, but it has grown on me like a fungus. I was at a Starbucks the other day listening to my iPod when I started shouting out, "Booty booty booty booty rockin' everwhere!!!!" scaring the hell out of all the white folks in the store.

The video is pretty funny too, parodying an infomercial, with Sparxxx and a smarmy host selling "New Booty" to an audience of women. Open the box, and these girls get their mojo, shaking their asses with moves that would put the average stripper to shame. Another scene features one of the Ying Yang Twins playing a pastor in a church where hundreds of women testify to the goodness and greatness of "New Booty." Several fall out in the aisles, with others fanning them. Bubba also goes door to door selling new booty to several bored housewives.

After a busy day, Bubba comes home to his girlfriend, who seems to be paying him no mind, until he cracks open another box of "New Booty." And they go to the bedroom, presumably to create themselves a Bubba, Jr. All in all, the "Booty" video is enough to forgive Bubba for blatantly ripping off David Banner. -Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

R. Kelly - Ignition (2004)

2006-04-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

*** (of four)

I love Dave Chappelle and all, but ever since he did the R. Kelly "I Wanna Piss on You" parody, no musical urination joke could hope to measure up. Well, especially since this shit came out two years ago. And that's a shame, too, because Kelly makes it so easy - "Ignition" even rhymes with "pissin." Tragic, I tells ya.

Anyway, I've got my TiVo zipping through the MTV "Hit List" airing from All American Rejects, and so far every video they've picked is rap and hip-hop. Which I think indicates that even the guys in the band know the style of music they release is shit. So here's the remix to "Ignition," which is only billed by MTV as "Ignition" because, let's face it, the remix IS the original. R. Kelly took the Super Mario Warp Zone approach to his music here and skipped straight to the remix.

The "Ignition" video, from softball director Bille Woodruff and hardcore director R. Kelly, is an amalgam of shit we've seen before in hip-hop and R+B. However, since the song is so damned infectious, the video is supremely watchable. Kelly presides over a vast yellow and green-tinted club, showing them all how to throw their hands in the air and wave them like they just don't have any emotional investment in the matter.

Girls dance, guys wave empty champagne bottles around, and when the blood alcohol level hits its peak, Kelly locks the bathroom doors and pulls out the tarps just in time for the Golden Showerz floor show. And that's one more musical urination joke that just doesn't measure up.

Phil Collins - I Wish It Would Rain Down (1990)

2006-03-29T00:57:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

My friend Bambi* is possibly my favorite person to watch music videos with. Not only does she have an encyclopediac knowledge of artists, songs and clips from the ubiquitous to the thoroughly obscure, she also has the innate sense of irony that renders awful videos from decades past completely watchable.

One summer night a few years ago, Bambi and I were lying head-to-head at the intersection of the L-shaped sofa in my mom's basement, scanning through a tape I put together during one of VH1's History of Music Video A-Z weekend specials. And, somewhere in between Peter Cetera and Crowded House, we happened upon the epic black-and-white video for Phil Collins' "I Wish It Would Rain Down." And we laughed our asses off.

The "Rain" video comes on the heel's of Phil's leading man debut in the British caper flick Buster, and clearly Phil's sting from the proverbial acting bug is still bright red and throbbing. The concept here is both transparent and ambitious, as Phil plays a drummer named Bill Collins who gets the chance to sing lead and become a huge star when his band's original singer (one Jeter Gabriel, I suspect) is out sick with appendicitis.

A cheeky Eric Clapton, who plays guitar on the record and in the video, looks on as Phil - excuse me, Bill - is handed the lyric sheet for the first time and belts out "I Wish It Would Rain Down" in an empty auditorium. The band's skeptical managers/agents/record execs are silenced when they realize Bill Collins is not just a pretty boy kewpie doll with a comma-shaped wisp of sandy-colored hair but a bonafide singer and adult-contemporary star in the making.

The whole thing is just a little too autobiographically ludicrous, especially considering it's a fantasy run-through of Phil's career set in the 1930s and '40s. Which means Phil gets digitally inserted over Bogart's shoulder in a Maltese Falcon clip, plays a Southern gentleman in a Broadway production called "The Way to Heaven" and is, for one brief, uncomical second, a Marx brother. He even fucks Marilyn Monroe doggystyle - hey, as long as you're dreaming, why not?

But what really got me and Bambi laughing in the basement that July night was the notion that the Phil/Bill Collins saga should have become a trend ripped off by the other huge stars of 1990. We would have loved to see fictional accounts of the rise and fall of Bichael Jackson. Or Bem-Cee Hammer. An entire line of phony videos, completely lost. It's enough to provoke tears.

* = Which is not her given name but an alias she uses. Not because she's a stripper or wannabe porn star but because her father was shot to death by a hunter in the woods several decades ago.

TRL Episode Review - 03.20.06

2006-03-23T04:10:00.000-06:00

I live in St. Louis, and we've had one of those mild winters brought to you by the fine folks at Global Warming & Sons, Inc. Our only real snow fell on Monday night, the first day of spring, when TRL broadcast this special Spring Break keeper of an episode with guests Mary J. Blige and Sean Paul.

Two nights later, I'm sitting at home with a vodka cranberry in hand, the snow is still on the ground outside, and the MTV Hits channel is repeating Monday's episode of "Total Request Live" at 2 a.m. Which, in its ninth or so year on the air, with Carson Daly long having since flown the coop, is every bit the rehearsed-hip, screaming teenybopper, braindead commercial plugfest it ever was. The MTV people have this phony-ass, self-serving shit down to a science.

I like to keep up on the teen pop video side of things, but for reasons of time, space and sanity, I can't write full-length reviews of every new piece of chart-shimmying fluff. So tonight I'm going to review the contents of this random rerun of TRL, brought to you from New York City by hosts Susie and Vanessa. Neither is identified by last name, though I'm not sure whether that's intended to make them look cool or they're just genuinely embarrassed that they studied acting at New School University and ended up introducing Ashlee Simpson videos on "Total Request Live."

Mary J. Blige and Sean Paul are hanging out in the green room, sitting side by side on a red sofa a good foot away from each other. A bunch of ninth graders are sitting in the studio. And the countdown begins, with what Susie (or is it Vanessa?) calls "the official Spring Break anthem," from - gasp - Sean Paul. Who happens to be sitting next to Mary J. Blige on that red green room sofa and will be joining us in just a few minutes.

10. Sean Paul - Temperature
**1/2 (of four)

I don't know why Leon gave this one four stars - I guess he didn't get the memo about eMpTyV scaling back from a nine-star rating system to just four. Myself, I've never been able to take Sean Paul seriously. He reminds me of the scat singer in the reggae band that plays the pool deck of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship and has all the eight-year-old white kids barking along to "Who Let the Dogs Out" every afternoon. I'll admit, though, the "Temperature" beat is pretty contagious and mesmerizing, and I like the winter set, with its shades-of-blue horizontal kaleidoscope and dancing ladies in fur-hooded parkas. The concept of the video is to show Sean Paul capturing the attention of these rented models during every season of the year, but TRL is only seeing fit to show the winter and like a second of spring and fall in this airing. Sorry, Sean Paul - maybe when you climb to #4 on the TRL countdown they'll give you two whole seasons.

SEGMENT: Between videos, Susie wants to remind us that Sean Paul will be joining us in just a few minutes, while Vanessa wants to remind us that it's Spring Break '06. Dissolve to correspondant Damien, with his report from the party bus. Which is more like a party Call-a-Ride van, with a Colombian driver and some Mexican blankets hanging from the windows. He picks up a few frat boys, makes them over in beach gear and takes them to an indoor pool, which positively teems with rented models. They go back to the Call-a-Ride van and bang maracas and recruit an entire calypso band. Holy fuck! Damien's party bus just pulled up, and everyone's coming into the TRL studios! Stay tuned.

--

9. Madonna - Sorry
** (of four)

As startling to me as the fact that the mid-forties Madonna can still crack the TRL countdown (albeit the lower reaches) is the fact that TRL is playing less than eight seconds of it. And Vanessa (or was it Susie?) talks over all eight seconds. They don't even capitalize on the fact that Damien's driving around his party van while Madonna in the "Sorry" video is driving around her own party van. With padded walls and a bunch of guys pulled inside off the street. Maybe it's the lack of Mexican blankets in Madonna's party bus that keeps them from pointing any of this out.

SEGMENT: Susie and Sean Paul are headed downstairs to greet the guests who are exiting the party van. The tension mounts.

--

8. Aly & AJ - Rush
*1/2 (of four)

This is what the whole Radio Disney thing was created for. Aly and AJ are child actresses who are sisters and who, between them, have been on about a half-dozen soap operas, sitcoms and kids shows. And are now moonlighting with generic guitar-driven pop singles that are less music than instant cellular ringtones. (How many times will young Caitlin Smith's family dinner be interrupted when the chorus to "Rush" comes ejaculating out of her LG flip phone because Britney wants to talk about that totally cute boy Joey, I wonder?) The video sucks, true, but both Aly and AJ are gorgeous to watch in all their jailbaitocity. Underage, yes they are, so at least try to resist the dirty thoughts until the middle of the second verse, will ya guys? The girls are also apparently into watching boys surf and swinging on ropes from trees and putting sand in tins and labeling it "Hawaii." All stuff jailbait girls routinely do.

SEGMENT: Now the party bus passengers are being paraded into the TRL studio. I'm guessing they were coming up in one elevator while Susie and Sean Paul were headed down on another elevator to greet them. This is a classic sitcom mixup, and I can't wait to see how it plays out. For now, we're headed to commercial.

--

7. Jonas Brothers - Mandy (Episode One)
*1/2 (of four)

These guys look to be even younger than Aly and AJ, and from what I can tell from the 20-second TRL sample just now, they rock way harder than those Hanson kids. An extra ten beats per minute and everything. There's a guy, right, and he's kind of a geek, right, and he's sitting in class, right, and he's looking across the aisle at an incredibly hot blonde girl, right, and meanwhile, she's got a message on her phone to meet Rick in the parking lot ("and HURRY!"). Fuck, I'll never know how this resolves, but take heart - Episode Two of "Mandy" debuts later this week.

INTERVIEW: Susie is sitting in a lawn chair in one inflated kiddie pool, while Sean Paul sits next to her in another lawn chair in another kiddie pool. Apparently, if you're Sean Paul, you're not that familiar with how Spring Break works in New York, but you know that in Jamaica, where you're from, it's a time of year when the guys are interested in the girls. Hard-hitting journalism, there, Susie. You should take a cue from Chris Matthews, who is merciless on his guests when he interviews them from the confines of an inflated kiddie pool.

--

6. Fall Out Boy - A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More "Touch Me"
*1/2 (of four)

Fall Out Boy wants the world to know they were only having fun when they put out their video for the mega teen pop hit "Dance Dance." Now they're back to being serious with "Sixteen Candles," a song about a guy who regrets missing his chance with a girl. Cliched, tender-hearted subject matter, but here comes director Alan Ferguson to dress it up with an epic vampire video. It's kind of a cross between "Thriller" and the moody Jack the Ripper thriller From Hell, and while some of the black-light makeup effects are intriguing, this whole affair seems like an ego-driven waste of time.

CLIP: Sean Paul performed at the Spring Break beachhouse last week, and I fucking missed it. The clip they show - with Sean Paul damn near standing still as he swallows the microphone while being flanked by a trio of female dancers - only whets my appetite for more. I'm being sarcastic.

--

5. Ashley Parker Angel - Let U Go
* (of four)

He's a serious musician alright, that Ashley Parker Angel. So serious that he started his career in the boy band O-Town. Oh, but they didn't allow his artistic talents to flourish, so he waited a few years and wrote a few songs with a few chords, and now Angel is back to show everyone how fucking cool he actually is. The singing on this driving rock song is damn near monotone, with distorted effects on both the vocal and guitar tracks. The video is the same murky green- and brown-tinted garage basement indoor shit we've seen a dozen times before in faceless modern rock, and the camera is always earthquake-shaking. And indeed "Let U Go" does fly straight off the charts of the Richter Scale of Crap.

