REVIEWS -- APRIL 21, 2000
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Christina Aguilera – I
Turn to You (**) Hmm, it’s a new look for Christina. She must have put on the “instant sorority chick” facial base for this video. It seems that Britney Spears has some competition for her roles as “Queen of Slap-on Beauty” now doesn’t it? Also isn’t it weird that she sounds more like Mariah Carey than Mariah Carey these days? Christina sings her little song, with the pre-requisite backing synth and the required “this is a ballad” acoustic session guitar. For the background story, we get Christina frolicking in the rain witnessing human misery. There’s a car crash, and the girl’s mother rushes to the scene. Much melodrama ensues, and they finally express their love for each other. Great. I suppose if she has to survive the teen-pop backlash, I can handle it. The girl has some range, I’ll give her that much. It’s all very inspirational, now isn’t it? –James Wallace Mary J.
Blige – Give Me You (Nino Remix) (*) This is like the shit chicks like Ce Ce Peniston put out
in the early ‘90s, just pitiful dance music underscored by bare-chested BET
rental models. The song was no good the first time around – with its domesticated,
Diane Warren feel – but in treading Whitney-remix territory, it reaches new
heights of blandness. Nino’s contribution is the standard high-hat disco
sound (yeah, there’s a disco ball in the video, along with plenty of those
trippy, swirly things that spin around). I can’t put my finger on just where
this video went wrong, except to say “fag hag” really shouldn’t be in Mary J.
Blige’s job description. –AH Bush – Warm
Machine (*) “How does it feel, knowing you won’t be able to be with the one you love during her pregnancy?” a perky bitch from Jailbait asks in the intro. Yes, Gavin Rossdale knows a thing or two about jailbait, although his main problem now is that the jailbait that bought his first two albums has stopped spending out of Daddy’s pocket and moved on. (That’s the only circumstance under which I see myself purchasing a Bush album – that shit’s definitely coming out of Daddy’s pocket.) That said, this is a total non-video, an assembled collection of cheaply shot concert footage and rent-a-soundstage-for-an-hour lip synching. I’ve got a friend who just figured out the guitar solo before it was over, which can’t be saying much. I figure we may still have to deal with the intermittent Bush video for another five years or so because Gavin is still going to be (arguably) cute enough to get on MTV for at least another presidential administration. With Al Gore at the helm, who knows? –AH (* ½) The
video opens with a fake newscast that would shame Dr. Dre. We learn about the
plight of the poor lad being sent up the river for not checking www.statuatory.com for the laws in his
state before violating that little cookie in MTV’s Jailbait. A mistake I would never make, of course.
It then shifts into footage of screaming teenage fans (Umm, where were these
people hiding?) crying and making a beeline for the band. The rest of it is just
Gavin Rossdale and the gang wearing black and singing in downtrodden tones. It’s
pretty weak musically, even by Bush’s standards. Our friend Kevin was none
too impressed with the musical style, and proceeded to play leads for it.
What followed went something like this: Kevin: Well, they
never stopped ripping off Nirvana. James: Why mess
with the basics? Andrew: That’s
the irony. Gavin Rossdale would never shoot himself in the head. It would
have spared us about 7 more albums of this crap. James: Well…he could have some help… Andrew: He’ll be
a pretty boy for at least 5 more years, so MTV will keep showing his face. James: (sounding
like Dr. Evil) Right… Andrew: Come on
James, you know even though you want to kick his ass, you’re still attracted
to his pretty little face. James: Strangely Andrew, that’s the same way I feel about you. –JW Common – The
Sixth Sense (***) “The revolution will not be
televised. The revolution is here.” So a voice intones at the beginning of
this Common video, and I think I speak for everyone when I say, Thank God!
