POP SCREEN: Music Videos

Britney Spears

“Do Somethin’” is the worst song I’ve heard in three decades, and I’ve only been alive for two. The music defies description, and not in a good way. Still, this is a video review, and I have seen more than a few videos overcome atrocious songs. Unfortunately, the plot of this video centers around—you’ll never guess—a bad Madonna cover-band wooing 50 Cent’s bodyguards at a seedy Cincinnati strip joint. No joke.

Britney and her posse of what look like sloppily spray-painted mannequins from a run-down Urban Outfitters basement transition from a preposterously fake space-ship to a cloud-riding pink hummer to a club filled to the brim with a doped-up entourage of anorexic Hollywood dancer-waiters. I was, at first, reminded of “Dirrty”, but, after looking back, I realized that, by comparison, Christina’s video is a beautiful allegorical representation of the struggles of the working class.

Britney’s, on the other hand, sucks. Her drunken eye-rolling and writhing, jiggling lingerie scenes would make for beautiful satire of the teenie-bopper-turned-outrageous-whore movement, if not for the fact that she herself is the harried, breathless epitome of it all.

—Henry M. Cowles

Dream

Dizzee Rascal

“Dream”, the latest single from Dizzee Rascal’s sophomore album Showtime, is so good it’s apt to inspire a religion. I kid you not: this video will flush the scales from your eyes and show you a better way.

Like The White Stripe’s “Fell In Love With A Girl” video, “Dream” takes its visual motif from the toy bin. Instead of Legos, “Dream” features bubble-headed marionettes and dollhouse-scale tin cars and airplanes.

Like the denizens of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”, these puppets inhabit a fantasy world where then can walk, talk, and break dance just like real b-girls and b-boys. An adorably miniaturized Dizzee emerges from a jack-in-the-box atop a grand piano to join his puppet companions as they spit rhymes, beat box, and mack fly honeys.

These ’hood antics are underscored by an infectious piano driven beat—ostensibly being performed by the regular-sized elderly woman seated at the piano’s keyboard.

Dizzee’s video is a welcome reprieve from the conspicuous consumption, macho posturing, and glib misogyny of too many hip-hop videos. With “Dream,” Dizzee proves that you can kick it on an old-school (or maybe pre-school) tip and still bring it.

—Bernard L. Parham

Evil

Interpol

Ladies and gentlemen, do you believe that a puppet can change your life? No? Please, lend me your ear as I tell you of my conversion to the International Church of the Interpol Puppet.

I was once like you, my friends—a young, bold intellectual, full of sarcasm, prone to bitter self-doubt and frequent crises. Then I saw the video for “Evil,” and realized that the puppet protagonist embodied all these intimate emotions.

I’ll let you make your own conclusions about the ambiguous plot—it follows an eerily Sesame Street-esque puppet, who may have killed a woman in a car crash, as he is tended to by doctors and either dies or miraculously survives, depending on your interpretation.

But I’ll tell you this much—watch the puppet’s facial expressions with every bit of attention you’ve got. They capture that cocktail of crushing and transcendent feelings you get when you’re horribly stress-exhausted or intoxicated and you realize that you’ve done some horrible things in your life.

You shake violently, you laugh even more violently, you weep, you beg for your mom, there are hands all around you, you sing at the top of your lungs to exorcise the demons while you get tucked into bed, and somehow, your life makes more sense than ever. Add that to a song that’s already about passionate loneliness, and you’ve got your video salvation for midterm studying.

—Abe J. Riesman