INTERVIEW: Damien has taken over microphone duties to introduce Mary J, who is hiding her contempt behind some giant black sunglasses. She ducks a question about how she likes to spend Spring Break by mentioning that she works all the time. I had no idea, though, that Mary J. performs in rap videos as her trash-talking alter ego Brook Lynn. Schizophrenia has always had a place in hip-hop, after all. For now, we're headed to commercial.

--

CLIP: L.L. Cool J's advice to guys on how to have anonymous sex with a stranger during Spring Break: "Pop a mint. Or something. That usually seems to work."

4. Bo Bice - The Real Thing
*1/2 (of four)

Bo Bice is taking the "American Idol" concept way too seriously. All you see in this video is the same shit you saw when he was slogging his way through the reality competition as "the rocker." Which is, Bo hiding behind his microphone stand, staring into the camera, tossing his head back and forth and letting his long, lustrous hair blow in the breeze. Only here, we get to see him do it from the top of the roof as the sun sets. And out in the street with the afternoon sun behind him. And while walking through a crowd of people who all, yes, idolize him. Talk about a graven image.

PERFORMANCE: Mary J. Blige, still hiding behind the giant black sunglasses, sings her new adult-contemporary R+B single over a karaoke backing track while the white ninth graders that comprise the audience feign interest.

--

3. Ye-Yo - So Sick
** (of four)

Another eight-second clip from R+B singer Ye-Yo (the new toy that spins on a string and spits out slow jams), who looks forlorn in a white wool hat while reminiscing about the good times he had with his lady in the snowy mountains. They made sweet love under an avalanche and everything. This Hype Williams video has the same double-letterbox gimmick as his last twenty videos, and there's lots of winter nature footage. I could count more than two hundred pine trees in the TRL eight-second clip alone.

INTERVIEW: Damien interviews Mary J. Blige, whose new album comes from the heart. And she's completely humble about the fact that she's so goddamned independent that she doesn't listen to anyone else, including the dozens of white ninth-graders who "spontaneously" applaud her manifesto of humility.

--

2. Shakira - Hips Don't Lie
*** (of four)

Shakira has just turned into this machine of convulsing body parts. She's some kind of sexual epileptic - instead of having a traditional seizure, hers occur in her hips and ass and, starting with this video, her shoulders. Seriously, I've seen Jane Fonda exert her shoulders less in her '80s workout tapes. Shakira should be sweating and shoveling Power Bars down her throat by the end of this. "Hips Don't Lie," by the way, is produced by Wyclef but sounds nothing like his stuff. Rather, it sounds like every fast Shakira song you've already heard with a few computer blips and the trumpet intro from Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz's "Deja Vu" thrown in for good measure. The video is fairly elaborate, though, with Shakira writhing solo on a chair from what looks like a Mexican prison and later leading a dozen rented hotties in a dance of veils and working it at a street carnival while Wyclef humps her leg. Which is the producer's privilege in music - Snoop Dogg should have a dime for every time Dre rubbed bone on his leg in a video.

MTV NEWS CLIP: Gideon Yago introduces a report on students who volunteer to help out the impoverished children and elderly of Costa Rica for three or four days before heading back to their air-conditioned suburbian homes with one mega-screen television and SUV per family member.

INTERVIEW: Sean Paul's new tour includes dancing and strobe lights. Oh, and he thinks Mary J. Blige brings "something to the slate" with her interpretation of "what de ladies feel."

--

1. Kelly Clarkson - Walk Away
** (of four)

Oddly appropriate it is that the winner of the first season of "American Idol" is currently perched atop the TRL charts. The former show seeks to fabricate and package a ready-made pop star, while the latter is the perfect showcase for ready-made pop stars to whore themselves out. Clarkson is a personality-free star, and her songs are all either horrible or have that vague ring of something we've heard before. Lots of times. "Walk Away" has an overfamiliar uptempo-empowerment feel to it, and Kelly herself - an acre of midriff exposed - sports a mullet pompadour borrowed from Cyndi Lauper. Clarkson lip synchs from a big wood-paneled room while dozens of extras from the beauty technician to the diner waitress to the cop on parking ticket duty sing and dance along to "Walk Away." The cop twirls his baton, the waitress sings into her ketchup bottle, and somehow it's not as painful to watch as it sounds. Maybe I've been numbed by an entire hour of "Total Request Live."

PERFORMANCE: But hold on, before we go, one more karaoke performance from Mary J., who dedicates the new song "to all the ladies who are played out in their relationship." You fucking go, girl.

House of Pain - Jump Around (1992)

2006-03-23T01:21:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

"Jump Around" is possibly the catchiest hip-hop single ever to be built around a one-note sample (shit, even the "O.P.P." piano hook was two notes), that siren-sounding bagpipe wail bound to get stuck in your cranium for hours after you hear it. It's also one of the more enduring white-boy rap songs of the early '90s, closer to Cypress Hill than Vanilla Ice.

And, mere days after I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by downing my first green beer at 8:30 and being booted from an outdoor venue in mid-afternoon for continuing to urinate wildly after I'd already backed out of the Johnny on the Spot, it's comforting to watch Everlast and the boys celebrate their Irish heritage by bouncing up and down among a massive pub crowd while the St. Pat's parade goes by in black and white outside. (Who says my sentences don't run on like they used to?)

Director David Perez keeps the entire affair manic but easy to follow - Irish-related stock footage flies by while jerky closeups of the rappers are cut in. And, a good decade-plus later, "Jump Around" is one of the few videos you'll see on the MTV cable channels that have the word "ho" intact. He's even allowed to threaten to smack an out-of-line ho. This is a cherished relic of a bygone era.

T-Pain - I'm in Love With a Stripper (2006)

2006-03-23T01:07:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

I found my dream stripper a few years back at P.T.'s in Sauget, Illinois. She was about 5'5", probably like 105 pounds, soft-featured and blonde with perky natural tits, and I fell for her immediately. She also, within twenty seconds of climbing onstage, fell on her ass. The friend I came with, who was sitting a few seats down, tossed out a sympathy dollar and beat a hasty retreat, while I settled into my chair with fanned-out bills at the ready. The dream stripper, upon regaining her balance, headed over my way. "That guy's an asshole," she whispered in my ear, smashing her right nipple into my cheek. "He laughed at me!" I told her not to mind my friend, he was half-drunk and was only trying to console her. "I fucking hate coming on after a black girl," she added, her thighs wrapped around my lower back at this point. "The stage is always slippery from that shit they put in their hair."

Well, the P.T.'s dream stripper would definitely want to steer clear of T-Pain's dream stripper. Who has a fair amount of product in her hair and is moving into the house next door with cardboard boxes full of fake-looking money. You also have to wonder if the agent from Konvict Realty who sold her the house stripped out all the copper pipes before she moved in. The Konvict Realty folks aren't quite as reliable as, say, Century 21 staff.

The stripper neighbor drops her keys, and T-Pain waits until cover of darkness to let himself into the house. Where her extremely pink bedroom is full of tiny little teddy bears and a stripper pole. Let's see, T-Pain also follows her to work, where we get some unsexy offstage laying around by the dancers and rappers, who seem way more interested in counting their money than doing the nasty. Director Scott Franklin also includes more loving slo-mo shots of rims, neck jewelry and T-Pain's multi-hued dreadlocks than titties and pert ass cheeks, which makes me want to turn this shit off and get back to P.T.'s with my asshole friend.

Oh, by the way, I can't stand this goddamned song either.

Cody Chesnutt - Look Good in Leather (2002)

2006-03-23T00:46:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

You may remember Cody Chesnutt from the Roots single "The Seed" ("I push my seed in her bush for life"). Or, like me, maybe you saw him open for Erykah Badu a few years back and were struck by how similar his look was to Mos Def and '70s "Hustle" singer Van McCoy. And how similar his voice was to Terence Trent D'Arby. And how similar some of his rambling between-song sermon speeches were to the slow moments at a Prince concert.

Yet for all the similarities, Cody Chesnutt has an original appeal - an amalgam of retro-rock, classic soul, '80s pop and newer hip-hop sensibilities. "Look Good in Leather" is a rhythm guitar driven pop track that is completely obnoxious on first listen and then lodges in your head and grows. After awhile, you realize how damn stupid the song is and how much you suddenly can't stop singing along to it.

Chesnutt's album, The Headphone Masterpiece, was recorded in his basement on damn near no budget. The album title practically gives away the fact that Cody was too poor to afford speakers to play his shit on. Likewise, I think the Donray Von video for "Leather" was taped on a camcorder and edited on a top-loading VCR. Chesnutt plays this song for a racially diverse crowd in a suburban parking lot somewhere. The sign for the 7-Eleven looms in the background. And no doubt Cody bummed a buck thirty-nine from the audience to get himself a Bacon Cheeseburger Big Bite when the shoot was over.

The entire affair is half-assed beyond belief, and Lord knows why Donray Von decided to cut in footage of a motorcycle gang rolling through the alley behind the Burger King. But just like the song itself, you can tell the anonymous people in this video are just here to have a good time. Budget and talent are entirely incidental.

Mya - Fallen (2004)

2006-03-23T00:15:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

How seriously does this Mya song want to be taken? Well, part of the chorus invokes the Medic Alert bracelet catchphrase, "I've fallen and I can't get up." Indeed, not only are hip-hop and R+B producers sampling old song hooks, drumbeats and synth riffs, they've also decided to sample afternoon soap opera ad campaigns from the early 1990s. Whatever works.

"Fallen," a tepid pop song that basically never gets up, also lifts its backing track practically wholesale from the Pharcyde classic "Runnin'." Which drew heavily from the track "Saudade Ven Correndo," as recorded by the Stan Getz Jazz Samba Encore. How's that for pedigree?

I wouldn't give "Fallin'" the time of day if not for the presence of Mya, R+B music's sexiest octaroon in history. I loved her in 1998, when she was a TRL idol, and I love her now, when she can't seem to get the attention of the mainstream audience no matter how many baths she takes on camera. Don't worry, Mya. You still have my support. I'd hate to see you fall on hard times and, say, turn to hardcore pornography to pay the bills. That would just devastate me. And my fully stocked supply of Astroglide.

The plot of this Darren Grant video? Mya is stalking a brotha who doesn't appear to know she's alive. She follows him out of work, stares him down while he's getting the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal from the newstand and races down to the subway when he gets in his car. All the while Mya is singing sensually into the streetposts and subway railings, looking unbelievably hot and comically pathetic at the same time.

Cut to the brotha arriving at home and Mya arriving at home. Whu-whu-what?! They're next-door neighbors! Soon enough she's turning his doorknob, uninvited, and she sneaks upstairs to take that bath I was talking about earlier. That's when the underwater mermaid dance interlude comes into play. I'm not joking.

Mya disappears just as the stalkee arrives upstairs and notices the song's title written in the bathroom mirror fog. Then he gets himself a three-foot long silly straw and sucks down every drop of her bathwater. This bit was also stolen from the Medic Alert bracelet ads of the early '90s. Pity no one can be original anymore.

MORE FROM MYA:

"Movin' On" (1998)
A distraught Mya receives a note ("If Malik's your boyfriend, he wasn’t last night.") and has to excuse herself from class so she can sing mournfully in the hallway.

"My First Night With You" (1999)
Man, could I take this light-skinned beauty home to Mama. I bet even David Duke could convince his mother that Mya just fell asleep on the tanning bed.

"Free (Cocktease Pt. II)" (2000)
Mya even looks sexy as a 1980s roller rink queen, tearing it up on the hardwood and flirting with sexy ol’ Jerome at the snack bar.