Lead us to victory by violent overthrow, scruffy-headed rappers of the group
Common! Okay, I act condescending, but I actually like this video – it
basically is a four-minute
depiction of a city riot, with the rappers alternately slow-riding through
the scenes of destruction and spewing lyrics at the crowd through a
megaphone. (“I said, ‘Would you like to suck my balls, LAPD officer?’”) So,
yeah, this video definitely falls into the “$20 Sack Pyramid” category of
Shit I Came Up On Loot. Chaotic and kind of cool, and <newspaper ad quote
selectors, begin your cut and paste here> you’ll never guess the secret
ending to “The Sixth Sense!” <end cut and paste>. –AH (** ½) Yeah, yeah, the revolution is here, and you
guys are going to bring it to us. Don’t believe them? Well, look around this
video: angry black men alternately rapping in the back of hoopties, threats
of violence to the establishment, and riots, death and destruction. There are
some cool moments, and it seems to be in the gangsta rap tradition, but for
the most part it just makes me pop The Predator or some Rage Against
the Machine In. But like my man Richard Pryor say, there’s no justice, just
us. -JW DMX – Party
Up (*½) Given up on our Romeo Must Die songs, have we? Well, I don’t blame you, D. The
movie sucked. Best to focus on your trademark brand of scruff-rap. “Party Up”
definitely qualifies as a legitimate entry to that genre. You may ask
yourself, what’s DMX’s idea of partying
up? As this video teaches us, it’s robbing a bank. Yeah, the whole video
concerns DMX and his accomplices (brandishing walkie-talkies, all) knocking
over the local money repository while DMX chants, “Y’all gon’ make me lose my
mind / Up in here / Up in here / Y’all gon’ make me act a fool / Up in here /
Up in here.” There’s some hostage interplay (“When I say ‘up,’ you say ‘in
here.’ Up…” “In here!”) and the eventual dispatching of the SWAT team. Oh,
and the United Nations building is somehow involved. It takes a special kind
of hostage scene to include dancing fly girls. –AH Goo Goo
Dolls – Broadway 
(**) Dizzying up the girl yet again, the Goo Goo Dolls are currently trying – without much success – to carve a piece of the MTV scene. Amidst the Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears especially, the choreographed dance scenes in “Broadway” (spoofy as they are) just plain don’t work. You knew it was only a matter of time before the Goos tried a parody video, and the naked guys and Kravitz look-alikes running through this one just don’t cut it. My favorite failed sequence: Johnny Rzeznzizk and the other Goos looking in on a room where a lab-coated doctor tries to teach some confused punks step-by-step instructions for head banging. Like the fucking Goo Goo Dolls have any room to be snide about what true rock is. –AH 
No Doubt –
Simple Kind of Life (**) She kind of always knew she’d end up
your ex-girlfriend, but Gwen Stefani never quite gives up. Here, we see her
wandering from scenario to scenario (her red-and-white hair never wavers,
though), apparently running through each band member while sporting different
versions of the red-and-white hair. We’ve got the Kelis look, the Cher look,
the Courtney Love look and the ‘80s porn star look. (You’d assume those last
two would be redundant, but you’d be wrong.) It all boils down to Runaway Bride marital angst, with
Stefani running around town in a Cyndi Lauper-style wedding dress, snatching
a baby up from a cemetery-side road and wielding baseball bats among a sea of
wedding cakes. Stefani and the boys rip through the overwhelming series of
cakes like Sting knocking over candles in “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” but
it’s the only sequence that works in this calculatedly alternative video.
Gwen, don’t forget, the wigs have to be back by six or you lose the deposit. –AH (**) Well, it seems that No Doubt come
to reap the rewards of the monster they’ve created. Thanks for killing
alternative, you freaky haired bitch! Umm, anyway…my feeling on both of the
No Doubt videos I’ve seen thus far is “who cares?” It’s the same punk-pop
from Tragic Kingdom, but without the catchy hooks that made it
interesting, or at the very least tolerable. This is definitely the worse of
the pair, since “Ex-Girlfriend” at least had a few nifty guitar lines and a
catchy chorus. This one though…OK, we have No Doubt running around like
idiots knocking shit over, and touchy feely moments where Gwen laments (you
guessed it!) her lost love. She sings, and their lead guitarists sits in the
background and plays a few sentimental acoustic chord progressions before
moving back to standard pop-ska guitar. Back to the hair though. Did you ever
Friday the 13th Part V? Remember the Pat Benatar girl who
bought it in what I like to call the “New Wave Death Scene?” Ahh, we can only
hope… - JW Britney
Spears – Oops… I Did It Again 
(zero) Life on Mars? Britney Spears is it,
it seems, and wouldn’t you hate to be the astronaut sent to explore that uncharted territory? Okay, so we
all know that territory is in fact very well charted, but it would still be
enough to make a dedicated NASA officer fall to his knees and cry out, “It’s
earth! You damn dirty teen idols!” I’m not even going to go into bad puns
based on the title of this song – seeing as her album is also called Oops! I Did It Again, there are
destined to be a lot of bad puns on the record-review circuit, anyway.