"Best of Me" (2000)
I’m sorry; I just masturbated through this entire video. Was I supposed to review it?

DMC featuring Sarah McLachlan - Just Like Me (2005)

2006-02-19T05:43:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

There’s something innately hilarious about this pairing - Daryl “DMC” McDaniels of Run DMC crash lands in VH1ville with a rap song featuring Sarah McLachlan singing the chorus to “Cats in the Cradle,” the Harry Chapin wimp radio classic famously covered in my high school days by Ugly Kid Joe. Some pedigree.

And it’s impossible to make fun of, too, because “Just Like Me” is an ode to the trials and joys and identity crises of adoption. I guess it makes sense, though. This DMC song sprung from the loins of two white parents - Chapin and McLachlan. Adoption is the only explanation.

Add in some generic Rick Rubin-esque hard rock guitar chords and DMC’s “whoo!” cries during the chorus, and this never stands a chance of cracking even B-level. A lot of DMC’s prose and delivery is clunky, too, but you can’t deny the sheer amount of emotion behind the project. DMC didn’t find out he was adopted until right after the Jam Master Jay shooting, so this is a relatively fresh compound wound.

The video is nothing special - we see the 1964 flashback scene of DMC being born in the hospital, present self watching his newborn self get snatched from the arms of a teenage mother. There’s a sparse, heaven-looking white set, an empty performance theater set and a long orphanage bedroom with a stained-glass backdrop.

McLachlan wanders the entire thing looking like a drugged-up earth mother. Eventually, there’s a lineup of kids singing along, and the closing shot has DMC singing with his own son - who’s dressed like the 1986 incarnation of his dad. Cheeseball, but worth a glance.

Madonna - Sorry (2006)

2006-02-19T05:09:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

Madonna and a trio of racially diverse friends 26 years her junior - one of them carrying a giant boombox over her shoulder - meet up with a big mama who's driving a big white panel van. Climb in, party amongst the purple neon and spend the next few minutes removing clothing*, driving around town and tossing unsuspecting (but, I'm sure, incredibly grateful) guys into the van with them.

There's room for all, because Madonna's big white panel van has the Snoopy's Doghouse option package. The thought of discriminating on looks is apparently irrelevant - before too long a Napoleon Dynamite clone gets hauled aboard to do his spazz dance and a giant slob in a cabbie hat gets his bare belly tickled by Maddy's girls. Madonna doesn't care about age, either. There's a little kid in the van and a couple guys who were actually born within ten years of her.

Beware the wank-happy subplot involving a trio of male models with shirts pulled back around their necks who want a piece of Madonna and her posse of Gulf War babies. Not in a sexual way, either (trust me); the guys just want to kick the girls' asses in a gender-war dance contest. Which occurs in a steel cage toward the end of the video. Masturbators everywhere will be ecstatic to learn that Madonna can still put her legs behind her head, although this move instantly turns her bones to dust and causes the on-set paramedics to scamble to the scene.

* = Most of the dancers show off midriff and maybe a little more, but Madonna has pooped out enough kids that she's finally crossed over into one-piece territory. Lots of leotards and corsets and silver suit jackets.

HiM - Wings of a Butterfly (2005)

2006-02-19T04:28:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

The band HiM comes across a lot better in a spooky music video than it does onstage, where the antics of the guitarist (whose dreadlocks swallow his upper body whole) and the heavily tattooed frontman (who resembles an unholy genetic trinity of John Mellencamp, Adam Ant and Billie Joe Armstrong) are not to be taken seriously for a second. His Infernal Majesty is all gothed out and Satan-friendly, but how badass can you be when your breakthrough song is about butterfly wings? Even if it is about ripping off those wings.

No, "Wings" is more pop than anything, and it's a wildly catchy pop song at that. The uncredited sixth member of the band? The omnipresent HiM logo, which is projected from the top of a skyscraper, Batsignal-style, and on the back wall of the big empty building the band is lip synching in. It's even embedded in someone's retina during an extreme closeup and hangs like a Public Enemy wall clock around the neck of one of the band members.

Now you're wondering what this logo looks like. Try a pentagram with Mickey Mouse ears on top - it's hard to imagine which party this association would offend more, Michael Eisner and the Disney Corp. or the Devil himself. (SATAN: I know I've dealt humanity some low blows, but come on - Bambi 2?! Who gets shot this time, Bambi's baby brother? Do they roast Thumper on a rotating spit? Christ, how derivative.)

The outdoor sequences in this Meiert Avis video - mostly of grainy, dark-blue-tinted swirling shots of the band logo being projected out into the night sky - are more convincing than the indoor scenes, which have the guys in the band performing into odd apparati that look like press conference microphones merged with unusual dentist chair accessories. There are also a lot of giant perpendicular magnifying lenses. You'll have to see the video to know what I'm talking about.

Just set your DVR for the "T-Minus Hits" show on MTV2 - "Wings of a Butterfly" is currently perched at a robust #6 on the countdown, between Kanye West and Busta Rhymes. And, sorry Infernal Majesty guys, I know you sacrificed a lot of virgin goats to the Dark Lord to get this sound, but I swear this song is the '00 decade's "Counting Blue Cars." Which was a soft-ass pop song about telling all your thoughts to a female God. The whole thing's come full circle, and Bambi's little bro just got shot in the head.

Black Eyed Peas featuring Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Cee-Lo and John Legend - It's Like That (2006)

2006-02-19T03:57:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

The Black Eyed Peas have gone blander than the actual peas in a Weight Watchers TV dinner, thanks to their TRL-happy frontwoman Fergie. But it's hard not to support the hip-hop collective in "It's Like That" - the BEP guys have procured three of the thinking man's greats (Tip, Kweli and Cee-Lo) and returned, here at least, to their pre-Ferg routine of just spitting flows off each other to an appealing beat. "It's Like That" comes closer to resembling the spirit of the Peas' first two albums than any of the act's recent singles.

Only problem is, this whole affair seems like an all-star Sprite commercial. The clip-art computer animation backdrops swirl, slide, pan and flip with the rapper's bodies stashed throughout the frames. Lots of animated, pulsing speakers, reprinted lyrics and, at least three times, a huge Black Eyed Peas logo. Just so we don't forget whose video this is. Also, if you have the super-expanded-basic cable package, you might be thrown off by the video's abstractly painted city buildings in reds and browns look like the between-videos promos you see on the MTV Jams and VH1 Soul channels.

Q-Tip's verse basically advertises the Peas and hip-hop in general, and Cee-Lo never gets to do more than sing along with one chorus (Legend gets the other) and clutch his toy-breed dog while wearing a pink suit coat and matching tie. But every BEP member's verse is a good one, and Talib's tops them all. Unnecessary after all this self-promotion, though - the closing "X is in the house, Y's in the house, my man Z is in the house," name checking of everyone involved in the project and several others who aren't there. Come on, guys, save that shit for the liner notes. We don't need a roll call of all your friends.

Santana featuring Steven Tyler - Just Feel Better (2005)

2006-02-18T02:03:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

It's sad when a gimmick wears thin. Santana's big formulaic comeback has jumped the shark. It's not fun anymore, it's a plodding listen that requires effort and rewards little - like the season of "Growing Pains" where they added Leonardo Dicaprio as the homeless adopted kid and every episode suddenly became a Very Special "Growing Pains." Santana has blown through the lighthearted antics of Rob Thomas, Lauryn Hill and Michelle Branch (twice!) and come to a screeching halt with this faux-emotional Steven Tyler ballad.

"Just Feel Better" takes all the old cliches of the Santana comeback video - where Carlos mainly stands in the corner and plays guitar while the storyline centers around actors 35 years younger than him - and crosses it with the cliches of the Aerosmith comeback video. Where Tyler hangs out in high school hallways and jams his tongue down the windpipe of a model who's 35 years younger than him.*

Storyline - younger model's old-lech schoolteacher pats her on the ass after a student-teacher conference and stirs up some long-buried anger issues. She promptly decks the teacher as we flash back to the model as a young girl, hiding behind the staircase while her abusive father runs out on her mom.

Let's see, the model also falls in love with one of her classmates, who's her own age and who wonders why they have to make out to the soundtrack of two musicians whose combined age is 113. And he dies a minute and a half later in a car accident. Like I said, it's a Very Special Santana Video, and Santana is sporting a Very Special Moustache And Stocking Cap throughout.

* = Their makeout scene is downright hot, Tyler and the decades-younger model - they have on the same shade of Revlon Foundation and everything, and Tyler's Peach Passion lip gloss blends just perfectly with the younger model's Wild Watermelon.

Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten (2005)

2006-02-18T01:28:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

Natasha Bedingfield has been popular in England for months or years or since they took prayer out of schools, some undetermined period of time. But Bedingfield had a hard time smashing through stateside. Until her fluffy white-girl hip-pop song "These Words" crossed over (an uber-guilty pleasure of mine, believe it or not, the kind of track I skip over other songs to get to) last fall. Twice as successful was the follow-up, "Unwritten," even fluffier and white-girl and this time features a big, glowing gospel choir.

So be forewarned - this video will, in a way not seen since "The Wonderful World of Disney" was canceled, attempt to pull a terrorist hijacking on your smile muscles. It's like a four-minute fucking toothpaste commercial, with Bedingfield riding an elevator up and down the same building and observing Real People from the corner. Smilers, laughers, cryers, lovers, families, more smilers, more smilers, more laughers.

Rest assured there's also a sequence with little smiling kids outdoors, playing in the spray of a popped fire hydrant. Eventually, the gospel choir comes marching down the hallway, gunning down innocent bystanders with their contagious happiness, and it's just a goddamned joyous bloodbath. It's all just so cheesy, but between the lines of the obviousness and calculation of the cheer, there's something intangibly appealing about this shit. To me, anyway. And I hardly ever smile.

L.L. Cool J featuring J.Lo - Control Myself (2006)

2006-02-18T01:22:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

Hype Williams has used his double-letterbox gimmick - one video in the traditional middle widescreen portion of your TV box and another concurrent one on the top and bottom - for probably twenty videos in a row. Which makes me wonder two things, a) How far is he going to run this format into the ground? and, b) How far behind are the imitators?

So far I haven't seen any double-letterbox clones, aside from Hype's nineteen clones of his own original. Can you copyright or patent a video technique like this? Or did Hype just film and edit a shitload of these all at the same time and no one else has caught up yet? Either way, it's not bad unless you see it over and over and over. Which is starting to happen more frequently, with no relief in sight.

Hype's most recent double-letterbox is "Control Myself." L.L. Cool J is all over "Total Request Live" and VH1, promoting this perfectly bland effort with J. Lo. The Jermaine Dupri track has a Missy-demo feel to it, while L.L.'s rap flow about the girl he wants to jump on ("The afterparty is on my body?" Come on...) is delivered in a decades-old, "It's Tricky" cadence. And, Jenny From the Block, I know you got there first, but now it seems like you're imitating Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Which makes your singing career that much sadder.*

The video's some B-minus fluff, too, consisting entirely of fashion-shoot soundstage stuff with L.L., J.Lo, J.D. and a half-dozen other sets of initials mugging and dancing on an underfurnished soundstage. There's the gray-tinted backdrop, the green-tinted backdrop, the blue-tinted backdrop, the white-tinted backdrop, the black spiral-pattern backdrop. Nothing too exciting.

But I do feel L.L.'s pain when he's surrounded by J.Lo and the other hot-ass dancers and laments, over and over, "It's hard to control myself, it's hard to control myself." I've got the same libidinal dilemma when my hand plunges into a full-pound bag of Sour Cream and Cheddar Lay's. Got a hearty lust for grease, I do.

* = Take solace in this, though - Fergie will no doubt imitate you by starting her own movie career, beginning with the Hollywood romantic comedy House-Cleaner in Honolulu.

Madonna - Die Another Day (2002)

2006-02-15T02:25:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

This James Bond soundtrack video likely pleased fans and detractors of Madonna, considering she spends most of the music video being tortured by Kim Jong Il and his Army-uniform-clad band of minions. Yeah, Madonna's some kind of renegade spy here - once she married Guy Ritchie and made that "What It Feels Like For a Girl" video, she switched her image to badass mode for a little bit. Peaking here, naturally.

Hauled into a grimy, green-gray interrogation room, a tank-topped Madonna is left alone to writhe and grimace atop various torture devices. Then Il and the boys return to shove her head into ice water, strap her down to an electric chair and slice up her torso. Meanwhile, in a concurrent death match in a bright-white armory/museum, two Madonnas battle each other. One is dressed in white, the other in black. I'll let you guess which one the viewer is made to root for.

And, while the camp value is high here, for sure, Madonna more or less pulls it off. Except for the sequence in which Evil Madonna breaks into a glass case housing the actor who played Odd Job, grabs his razor-sharp bowler off his head and frisbees it across the room, where it decapitates a fluffy cat puppet and whizzes by Good Madonna's cheek. Oh well, she gets points for creating a song I like (with her French techno-blip producer Mirwais) and for never being referred to as Agent M. Mariah Carey already laid claim to that title in her goofy spy video, 1997's "Honey."

Sheryl Crow - Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

2006-02-15T02:21:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

I haven't seen the James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies since opening weekend, but I'm pretty sure this entire video is pretty much the opening credits sequence with the credits removed and a black-turtlenecked Sheryl Crow inserted. Crow spends the video waving her arms around half-conscious and staring into the camera in closeup.

Not to worry, there are probably a dozen other, sexier dancers writhing along at various points on the soundstage. After all, James Bond is never satisfied with just one woman per movie. It's usually like three or four, and he never wears a rubber. Bond's illegitimate children number in the high dozens.

FIVE MOST BORING IMAGES:

5. Sheryl standing on an outstretched, giant human palm.
4. Sheryl standing on a pursed, giant pair of human lips.
3. Sheryl standing on an upturned, giant human foot.
2. Sheryl standing on James Bond's turgid, surprisingly average-sized member
1. Sheryl standing. Period.

Outkast - Land of a Million Drums (2002)

2006-02-15T02:16:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

Now, there's no way in hell I'd pay to watch either of the new-breed, live-action Scooby Doo movies - a computer-animated Scooby? WTF?! - but for four minutes, this cheeky Outkast video makes the franchise seem almost halfway tolerable. Not to mention, the track is bouncy and lovable in a spooky yet perky way, and half the song's lyrics are about getting high in the Mystery Machine with Shaggy.

Andre 3000 rolls around in a vintage convertible while Shaggy rides bitch in the Mystery Machine with Big Boi driving. It's not that Big Boi is worried about Shaggy's judgment abilities or reaction time, he's just sick of the red-eyed bastard consistently driving ten miles under the speed limit. There's also a party in a haunted, cobwebby mansion while Dre plays pot-and-pan drums with wooden spoons.

Matthew "Shaggy" Lillard hams it up here, to decent effect, while Freddie "Fred" Prinze Jr. is nowhere to be seen. He was probably deep into a reading of the script for She's All That 2 when this video was being filmed.

Outkast even builds their closing refrain out of an age-old "Scooby Doo" catchphrase, spouted by every deposed real-estate scammer villain on the show: "I woulda got away with it if it wasn't for them meddlin' kids." Proving even throwaway, phoned-in songs from prime-era Outkast put most of the rest of these clowns to shame.

Kanye West - Jesus Walks (2004)

2006-02-15T00:42:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

I'm trying to fucking figure out what it is - I don't have a lot of respect for Kanye West in interviews and ego and overall rap ability and relevance, but every time the bastard makes a serious song and/or video, I lap it right up. "Jesus Walks" is probably my favorite example. Even though I know enough theology to know Kanye's interpretation of the New Testament is muddled and oddly self-centered at best. All through the song, West acts like he's talking about/to Jesus, but he's really talking about/to himself. A lot.

It's foolish shit, and to be taken with a grain of salt, but it kind of pulls on my emotion nontheless. Emotion can create the illusion of meaning. And "Jesus Walks," which cops a haunting, classic gospel hook, is still my favorite Kanye, and the video is up to par. Provided you fall, like I did, for the clip's grainy black-and-white mood. "Jesus Walks" has a timeless, culture-crossing monochrome beauty, in a way. Hard to turn off, if I'm the one with the remote.

That's not to say you might not chuckle as you see Kanye leave the front door of his project tenement building while Jesus, who's patiently sitting out in the hall waiting to personally guard Kanye, scrambles to his feet and hustles to get the rapper's back. This Christ seriously acts like a high-maintenance star's handler on serious speed, a true music video Messiah.

J.C. follows Kanye all through the video as he wanders the hood and, just so he doesn't get rusty on the whole miracle-working thing and get bored, Christ even makes food appear like magic in Kanye's refrigerator. I'm not joking. Name-brand and everything. No Jennie-O at this turkey feast!

The "Footsteps" poem gets referenced at one point, and there are choreographed kid dancers who break their steps when they see Herr Kanye walk out of the house. They seriously drop everything to run over and greet him with admiration. Jesus wisely stays out of that shot. He's inside, divinically refilling the toilet paper and unclogging the bathtub drain, like a good friend.

Kanye even delivers a frantic verse from the pulpit. It's the ego element that really drives this piece, you're reminded when the video closes on a two-shot of Kanye and Christ, with Kanye out front and Christ over his shoulder, looking off-camera in a Bergman-esque three-quarters shot. Kanye's staring into the lens while a white, cursive-script Thank You is imposed on the bottom of the screen.

Is that Thank You... from Kanye? To Jesus? No way. Thank you is what Kanye - who looms large in the shot, remember - hears the people gratefully projecting back at him for his brilliant, ghetto-redeeming opus. Of course, Kanye couldn't have done it without the divine protection of, shoot, what's that guy's name again? That olive-skinned white boy with the crown of thorns who's perched just over Kanye's shoulder. Pedro Something.

Sean Paul - Temperature (2006)

2006-02-15T00:38:00.000-06:00

**** (of four)

I've always been a fan of the Dancehall genre, and the thumping beat of "Temperature" hasn't been able to escape my head since I've heard it. Sean Paul always manages to find a group of leggy beauties to perform physically impossible dance moves (it's always funny to see overweight girls attempting to imitate them), and this video is no exception.

The "Temperature" video has Sean Paul and an army of dancers dancing through the four seasons in front of obviously fake but colorful backgrounds. In the autumn, dancers shake it in front of trees with falling leaves, and in winter, the dancers don winter coats in the fake snow. On to spring, as rain starts to fall down, and finally summer - introduced with a squirting bottle of lotion - where the dancers strip down to bikinis and Sean Paul throws beach balls at them.

This is a great video to watch while we freeze our asses off in the winter. Yes, it's a frigid 50 degrees here in Tampa Bay. Stop laughing, that's cold! I’m going to try and review "Unpredictable" for you really soon.

-Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

Amerie - 1 Thing (2005)

2006-02-15T00:36:00.000-06:00

**** (of four)

This sexy Afro-Asian beauty channels her inner Beyoncé and sashays her way through the "1 Thing" video, which perfectly captures the song's energetic, percussion-heavy feeling. Amerie dances in front of a band - with lots of drums, of course - and background dancers wearing some of the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen.

Some versions of this video have clips from the movie Hitch because the song was originally released from that movie’s soundtrack. But Amerie smartly rips down a canvas playing shots of Will Smith and Eva Mendes and dances some more. There are also some parts in which various versions of Amerie in silhouette dance behind a red background, while the real Amerie dances in the foreground. Sex-ay…

"1 Thing" draws heavy inspiration from the Go-Go sound of Amerie’s and producer Rich Harrison’s native Washington, D.C. Too bad the rest of her album, Touch was slept on, because it's great. Of course, the question is - what is that "1 Thing" that Amerie is looking for? I pray to God it's me.

-Guest Reviewer Leon Bracey

Saul Williams - Black Stacey (2004)

2006-02-15T00:26:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

Does anyone remember? Was it Fear of a Black Hat or CB4 or "In Living Color" or "Saturday Night Live" that had a parody rap act performing a song whose repeated hook and entire lyrical focus was, "I'm black y'all, black y'all / Blickity-blickity-black y'all"?

It was overstated humor of the absurd, and like a decade and a half later, here's Saul Williams with damn near the same hook, except more prolonged and pronounced. And meant to be taken seriously.

The Williams style is half-spoken word, half-jazz, half-hip-hop, half-reggae and half-industrial. That's four halves, and as Saul constantly reminds you, each half is non-Caucasian: "They say you're too black / Man I think I'm too black / Do you think I'm too black? / I think I'm too black / I think I'm too black / I think I'm too blacka-blacka-blacka-black."*

Yeah, the lyrics here are all about confessional time, and Saul pulls it off. This street poet who has played Lollapalooza is still insecure about being chided in school for the color of his skin. Apparently, someone kidded around and called him "Chuck D" in sixth grade, and he hasn't forgotten it. (Though, when you think about it, wouldn't calling someone "Flavor Flav" be the bigger insult?)

And, as the song title reveals, he apparently was called "Black Stacey" by his adolescent peers. Which to me sounds like a name the Mattel corporation would give to one of Barbie's friends. Kind of a C-minus on the junior high insult scale but, I suppose, something you wouldn't forget when, say, you were trying to write your breakthrough single.

But I'm here to talk about the video, right? Ostensibly. Well, Black Stacey is indeed black - about four Hershey bars out of five on the complexion scale. In case you forgot that, he paints tribesman dots all over his face and refuses to wear any clothing over his beltline.

"Black Stacey" is low-medium budget but looks fucking rich and classy, lighting and color-wise. Half the time, Williams is seen in a three-quarters shot, medium close-up, with half of his face plunged into, er, darkness. Saul also stands outdoors in an old-school red leather jacket, holding a vintage boombox while performing in front of a dingy blue-steel-ribbed warehouse.

If this doesn't grab you at all the first time - if you're thinking, whiny fucker, too repetitious, get over it, kind of laughable at heart, watch it again. If you still think that, watch it a third time. Then get high, get drunk and sentimental, get in confessional mode. Watch it four times with a good buzz on, and you'll feel what this guy's saying. Hypothetically, of course.

* = Saul, you should be glad political correctness hasn't completely taken over - imagine the syllable crunch as a lyricist if you were forced to call yourself African American: "They say you're too African American / Man I think I'm too African American / Do you think I'm too African American? / I think I'm too African American / I think I'm too African American / I think I'm too Afri-Afri-Afri-African American."

Howard Jones - Everlasting Love (1989)

2006-02-15T00:13:00.000-06:00

* (of four)

If you don't remember Howard Jones, he had one good song - it was called "Things Can Only Get Better." You might not know it by its title, though, but by its hook, which went WOAH woah woah-oh-oh whoa-WHOA-whoa-oh-oh.* Anyway, this is not that song, this is "Everlasting Love," which is also not the perennially remade "Everlasting Love" you're thinking of. No, this is a midtempo, third-of-the-way-catchy '80s new wave/pop/British art fag track with a classically cheesy video.

A mummy pops out of an Egyptian sarcophagus on a white soundstage while Jones is wearing an über-loud red/green/yellow/blue/purple suit with bigger-than-average shoulder pads. He tells a love story starring a mummy and his femummy as props placed around Jones shift, one per shot, and we see second-unit shots of the mummy couple walking in the park, sticking Pop Tarts in the toaster, trying on boxer shorts in a mall changing room. The mummy couple even plays racquetball. All the things people do. That's why it's supposed to be fucking funny.