Instead, I want to focus on the fact that this song is exactly – I mean,
chords, tempo, synth noises, vocals – identical to “Baby One More Time.” I
mean, dead on the money, this is the same fucking song. Can she get away with
this? Will the teen bitch actually have another diamond-certified album? In
the video, Britney appears as a red-leather dominatrix with whip (“I’m not
that innocent.” No, that’s not the whip talking.) and proceeds to lead a
bunch of white-clad vixen-extras in a choreographed dance. The set for “Oops”
isn’t that elaborate, although the proliferation of light bulbs makes it
appear that way, and neither is anything else in the video save the ass-funny
interlude written by (let me take a wild guess here) Britney herself. The
astronaut in question presents her with the Heart of the Ocean necklace from Titanic. “But I thought the old lady
threw it in the ocean,” Britney protests. The astronaut replies, “She did. I
dove down and got it for you.” Give me a fucking break. –AH 
(zero) With a song that sounds just like “Baby, One More Time”, Britney switches it around on us by combining the gloss of “Drive Me Crazy” with a bunch of space jargon and special effects. We can watch this and insert the “Britney Noiseä” (you know, the one that sounds like she’s still getting over her breast surgery?) at the right moments, and it sounds exactly like every other Britney song you’ve heard, and all the ones you’ll hear off Oops, I Did It Again. Give me a break. Oops, I did it again Britney. Oops, I wasn’t aiming for your ass, I swear. Did what again, anyway? Forgot to take your gum out of your mouth when you went to bed? Forgot how to walk? Woke up naked outside Alpha Omega Beta? Nothing would surprise me. At one point in the video, a smitten spaceman leaves Britney a parting gift: The Heart of the Ocean from Titanic. An astonished Britney asks “Didn’t the old lady throw it in the ocean in the end?” “Yes, but I went down and got it,” he replies. Two things worth noting: first, Britney loved Titanic. Second, she wants guys to jump into the ocean for her. Funny, because I’ve often wished she would do the same thing. -JW 
Carl Thomas – I
Wish
(**) Well, isn’t this an anomaly. Who is Carl Thomas? Why is he single handedly trying to bring back the genre vacated by the likes of Brian McKnight, Maxwell and, if you go back far enough, Ray Parker, Jr. (god forbid). “I Wish” is synthesized piano-dance R+B made safe for the supermarket – equal parts Muzak and soul. As such, I’m conflicted. I kind of like this, but at the same time I feel like I should be waiting for the nurse at the dentist’s office to call my name so I can go in for my checkup. As a matter of fact, I can faintly smell the nitrous oxide the more I listen to the vocal stylings of Carl Thomas. Actually, I think those are the tubes of nitrous oxide I picked up at the local health food store. You didn’t think I was just shopping for ginseng root today, did you? No, man, I’m loaded up. –AH (**) Yawn…wanna-be Lionel Ritchie or maybe really wanna-be Stevie Wonder. Carl is supposedly playing the piano here, but I have my doubts. It’s Muzak through and through, and completely forgettable in a “Yes, you’re going to leave this on Soft 103 and make babies” kind of way. -JW Classic Videos Green Day –
Basket Case (1994) (***) I hated these guys when they first
came out. Hated them. I guess I was offended by their overall lack of musical
sophistication and maturity, and I got over it real quick. Considering some
of the rap music I like, it’s hard to fault any artist for not being
sophisticated and mature. And who would have known that, a few years later,
Blink 182 would make these guys look like The Beatles? The video for “Basket
Case” is the best-looking of the Dookie
trilogy, a washed-out Mark Kohr video full of grainy, pastel colors. It’s
set in a mental institution, of course, and Billie Joe and the boys are
catatonic patients who only come alive when they’re playing their three-chord
music. The video is rounded out by shots of the Green Day guys taking their
pills, tossing file cabinets at meshed-in windows and cracking up in the
public shower facility. “Basket Case” barely cracked MTV’s Top 100 videos
last December, and I can agree it deserves a place somewhere in those lower
reaches because it’s a solid video and it actually captures a time and
spirit. Dammit, why do I already look back on 1994 like it was as edgy and
idealistic as 1969? –AH
They Might Be
Giants – Birdhouse in Your
Soul (1990) (***) James’ birthday was in mid-June. I
presented him with the TMBG compilation video Direct From Brooklyn in mid-August as a belated gift, and it’s
joined the ranks of our classic late-night offerings. That’s because the
Giants make good on the promises of their wacky lyrics and all-over-the-map
production with trippy and sometimes creepy videos. The clip for “Birdhouse
in Your Soul” fits right in with the Giants mold – it’s the most accessible
of their singles but probably the band’s strangest video. We do see plenty of
vocalist John Linnell’s “little glowing friend” (no, that’s not what I
meant), but otherwise the video bears scant resemblance to the song that
spawned it. It’s pretentious and geeky, yes, but that’s exactly what you
bargain for when you watch a Giants video. And I’ve gotten as much enjoyment
out of the collection as James has, I wager. My only question now is, should
I go ahead and purchase the Death Row
Uncut video collection now, in mid-April, for my other roommate, whose
birthday was in mid-January? –AH (***) Ahh, the video that proves that John Linnell is a pretentious bastard. Despite the goofy lyrics and accordion music, I’m convinced that he think thinks this is art. The video sure has the feel of a final art project, with weird flickering lighting making Linnell fade in and out, both John Linnell and John Flansberg doing interpretive dance, and various crowds participating in what I can only describe as “happenings”. Overbearing and artsy out the ass, it still has that certain Giants quality that can only be described as “good times.” -JW |
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Copyright 2000 Apartment Y Productions |