Oh, and if you've never seen a mummy who's holding a briefcase step into the backseat of a cab being driven on the left side of the road, well, watch the VH1 Classic channel a little more in the middle of the night. You're in for a treat, my friend. -AH

* = Not to be confused with the "Life in a Northern Town" hook Hey-oh Ma-ma-ma / Hey-eee-doo-bee-die-yah / Hey-oh-ma-ma-mee / Hey-ay-ay-ie-yo or the Enigma "Return to Innocence" hook Hyiiii-yiii-HIIIII OHHHH-hi-HI-hi / Ohh-oh-oh hiiigh / OH-hi-yo-hi-hi yo-hi-hieee. Different hook.

Cher - If I Could Turn Back Time (1989)

2006-02-15T00:12:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

This video has burned out more heterosexual retinas than could ever be measured empirically. Here, Cher's ultimate fantasy is realized - to perform on an aircraft carrier at night, while she's surrounded by dozens of guys fresh out of high school. Cher lip synchs while crouching astride a series of cylindrical heavy-artillery props. All while sporting a fright wig sowed together from the carcasses of seventeen ebony poodles. And while wearing a gauzy black leotard that is completely transparant save a Band-Aid-wide black line running across her nipples and muffin. Which - the muffin - is shaved into the cartoonish shape of Sonny Bono in a drop-top flying into a robust sycamore. I'm telling you, Cher's a sick fucking bitch. Every time she thinks about Sonny's death, she gets off. Hard.

2006 Grammy Awards - Hours 2 Through 4

2006-02-09T16:09:00.000-06:00

Being as the eMpTyV blog focuses on the flashy visual side of pop music past and present, it's only natural that I squeeze in a post about the 2006 Grammy Awards. However, my TiVo box had a conflict with the first hour - it seems "American Idol" is a hell of a lot more important on the priorities list, and priorities are priorities. So I missed that first sixty minutes, when apparently Madonna crashed a Gorillaz performance by popping out of a cartoon version of herself and humping on a guy and a girl. Here are the highlights from the rest of the bisexual humping at this year's Grammies...

HOUR TWO

-U2 wins the Best Rock Album award, and frontman/AIDS-eradicator Bono gives a convoluted acceptance speech comparing the record industry to the circus - even if you're the bearded lady or the guy shoveling up the elephant dung, it's good just to be there. The mental image of all five members of U2 plummeting from a tightrope and being eaten by lions gives me an odd feeling of comfort.

-Paul McCartney performs with his band while playing a psychedelic blue-screen piano. His massive drummer, Abe Somebody, makes his (i.e. the drummer's) job look impossibly easy by playing the drums and a pair of percussion shakers at the same time. McCartney somehow performs a version of "Helter Skelter" that sounds stripped of its hippiedom and safe for the off-key finger snaps of The Man.

-Jennifer Love Hewitt presents with the Black Eyed Peas, who immediately mention that they won a Grammy award earlier that was not televised ("Just so y'know, U2 and John Legend didn't get ALL these muhfuckas this year"). Sure enough, Legend wins for Best R+B Vocal, and his speech, like the rest of his album, is accompanied only by solo piano and induces sleep. Meanwhile, one of the Peas is spotted in the background asking Hewitt if she wants to be their new girl singer, because the old one looks too damn much like a mulatto Kirstie Alley.

-Mariah Carey, in a pre-performance taped segment, declares, "I'd like to thank the penises of the following artists, without whom I would not be here today - Tommy Motolla, Walter Afanassief, Jermaine Dupri, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Jay-Z, Bizzy Bone, Krayzie Bone, Mother Love Bone, some sculptor I met on the subway once..." Fifteen minutes later, she's performing "We Belong Together," working her absolute windpipiest to blow the shit out of the song. Her efforts earn her a single "spontaneous" round of applause as she runs through more scales than Weight Watchers. During her second song, she manages to out-shout an entire gospel choir, simply because her microphone is turned up louder than theirs.

-Michael Buble presents with Teri Hatcher. I can't decide which is the more desperate housewife, and I spend the duration of their appearance trying to figure out whether I can see through the boob part of Hatcher's dress or not. I never reach a conclusion. Best Pop Vocal goes to Kelly Clarkson, who garnered the necessary number of votes from viewers calling 1-888-GRAMMY-01. Clarkson thanks Jesus and God but not Simon Cowell, the third member of the Holy Trinity. Clarkson does give a shout-out to Bonnie Raitt, who is then seen in reaction shot sporting a shit-eating grin on her face like, "Yeah, thanks, I'm here because I have songwriting and musicianship skills. You owe your career to a reality TV show on the fucking Fox network."

-A barely recognizable Jenna Elfman pays tribute to country great Owen Bradley, who was instrumental in the careers of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and the mammy from the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons. Cut to a performance from diminutive singer Keith Urban, who plays from atop a see-through Rubik's Cube.

-Santana talks? That's the big surprise of the night. I'm surprised he doesn't let Rob Thomas or Michelle Branch make his presentation speech for him. On the other hand, when Linkin Park and Jay-Z win for Best Rapped/Sung Collaboration, an obviously stoned Jay-Z declines his turn at the microphone and in fact appears to be questioning his decision to work with Mike Shinoda and the boys.

HOUR THREE

-Dave Chappelle is set to present and, ever since seeing him on Oprah last week, everyone's wondering if he's really gonna come out and talk because you know that's a lot of stress and a lot of people are watching and oh shit what if the teleprompter fucks up and goddamn he can't get tongue-tied in front of Bonnie Raitt and Dave Grohl that could ruin his career and fifty million bucks isn't enough to allay any of those fears. It turns out Chappelle has nothing to worry about - he cracks a joke and Tom Hanks spits a mouthful of grape Kool-Aid across four rows of academy members.

-Mega-tribute to funk recluse Sly Stone begins with Joss Stone/John Legend/Some Other Guy collective trying to out-adlib each other with oooh's, ohh's, uuuh's and uhhh's. Then Fantasia Barrino and a mulleted Keith Richards/Seth Meyers lookalike guy singer butcher "If You Want Me To Stay," and Ciara and Maroon 5 sing the, "There is an orange one who can't accept the tangerine one who doesn't like the fuschia one who hates the burnt sienna one," verse from "Everyday People." Then BEP's Will.I.Am raps over "Dance to the Music" while claiming that he's "dancin' onstage like a black Fred Astaire." Cowboy Troy does "You Can Make It If You Try." Steven Tyler and Joe Perry butcher "I Wanna Take You Higher," and Sly Stone has his last chance to get out of the entire proceedings unscathed. Chappelle tries to give him pointers on how to vanish when the industry is throwing money at you, but Stone comes out anyway in a big bleached mohawk, a Doctor Emmett Brown silver coat, expansive sunglasses and... are we even sure that's him under there? The Grammy people could have just hired any old homeless guy with Parkinson's in his fifties. The whole thing just degenerates into one huge, choreographed jam session featuring several dozen mediocre artists.

-LL Cool J claims that blues legend Robert Johnson "paved the way for Cream, Led Zeppelin and my 1991 cover of 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf' on the Simply Mad About the Mouse Disney compilation album." Linkin Park and Jay-Z perform with Paul McCartney, who hasn't had someone to sing the "Yo yuhyuhyuh yo, uh uh yeah uh huh" harmony part to "Yesterday" since Linda died.

-Tom Hanks, sporting a Jon Lovitz exposed-forehead hairdo that makes it look like there's a football coming out of his head, presents a Lifetime Achievement Award to folk band The Weavers. ("Forrest Gump owns all their old 78s.") Segue to Bruce Springsteen, who's trying way too fucking hard to be Bob Dylan. He's got the hair, the shadow-across-the-face lighting, even the dental-work, headgear-harmonica rig springing up from his neck. Somewhere out in the parking lot, among the valet attendants, Jakob Dylan is shouting at a tiny TV set, "Fuck you, Springsteen, that's my hustle!"

-U2 beats out Rascal Flatts, Springsteen, John Legend and Mariah for Song of the Year, only because D4L's "Laffy Taffy" was released too late for consideration.

-The Kanye West/Jamie Foxx performance is presented as a KW State vs. JFU halftime marching band battle, which at first reminds me of the Speakerboxx vs. Love Below rumble in the Outkast video for "Roses." It turns out to be one of the night's better spectacles, as it degenerates into a drumline step show and I spot six cameltoes in a row. Immediately as the performance ends, the show cuts straight to a reaction shot from James Taylor, who pronounces, "It was sublime in its ghettocity."

-Sting offes to sell Kanye the backing track of his old Police song "Spirits in the Material World" for a hundred bucks, and Kanye says he'll consider. Meantime, Green Day wins Record of the Year for successfully transcribing the chords to "Wonderwall" by Oasis and writing whinier words on top.

HOUR FOUR

-Terrence Howard snickers while introducing Christina Aguilera. He's probably thinking about the time he came in her right eye in a men's room stall at the Moulin Rouge premiere. Aguilera, who's officially entered the Breathless Mahoney stage in her Madonna Career Emulation Program™, performs a torch song with Herbie Hancock, who came in Christina's left nostril during the "Dirrty" video shoot.

-Time for the Best New Artist grammy, presented by Common, Chuck D and Fiona Apple, which is an odd trio since two of them eat soul food and one eats no food.

CHUCK: One of these artists is about to win an award that's gone to such greats as Bobby Darin, The Beatles...
COMMON: Milli Vanilli, Arrested Development...
FIONA: A Taste of Honey, Men at Work, the Captain and Tennille...

John Legend now joins those ranks, and I think he just thanked Devo.

-Album of the Year also goes to U2, while Bono declares in his speech that Kanye and Gwen Stefani should have gotten the award instead. He quips, I believe in an attempt at humor, "Gwat about Gwen?" His award is immediately revoked and given to Milli Vanilli.

-A speech from the Grammy president is followed by a show-closing tribute to New Orleans, while Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt and others perform an original song. ("What rhymes with 'overflowing Superdome men's room feces?'") This concludes another 210-minute Grammy Awards show. Stay tuned for the fucking Oscars.

Armor For Sleep - The Truth About Heaven (2005)

2006-02-09T14:06:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

The leadoff single from the album What To Do When You Are Dead isn't playing around about the great beyond. It seems the frontman - in hopes of being the white Biggie or Pac or Pun or Left Eye or Aaliyah or Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. or Otis Redding or Marvin Gaye - is hoping to become a bigger legend as a corpse than a living, breathing emo rock star.

So he spends the entire video in a state of limbo, haunting (or comforting, depending on your perspective) the girlfriend he left behind. His bandmates are dead with him, and I imagine they want to be loyal friends and all, but they're probably pissed they have to spend their afterlife watching their buddy stare at his fucking high school sweetheart. Though occasionally she probably does take a shower or have a ticklefight with her girlfriends during a sleepover. There are minor perks.

He and the other Armor For Sleep guys first perform in the street in front of her house, where they're surprised to see cars driving right through them. Then, my favorite, they're seen perched on the front porch and upper eaves of the house. Then on top of the car she rides to the beach in with some friends.

At the beach, in the video's clear dramatic climax (uh huh), the dead frontman watches his girlfriend talk to a new guy and then abruptly get up and leave him. Cut to triumphant look on the dead frontman's face, as he realizes his girlfriend will carry on a miserable celibate existence in his absence. It's the minor details that count in these pop-crossover, indie-rock videos.

From Satellite - A Hundred Days (2005)

2006-02-09T13:58:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

From Satellite is some low-budget, generic pop-punk-grunge stuff brought to you by a conglomerate of American brewing companies, who believe if they show enough people crammed into a room, waving around half-consumed beer bottles while watching a band whose sound equipment is lined with haphazardly placed empties, each viewer will want to consume a twelve-pack within a half-hour.

Too bad most music video viewers are not the raging alcoholics I am. Too bad I'm also watching and writing this at six in the morning, which is hardly the most productive time to start drinking when you have to work in five hours. Though it's not certainly not unheard of. I'm gonna make like Nancy Reagan and Just Say No to this entire mess.

White Zombie - More Human Than Human (1995)

2006-02-01T00:52:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

I couldn't stand this fucker when he was popular. Even more so than Kiss and Alice Cooper, it was patently obvious White Zombie's image was theatrical, cartoonish and phony, meant to bilk the dollars of the Evil Equals Cool teen market. Besides, my little brother was in love with the band and couldn't resist playing La Sexorcisto and Astro Creep 2000 at top volume over and over and over and over. And over and over and over and over.

But it slowly became obvious over the years that, if Rob Zombie had cultivated a phony image, at least he had fun with it and filled his videos with images on the camp side of horror. The man was an entertainer. I haven't seen Zombie's two recent slasher flicks, but this is the most thorough viewing I've ever given his "More Human Than Human" video. Which seems to turn the medium of 1960s home movies into a sinister collection of robots, clowns, jack-o-lanterns and giant albino rats.

The whole letterboxed video has phony film scratches applied to it and lots of manically cut stock footage, but the centerpiece is performance footage of Rob and his band. Who seem to be bouncing around someone's basement or garage in a universe of hyper-color. The cumulative effect borders on sensory overload, but it's completely accessible. I mean, how underground and demonic could it possibly be when its frontman is wearing a fucking jean jacket?

The Lemonheads - It's a Shame About Ray (1992)

2006-02-01T00:30:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

Apparently, Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando was a teen heartthrob in his time, a dapper, dorkier version of Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson. I don't know much about all that, but I've always had a passive kind of fondness for the band's 1992 hit "It's a Shame About Ray." Catchy, mid-tempo, jangly acoustic guitars, plaintive vocals and lyrics that you can stare at for five minutes and still not really figure out if they're about suicide or what. Help me out here, English majors.

The video takes place outside and around a house in the desert, where the band plays outside on the porch and Dando mopes around inside with heavy-lidded eyes. The camera just kind of meanders back and forth, and we keep seeing glimpses of a blonde girl who I believe is in the process of leaving Dando. Yeah, she is gone, because he just pulled her picture out of the frame and dropped it in a plastic garbage bag. And dropped the frame to the dusty hardwood floor in slow motion.

You could say this video is dated and too poppy and didn't even make sense to analytic stoners when it was released. I prefer to call it atmospheric and halfway decent.

Sublime - Date Rape (1992)

2006-01-31T23:49:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

I wonder if this low-budget, slap-happy, vulgar little video ever saw the light of day on MTV. I was surprised just now to run across it on VH1 Classic's show "The Alternative." As we all know, Sublime was a kick-ass rock/reggae/punk band who would have been truly massive and long-lasting had its lead singer, Brad Nowell, not died of a heroin overdose just before the release of his band's breakthrough self-titled album.

We have three half-assed but charming studio albums to remember Sublime by but only a handful of videos. Most of those, in the style of the posthumous barrage of 2Pac clips, awkwardly inject the same available footage of Nowell before he died. "Date Rape," though, has a full-fledged, breathing, shirtless Nowell spread throughout the video. From the opening shot of him spitting into the camera to the closing shot of him getting whacked in the head by the neck of the bass player's whirling instrument.

The band performs in a smokey room in black and white, while the song's story is acted out in camcorder-looking color shots of a truly smarmy gentleman approaching a single woman at the bar, buying her several drinks and leaving in his car together. Not surprisingly, considering the song's title, Smarmy doesn't take no for an answer, but the victim gets her revenge. She throws a rock at his head, gets a lawyer and calls the cops, then Judge Ron Jeremy sentences him to a couple decades in jail, where Smarmy gets "butt-raped by a large inmate." Played by Ron Jeremy. Who, if you've seen any of his several thousand porn flicks, is no small fry. And is apparently no gentleman where lube is concerned.

Sublime's best music has innovation crossed with certain immature charm, and "Date Rape" is one of the band's strongest singles. That there's an actual video from years before Sublime had any notoriety and Nowell took his last intravenous plunge - an actual video made with a three-digit budget and somehow free of content censorship by the cable channels - well, that's a pleasant surprise on a Sunday morning.

Temple of the Dog - Hunger Strike (1992)

2006-01-31T23:45:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

Until I perused the band biography on Billboard.com, I thought Temple of the Dog was a one-off supergroup that basically merged Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. I didn't realize it was a pre-Pearl Jam, one-album project put together by the surviving members of the band Mother Love Bone, who had just lost their lead singer to a heroin overdose.

Chris Cornell was brought in to write and do pinch vocal work, Soundgarden's drummer and future Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready rounded out the band, and Eddie Vedder contributed vocals here and there on the album. Which came out in 1990 but didn't hit until two years later, when the entire nation was angst-ridden, wearing flannel and looking to Seattle for inspiration.

"Hunger Strike" is one quick verse and chorus, repeated and repeated by Cornell and Vedder, who bounce their high/operatic and low/urrrrr-sounding respective vocals off each other. The topic? Personal satisfaction in the age of money-grubbing capitalism. ("I don't mind stealing bread / From the mouths of decadence / But I can't feed on the powerless / When my cup's already overfilled.") It's a haunting, driving song that builds as it goes.

Paul Rachman's video mostly consists of outdoor shots - lighthouses, shorelines, barren trees, clouds in the sunrise, etc. Cornell sits alone somewhere, head between knees, depressed as usual, while Vedder stands in the middle of a wheatfield or something. The full band eventually joins the scene, and they play together on the beach and in the woods at night. True to the lyrics of the song, no one is ever spotted eating anything.

Toby Keith - Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (2002)

2006-01-29T01:44:00.000-06:00

zero stars (of four)

A lot of liberal people hate Toby Keith. Me, I'm pretty liberal, and I think Toby's kinda entertaining sometimes. Steal "If I Was Jesus" or "The Critic" off the Internet if you don't believe me. But Toby's one lowest-common-denominator, pandering-ass S.O.B. too, and he uses incredibly cheap tricks to stir up blind patriotism. There's no more prime example than this knee-jerk, post-9/11 We're Gonna Kick Yer Bearded Brown Ass cut from the album Unleashed, which actually has a drawing of a doghouse on the front.*

Normally, superduper trite and clunky lyrics like this make me laugh, but the sheer ethnocentric arrogance of "Courtesy" half-pisses me off. (Then I take a deep breath and picture, as Toby suggests, the Statue of Liberty shaking her fist at the towelheads, and I'm back in a decent mood.) But Toby doesn't need a conscience - he has the support of every trailer-dwelling, beer-swilling waterhead in America, and apparently they all have enough disposable cash to snatch up millions of this fucker's albums from the Super Wal-Mart's electronics store.

That means no artistic effort was necessary for the "Courtesy" video - the lyrics and sentiment alone seal the deal. So Toby spends the duration standing front and center on a concert stage, flabby arms protruding from his black sleeveless shirt and red, white and blue acoustic guitar proudly on display. Stock footage of soldiers past and present is mixed in, of course, along with artillery and Cute Little Kids. It's also comforting to know, via the plaque held up by one such troop, that Toby Keith is a TF-1-77 AR Honorary "Steel Tiger" Tank Commander. I was having trouble sleeping before; now I'm out like a light, every night.

Man, it's gonna be hell when you hear Mother Freedom start ringin' her bell.

* = The only thing missing is a cartoon water dish with the word "Osama" scrawled around the rim.

Trace Adkins - Honky Tonk Badonkadonk (2005)

2006-01-29T01:38:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

Some day, there will be a hit rap song delivered entirely in clever tongue-in-cheek cliches popularized by Redneck America. For now, all we have is the opposite, a guy named Trace Adkins adopting ghetto slang and other worn-out phrases to describe the big ol' butt on some random country cutie in the bar.

This junk-in-trunk babe puts down her drink when song she likes comes on, and she proceeds to head to the dance floor and work "what her mama gave her... that money maker." Lest you doubt, this bitch "got it goin' on like Donkey Kong." Not enough unoriginality for you? How about the age-old line, "We hate to see her go but love to watch her leave"?

The entire video takes place in a huge club, where Adkins shows off his giant black cowboy hat, "Honky" and "Tonk" brass knuckles and vaguely phallic cigar. That's all I really noticed about Trace - I was more distracted by the wall-to-wall rented models dancing in scant clothing, and the camera couldn't help but zoom in tight on their shimmying posteriors.

Yep, this is "Baby Got Back" for the trailer park set. I've never seen so much ass-shaking in a country video - I thought this entire genre was the wholesome alternative to hip-hop, devil rock and Top 40. Nope, there's butt cheek and everything here, and protest groups shut also note that Adkins advocates that listeners "smack your grandma."

Still, somehow, the whole affair comes out seeming sanitized and almost wholesome - how "on the edge" can your video be, morally, when your girls chew bubblegum and wear roller skates?

Nelly featuring Paul Wall, Ali and Big Gipp - Grillz (2005)

2006-01-27T00:20:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

A gold tooth is no longer sufficient for proving economic status and overall down-ness. Nope, my hometown Lou chum Nelly - we used to eat toasted ravioli at the top of the Arch together and gaze down at the Mississippi River as pre-adolescents - has upped the ante with this ode to jewelry in one's mouth.

A "grill" no longer refers to a person's face, or the heated substance most aspiring hip-hoppers flip burgers on, or an accessory at the front of one's car. Rather, it's an entire row of interconnected diamonds, rubies and sapphires in the shape of teeth, inserted atop molars, bicuspids and incisors.

Nelly, St. Lunatic Ali, Big Gipp, honky rapper Paul Wall, producer Jermaine Dupri and a handful of rented hottie models all sport grillz in this video from director Fat Cats. Who favors very tight closeups of these open mouths.

I have to wonder if the video shoot was catered, because I swear I spotted six to eight cole slaw shreds hanging from Paul Wall's lower grill. Also, if the shots of the video models' fake teeth are any indication, an influx of rapper semen apparently turns a gold grill a grossly tarnished shade of green.

The white-letterboxed video is shot entirely in a huge house, or maybe a remodeled dentists' office. Blue and red tints accompany the endless shots of oral jewelry, and what's not completely generic is unintentionally funny. The lyrics are even all about grillz, which gets old awfully fast.

TOP TEN WORST LINES IN "GRILLZ"

10. PAUL WALL: I got my mouth lookin somethin' like a disco ball
9. NELLY: It look like Now-N-Laters, gum drops, jelly beans
8. PAUL WALL: My teeth gleaming like I'm chewin' on aluminum foil
7. BIG GIPP: Mouth got colors like a Fruit Loop box
6. PAUL WALL: I put my money where my mouth is and bought a grill
5. ALI: And da otha set is same, got my name in da mold
4. PAUL WALL: Call me George Foreman, 'cause I'm sellin' everybody grillz.
3. NELLY: If I could call it a drink, call it a smile on da rocks
2. PAUL WALL: Open up my mouth and you see mo' karots than a salad
1. ALI: Gotta bill in my mouth like I'm Hillary Rodham

Tom Petty - It's Good To Be King (1995)

2006-01-27T00:19:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

Petty, without the Heartbreakers, put out one of his best on the Wildflowers album. Sure there was the stoner mega-hit "You Don't Know How It Feels" and the inane fan favorite "You Wreck Me," but for my money the album's best track was "It's Good To Be King." Which is, as you'd expect from Petty, a simplistic mid-tempo rock tune that also smacks of blues and pure sing-along pop.

The video is an odd amalgam of elaborate sets and bizarre extras, several dozen representing every culture. Director Peter Care's idea of ordinary people fantasizing about being king includes a lot of ornate costumes and unconventional headgear. Among them, tribal headdresses, a gas mask, a birdcage and actual crowns.

There are a lot of vignettes that are either poignant or make no sense at all, depending on who you ask and in what mindstate you currently reside. I just sit back and enjoy them, from the old lady playing a Mellotron on a set of train tracks to the wedding of Charlie Murphy to to the homeless man wandering around the trailer park and eventually the shore of a body of water, where he finds a child's wagon buried knee-deep.

I'm just glad I got to hear Petty do a ten-minute version of "King" in concert a few summers ago while relaxing outside in beautiful weather and basking in a healthy THC and alcohol buzz. Tom Petty doesn't come through my town enough, with or without the Heartbreakers.

George Michael - Father Figure (1988)

2006-01-27T00:17:00.000-06:00

**1/2

It's a gay '80s ballad that's been Muzaked to death in the almost two decades since its release, but I'll go to bat for "Father Figure." George Michael could write good music, sing good music and produce good music. Most of the time, he was in so-bubblegum-ya-wanna-smack-him mode, but occasionally he'd send a catchy but undeniably adult ballad to the top of the charts. This is a prime example.

Granted, the video can be a little tough to swallow (pun sort of intended). You've got to view its meandering film noirish take on High Fashion Meets The Gritty City as heavy-handed kitsch, but the director - whoever he is - sneaks in a lot of solid shots that still hold up. You could yank a hundred or more still frames from "Father Figure" and use them in a coffee table book today.

George is a rough, jean-jacketed cabbie with exactly four days of stubble on his face. Not three, not five. He's a stalker of supermodels with a photographic wall of fame on his wall directly above the bed's headboard. And he picks up a fare that changes his world - she's a model, yes, and she does her little turn on the catwalk. On the catwalk. Yeah, on the catwalk. She shakes her little tush on the catwalk.

She also, in certain shots, has some hard, hard lines on her face. Kinda looks like a dude with a lot of makeup on. But she's all woman, we find out in the scene in George's bedroom where the model is backed to the wall in her lingerie, enjoying a vicious makeout session with cabbie G.M. They spend the night together, she gets distressed the next morning and can't pose right for the photographer. Who grabs his forehead with both hands in universal mime for Very Displeased.

Hang in there until the bitter end and you'll hear my favorite George Michael ad-lib of all time: "I'll be your daddy, OHHH!!" It's a classic.

Billy Currington - Must Be Doin' Somethin' Right (2005)

2006-01-24T21:16:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

This is a new breed of country video, one where the singer writhes around on the wet sands of a tropical beach with his shirt open, frolics with a rented model and - GOD DAMN! - doesn't even wear a cowboy hat. If this doesn't scream "VH1 Crossover Potential!" or "Blatant Chris Isaak Ripoff!" I don't know what does. And, yeah, after reaching #1 on the country chart, "Somethin' Right" cracked the pop Top 40. I do mean cracked - it peaked at #39.

Yeah, this video is a retread of Isaak's "Wicked Game," only the song's not too entertaining ("Lean into my kiss and close those deep-blue, need-you eyes"), Billy Currington's a little too self-consciously hunky for his own good (and he's really not that built or good-looking, either), and the cinematography is nowhere near the smoke-filled, black-and-white brilliance of the 1991 Herb Ritts video it rips off. Not to mention, Currington's rented model is no topless Helena Christensen.

So, sorry Billy, top of the country charts or not, you're not really doing anything right here.

Trick Daddy featuring Cee-Lo and Lil' Kim - Sugar (Gimme Some) (2005)

2006-01-24T20:39:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

The poppier Trick Daddy gets, the more I like him, especially when he partners up with Cee-Lo (whose two solo albums are very much worth tracking down). 2002's "In Da Wind" was one of the great hip-hop singles of the year, and last summer's "Sugar" followed suit. The sound is similar, yeah, but the theme is a hell of a lot more suggestive and therefore more commercial. The sweet substance referred to in the song's title is none other than the vaginal juice of whichever rented booty-dancing model is nearest.

Yep, this shit's all about cunnilingis, and the phoned-in Ludacris verse from the album track is jettisoned in favor of sixteen bars or so from Lil' Konvict Kim. Interestingly enough, MTV censors allow Trick Daddy to refer to the female sex organ as "butter pecan," "french vanilla," "the berry," "honey," "a slice of pie" and "your Cocoa Puffs." But when Lil' Kim invites the thug rapper to bring his mouth down to her "jar of honey" and "come and lick" her Tootsie Roll, her lyrics get cut to hell.

The video takes place at the Trick Daddy Sugar Shack, a candy store filled with dancing models licking lollipops and kids trying to cheat the proprietor out of his profits.There's cotton candy, a big mixing bowl full of liquid chocolate and an oven full of cookies. All the while, chunky-ass Cee-Lo can't decide whether to put his hands on the girls or the Wonka bars.

And best of all, director Ray Kay cuts in parody candy wrappers ("Tricklets," "Pimp Mints") that are pretty damn funny. The whole affair reminds me of the Jerry Springer episode where the 600-pound redneck and his equally corpulent spouse combined their love for food with their love for sex and made love in a giant bathtub full of creamed corn. If someone could make that into a rap video, the MTV censors would be ecstatic, I wager.

Anthony Hamilton - Can't Let Go (2005)

2006-01-24T20:10:00.000-06:00

*** (of four)

Anthony Hamilton seems to be overly concerned with the opinions of others in regards to his relationship. "No matter what the people say, I'm gonna love you anyway," he keeps singing. "Why must they try to tear down my house when they know it's made from love?" Sounds cheesy, yeah, but there's something sincere and organic and timeless about this organ-driven soul ballad and of Hamilton's strong-ass voice. I like both.

Hamilton's been around for awhile, but VH1 has picked this month to promote the crap out of him, comparing him to R+B greats like Bill "Lean on Me" Withers and Bobby "What Is This" Womack. If the video for "Can't Let Go" is any indication, Hamilton would like to be stuck in the past with them. Except his T-shirt has the word "Blingin'" on it. That kind of kills the effect.

Director Dean Karr follows a heartbroken Hamilton from a Southern diner booth to driver's seat of an ancient pickup truck to a beat-up bus to a dingy hotel room to the mirror of a convenience store bathroom. All the while, he keeps seeing phantom images of the woman he loves, the woman he apparently wronged and is trying desperately to return home to. The video is almost gentle in its turbulence, and a happy ending is never in question, but still it feels like an emotional journey.

Fall Out Boy - Dance, Dance (2005)

2006-01-24T18:58:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

I don't know much about Fall Out Boy, aside from the fact that they share the same name as Radioactive Man's sidekick on a "Simpsons" episode. Oh, and that they think it's completely hilarious to watch white boys dance awkwardly. And it is hilarious - in real life, when white boys don't know they're dancing badly. When being intentionally arhythmic for the purposes of entertainment, particularly after Jon Heder's extended dance sequence in Napoleon Dynamite nailed that coffin shut, you are no longer funny.

That goes double for "cool" guys trying to make themselves over as geek guys for entertainment. Fall Out Boy's guitarist spends the entire video in a vintage suit, hair slicked down to his scalp, attending his high school's homecoming. (He's a twelfth year senior, apparently.) He asks out his plain-looking, big-chinned love interest by burning the word "Homecoming?" into her front yard grass, then cuts her chest while pinning on the corsage. But take off his thick Woody Allen glasses, and he's actually quite attractive and eager to dance.

Well, when you're at Homecoming and the house band is Fall Out Boy, and they're playing a song called "Dance, Dance," you have no choice but to do just that. The racially diverse crowd trades off moves, the guitarist-geek crowd surfs, and dorky doubles of each of the band members wander the crowd trying to find girlfriends. They do not succeed, although the guitarist geek - through his intentionally arhythmic dancing - does win the affections of the plain-looking, big-chinned love interest. No surprises there.

It's all very hammed up, even for MTV, but even while shaking my head at it, I have to admit the video is watchable. If just because the song is so solidly catchy. And because of the quick shot - about a minute in - where we see three rows of lonely fat girls sitting on bleacher risers in their dresses. Even when dorkhood is celebrated, big broads don't stand a chance.

Yellowcard - Lights and Sounds (2005)

2006-01-24T18:34:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

This song's intro sounds just like the riff from Nirvana's "Breathe." Then the frontman - who resembles gay Broadway star Alan Cumming - unleashes his innocuously nasally vocal cards on us, and the unoriginality somehow gets more unoriginal. The band appears to be trapped in a large cattle car full of flashing, patterned flourescent lightbulbs with mini-searchlights flying around the room. Generic, forgettable, these "Lights and Sounds" not worth watching, writing about or reading about. Yellowcard wasted my time, and now I'm wasting your time.

Matisyahu - King Without a Crown (2005)

2006-01-24T18:23:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

It's hard to establish an identity on "Total Request Live" these days, when the only options open are, a) hip-hop thug, b) power-punk boy, c) poppy teen slut, and, d) AOR growl-rock frontman. One way to stand out, I suppose, is to be a Hasidic Jew reggae rapper whose flow is eerily reminiscent of Snow ("a licky boom boom down"). That's Matisyahu, and he's huge right now on the pop and modern rock scene.

Time - and a follow-up single - will tell whether his talent transcends the realm of novelty. So far, it's mainly an issue of mainstream pop never having dealt with anything like this before. And I, for one, think it's refreshing in the most amoral age of popular music to have someone sing a blindly glowing love song straight to the Almighty. The so-called Christian acts (P.O.D., Reliant K, Scott Stapp) can only get vague and "positive" with their religion. But fat-bearded Matisyahu sports an eternal hardon for the wrathful Old Testament God.

"King Without a Crown" is a brown- and green-tinted collection of computer-manipulated clip art, disembodied shots of Matisyahu and his band performing and a smattering of the song's rapid-fire lyrics. Director P.R. Brown also keeps coming back to a street corner, where despondent lost souls trudge off to unknown destinations. What these sad individuals need is a little loving from a divine being who once covered the entire earth with a thousand feet of water because no one would pay attention to him.

Technotronic - Pump Up the Jam (1989)

2006-01-23T05:31:00.000-06:00

* (of four)

Technotronic was a three-hit wonder, with "Pump Up the Jam" giving way to soundalikes "Get Up (Before the Night Is Over)" and "Move This (Shake That Body, Shake That Body For Me, People Don't You Know, Don't You Know It's About Time, Can You Hear the Jam is Pumpin', While You Taste a Piece of Mine)." Technotronic was also the musical guest on an early 1990 episode of "Saturday Night Live" hosted by "Wonder Years" star Fred Savage.

Let's see, what other useless trivia can I spout about Technotronic? How about I paraphrase the techno/dance/R+B act's autobiography from Billboard.com? Okay, here goes - Technotronic was the Belgian brainchild of American philosophy teacher Jo Bogaert. The raps were performed by a female rapper (I seriously thought it was a dude this entire time until just now) named Ya Kid K but lip synched here by African model Felly*, who didn't speak a word of English. Not "jam," not "pump," not a single word.

The video is blue-screen mayhem straight out of the instant music videos you could make with a friend in the Six Flags lip synch booth and take home a VHS souvenir for twenty bucks. Felly - looking a bit drag queenish considering the masculine-sounding vocals - dances and pumps her fists in a variety of outfits while the camera jerk-zooms and cuts in generic, mesmerizing patterns for the blue screen. There's strobe, there's lyrics flashed on the screen, there's a spandex jogging outfit complete with fanny pack. Belgium really needs to stick to chocolate.

* = Felly sounds like the name of a Muppet character on "Sesame Street," if you ask me. ("Today's show is brought to you by the letter T. T for Technotronic, T for Trite and Terrible, T for Try Another Channel...")

D'Angelo featuring A.Z. - Lady (remix) (1996)

2006-01-23T05:16:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

D'Angelo makes records like Albert Brooks makes movies - he puts one out then disappears for five to six years. D'Angelo's been gone for over a half-decade at this point, so it's reasonable for me to assume he's just gonna sneak out another album on us at any time. Until then, we've got Brown Sugar, one of the great R+B debut albums, the not-nearly-as-cool follow-up Voodoo and (courtesy of the VH1 Soul channel at 4:45 a.m.) a remix video for "Lady."

Not a lot of effort went into this one, the song or video, but it's truly not half-bad. The "Lady" remix groove is built around a standard drum machine beat and the same three notes pounded into a synthesizer. D'Angelo sits on his piano bench on a plain white soundstage while R+B divas step in to dance, flirt and lip synch. Erykah Badu brings some lime green headwrap to the proceedings, and I think I spot Mary J. Blige and Chante Moore, but I'm a little rusty and can't find any D'Angelo remix video trivia tidbits on the Internet.*

A.Z. pops up toward the end to share the bench with D'Angelo and spit out a verse ("This earth was once lavish / Now it's cursed, left for a savage"), at the conclusion of which he mentions twice that he's in the employ of Dr. Dre's rap outfit The Firm. You remember that debacle, don't you? Supposed to be huge, flopped, and then they couldn't even call themselves The Firm because Robert Plant or some Russian hair band already owned the copyright to the name.

* = Actually, on a Hype Williams-related site just now, I discovered the mystery divas are actually Faith Evans and Joi, but I like my original sentence better, so I'm leaving it. Sometimes ignorance truly does equal bliss.

Clay Aiken - Invisible (2004)

2006-01-23T04:48:00.000-06:00

* (of four)

Think about this - a television show goes on a talent hunt in a country with a population of a quarter-billion. Multiple auditions net an enormous response at locations spread around the continental states. Producers and judges see countless individuals of varying talent and begin an elimination process to find the most bankable superstar.

Millions of viewers vote on the outcome of this show, and eventually the Chosen One, the last singer standing, is THIS GUY. This freckled, wispy little spright-boy of ambiguous sexuality. Oh, another guy actually wins the competition - a soulful, likeable and ultimately unremarkable cat named Ruben who looks like an unholy love child of Luther Vandross and Jabba the Hutt - but Clay Aiken is the one everyone pays attention to. For a little while.

I don't know. I never got the appeal of this guy... thing... whatever. And Clay's biggest hit, "Invisible," has a disturbing, oddly pathetic stalker motif. Clay likes a girl... guy... thing... who doesn't know he's alive. So he kinda just fantasizes, "I wish I could be a fly on your wall," so "I could just watch you in your room." You have to think famed privacy invader John Aschcroft finds a good deal of personal satisfaction in those lyrics. Of course, he doesn't need to be a fly on the wall. He already has 217 cameras hidden in the unrequited dame's duplex.

The video? Yeah, that's right, that's what we're here to talk about. Well, it's a bunch of shit. Clay lip synchs from an outdoor stage on a shut-down city block for an appreciative audience of teenyboppers, secretaries, interior decorators, a couple hyper-ironic goth kids and, of course, a human Red Rover line of security cops holding back the adoring throng.

Shit. A buncha shit.

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life (2003)

2006-01-23T04:46:00.000-06:00

*1/2 (of four)

I have a history of prematurely declaring the demise of flash-in-the-pan artists I can't stand. I said - and prayed - Kid Rock would be done after his first album, and instead we got to hear the tin-ear duet "Picture" on four different radio format channels for 31 months straight.

So I can't say for sure that Evanescence's special brand of operatic adult-contemporary power ballads has seen its last thrust into the limelight. I can only get back down on my knees and petition the Almighty to banish Evanescence to the casino-venue circuit. Too bad the Almighty's already on their side.

"Bring Me To Life," as remixed for radio, trades off its chorus vocals between the regularly scheduled Female Operatic Adult-Contemporary Power Ballad Singer and Paul McCoy of 12 Stones. His job is to rap out the line, "Wake me up! I can't wake up!" in true wigger-punk fashion. I'd like to have his job. He doesn't have to work very hard.

Director Phillip Stolzl's template is a mish-mash here. It's a windy night in the city*, with sheer white curtains fluttering in the apartment of the slumbering Female Operatic Adult-Contemporary Power Ballad Singer, who dreams she's falling**. Upstairs, Paul McCoy's doing his "Wake me up! I can't wake up!" thing while the camera hovers outside.*** He wakes up the FOACPBS, she walks out onto her ledge and proceeds to climb up the side of the building.**** Will she make it, or will McCoy drop her to the streets below? What the fuck do you think?

* = Rendered in slow zoom with swooping side-to-side camera shots, a la Batman Forever.

** = a la Eminem's "The Way I Am" video.

*** = a la Nine Days' "Story of a Girl" video, Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break Your Heart" video and several anonymous others

**** = a la the eponymous character in Peter Jackson's three-hour holiday season waste of too much money King Kong

Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved (2004)

2006-01-23T04:40:00.000-06:00

**1/2 (of four)

I have no strong opinion either way of Maroon 5, a band I first encountered about four years ago at a concert. They opened for Nikka Costa, and a friend and I mostly talked over them. They were talented, sure, but the only song in their set that stood out was a well-executed cover of "Darling Nikki," Tipper Gore's all-time favorite Prince song.

The first few times I heard "Harder to Breathe," I thought it was a Justin Timberlake track. The second Songs For Jane single, though, "This Love," was a guilty-pleasure smash hit for me through probably its first eight months of heavy, heavy rotation. And then came "She Will Be Loved," which I semi-didn't mind listening to and semi-fucking hated. I was always annoyed by how closely the progression of this song's bridge resembles that of Cheap Trick's 1988 chart-topper "The Flame."

Why even review the video two years or whatever after its original release? Well, it's good to have a little distance - I can stomach this song a lot more now that I don't hear it ten to twelve times a week. And the video, from veteran director Sophie Muller, is actually somewhat intriguing. Granted, the video's Graduate-ripoff premise is about as groundbreaking and unique as Maroon 5 itself (that is to say, not very), but the intergenerational love triangle actually does hold about three minutes of my attention. Which is a bit of a fait accompli these days.

Singer Adam Levine is the Benjamin character here. He's dating a "beauty queen of only 18," an-uber hot little brunette from a well-to-do family. But watch the fuck out, the rich beauty queen's mom is Kelly Preston, Mrs. Travolta herself. Benji Levine leaves the pool party to console an emotionally wounded (and passed-the-fuck-out, with lipstick heavily smeared) Preston, whose husband couldn't handle the fact that she was flirting simultaneously with every twentysomething dude at the party.

They kiss, they stalk each other, and basically they stare across the room at each other for probably a combined seventy seconds or more when Preston comes to Benji's singing gig at the classy place with the giant Rembrandt oil mural backdrop. The video drags for awhile, but Preston finally stands up to her husband, Levine runs back out to console her/suck off her face, and the smokin' hot daughter happens upon the both of them.

Somewhere out in viewing land, Tipper Gore is masturbating furiously by the end of this video every time it airs. Masturbating with a magazine, that is.

Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World (2002)

2006-01-20T08:12:00.000-06:00

**** (of four)

Yeah, you're reading right, I'm giving the first four-star rating of my rejuvenated eMpTyV website to a Kylie Minogue video. That's the same Kylie Minogue who bounced through her 1988 "Locomotion" video like a living Barbie doll. The same Kylie Minogue who's been a huge star ever since in Britain, Australia and bars where guys pick up guys. The same Kylie Minogue who perpetrated the massively overplayed dance-pop song "Can't Get You Out Of My Head."

But in the hands of Michel Gondry - the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind auteur who gobbles acid a sheet at a time - Kylie becomes immortal just by walking down the street. And replicating herself three times. Instant cloning, even down to the outfit and accessories, that's fucking impressive.

The video is on a one-minute loop, basically. Kylie weaves her way down a few sidewalks and a few streets and winds up back where she started, only to be joined by another clone Kylie when she repeats the adventure. Gimmicky, definitely, but every time Kylie treks back through the streets, the background extras are doubled and eventually tripled and quadrupled. That's a total of four Kylies, guys on ladders, kids on skateboards, metermaids writing parking tickets, motorcycle accident/fights and mattresses being thrown out the second-story window by the pissed-off girlfriend.

Director-file.com says Gondry's shoot, in a Parisian suburb, had over fifty extras and required the entire neighborhood to be closed off to the public for two days of shooting. It also took more than two weeks of special effects duplication to add the twins, triplets and quadruplets into the frames. The "Come Into My World" video is just plain mesmerizing, requires multiple viewings and will put a smile on your smug, cynical face.

The White Stripes - The Hardest Button To Button (2003)

2006-01-20T07:50:00.000-06:00

***1/2 (of four)

I was on the White Stripes bandwagon a few years ago along with all the other self-aware pseudo-hipsters, but I was pretty much done thinking they were anything special shortly after the release of Elephant. A solid single, though, complete with a killer AC/DC rhythm-guitar riff intro and singalong chorus, is "Hardest Button to Button."

The Michel Gondry video is supremely watchable as well, thanks to live-action editing that's so swift it's almost stop-motion. Jack and Meg White play their instruments all over the city - dozens of duplicate drum kits appear, one in front of the other, to the beat of the song while Meg hops from kit to kit. At one point, there are at least forty of the things, rotating in a dizzying eight-point star formation.

She descends the concrete stairs to a subway station, while a guitar-playing Jack pops down with her, duplicate amps appearing in front of him at will. The whole video is one big trick played on the eyes, probably several thousand shots in all, spanning a sidewalk scene, a highway overpass tunnel and a subway car. "Hardest Button" was made with patience and care, and it pays off big time.

Jan Hammer - Miami Vice Theme (1985)

2006-01-20T06:37:00.000-06:00

* (of four)

Stay up until 6:27 in the morning and you may be surprised, as I just was, to learn there exists a video for the Casio-infused instrumental theme from "Miami Vice." This shit shot to the top of the charts in 1985, due in part to the popularity of the show and in part the brain-grating catchiness of Jan Hammer's synth guitar riff.

I've never laid eyes on Hammer until now, but watching him in his shimmering blue suit and bright red dress shirt, I'm oddly reminded of the "Inconceivable!" guy from The Princess Bride going through a mid-life crisis. Hammer spends the video in the studio with a concentrated, demented look on his face, playing synthesizer along to projected clips from "Miami Vice." Just in case we forget what show we're watching, the MV logo pops onscreen from time to time.

Jan has his regular synthesizer, his drum pattern number board and his synth guitar. He rocks out with the latter while the MV clips are projected across his body. There's really nothing quite like watching an abnormally goofy-looking guy push a bunch of buttons like a rock star for two and a half minutes.

Gregory Abbott - Shake You Down (1987)

2006-01-20T06:04:00.000-06:00

** (of four)

One of the more noxious mid-'80s slow jams is "(Mama Let Me) Shake You Down" from two-hit wonder Gregory Abbott, who looks kind of like Ted Danson in blackface. Odd, since a quick artist bio search on the Internet just revealed that Abbott was considered one of the sexiest artists in pop at the time. Competition wasn't so fierce in those days, I suppose - the REO Speedwagon frontman was years away from his life-altering visit to Dr. 90210.

This video reeks of a bad senior portrait session. Images of Abbott - posing solo with chair in front of white backdrop, looking austere in front of the sepia-paisley backdrop, et al - and various multiethnic female models roll across the screen from right to left. Abbott, for his part, is dressed like Tubbs from "Miami Vice," with suit coat atop white T-shirt. The models are hit and miss - one strange-looking white girl keeps singing intently into the camera and eventually pulls her sweater up over her head to reveal some forbidden white bra strap. That one's a miss, methinks.

Hang in there until the end and you'll be rewarded with Abbott's pair of nursery rhyme ad-libs: "Roses are red and violets are blue / I'm gonna rock this world for you," and, "Eenie meenie miney moe / I'm gonna let my love flow." When I'm bored and this song comes on somewhere I can't change the channel, I sing my own ad-libs. My favorites so far are, "I do not like green eggs and ham / I'm gonna give you a lumberjack slam," and, "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two / Columbus beat your beaver blue."