Not sure what to make of the fact that "My Drive Thru," a new song commissioned by Converse for its new ad campaign, is more interesting than pretty much anything on the new N.E.R.D. album, but nevertheless the teaming of Pharrell, Santogold and the Strokes' Julian Casablancas is upbeat, edgy and, most of all, fun.
Download song here
Mariah Carey, "I'll Be Loving U Long Time"
With several far more immediate songs left on "E=MC2," Mariah Carey makes an odd choice for her third single and the video for it seems to back it up. Aside from Mariah swimming with the dolphins, this seems a bit thrown together. Could it be that the time off for her surprise wedding to Nick Cannon and the time off that came with it led to this song getting moved up in the rotation?
Maybe far more accomplished videos will accompany the releases of the sure-fire hits "Migrate" with T-Pain and "Cruise Control" with Damian Marley and "I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time" got pulled in at the last minute when "Bye Bye" didn't last as long as expected.
Chrisette Michele is finally releasing the gorgeous "Love Is You" from her debut "I Am" and the pride of Patchogue has a new video to help it out. (Click on the pic for the video.)
Diddy is still Diddy. He took to YouTube this week to squash the months-old rumor that he was going to start performing as Sean John because another artist is known as Diddy in England. He also took the opportunity to encourage people to register to vote without threatening "Vote or Die!," which was nice.
The video of Fred Schneider doing dramatic readings on "The Daily Show" is pretty hilarious, especially after his conversation in a normal voice. I think this should be a regular feature, though I guess that would be hard since Schneider and the B's split town tonight after the True Colors Tour show at Radio City. [via Idolator, because my stupid DVR is broken]
The new Weezer video for "Pork and Beans" is brilliant on so many levels.
As a collection of pretty much every YouTube star and trend in one place -- from Chris "Leave Britney Alone" Crocker and Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday to the "Numa Numa" chair-dancing guy and the Mentos-and-soda people -- it's already amazing.
As marketing, it's just as brainy, released on YouTube by Weezer as an embeddable video (meaning that the band doesn't block that useful-to-bloggers feature to make people go through the charade of copying it and putting it up themselves). And (!) they made it a featured video on the YouTube site, landing them a whole new audience outside the modern-rock-radio crowd who have already embraced the single.
In less than a day, the video has more than a million views.
Rivers Cuomo didn't go to Harvard for nothing, y'know.
Weezer, "Pork and Beans"
Yeah, Kenny Chesney won the big Entertainer of the Year award. And yeah, last night's Academy of Country Music Awards were pretty much all about Garth Brooks geting the first Crystal Milestone award. But Miranda Lambert's performance of "Gunpowder and Lead" nearly stole the show -- and her excellent "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" album snuck in and won album of the year.
Miranda Lambert, "Gunpowder and Lead"
Yeah, there were a whole bunch of possible problems for the New Kids on the Block reunion debut on today's Today show -- the rain-soaked stage, a probable lack of monitors and, well, some bad sound.
But that doesn't necessarily explain all the awkwardness and off-key harmonies, now does it? I'll get to see for myself tomorrow when NKOTB hits Zootopia and, of course, report back here Sunday morning.
In the meantime, here's the video to judge for yourselves:
Fantasia, "Bore Me (Live)"
Forget David vs. David. The most talked-about moment from last night's "Idol" show was apparently Fantasia's amazing performance of "Bore Me." Sure, it wasn't great singing exactly, but it was definitely memorable, given the kinda-predictable shows recently. Will it boost sales of her underappreciated "Fantasia" album from 2006? Hopefully, though maybe "Bump What Ya Friends Say" would have resulted in a less split verdict.
Busta Rhymes has had a rocky few years, but this superstar teaming should put Bus-a-bus back on top of the charts, combining Eminem's "Lose Yourself" vibe with Jay-Z's rocker pals Linkin Park and a big-budget video.
Busta Rhymes feat. Linkin Park, "We Made It"
So Kanye West's video for "Good Morning," directed by Takeshi Murakami, has been floating around in various bootleg forms for a few weeks, but I finally made it over to the Brooklyn Museum of Art to check it out in person and it really is worth the effort to see it.
The video is part of the multimedia portion of the museum's "Murakami" exhibit, along with some playful cartoons featuring Kaikai and Kiki, Murakami's favorite characters, about the wonders of, well, poop.
It's far darker than most of Murakami's work, reflecting the influence of West's own personal story, but in the end, everything still turns out OK in the artist's detailed, childlike style. Even the experience of watching the video plays to Murakami's style, requiring people to sit in a darkened room on a carpet, patterned with his happy flowers, like they were gathered for a grade-school movie.
Kanye West, "Good Morning"
Yes, the new Patrick Dempsey movie "Made of Honor" (a.k.a. "My Best Friend's Wedding" with the genders flipped and McDreamy in the Julia Roberts role) looks quite bad in the trailers, but at least they've decided to revive Dashboard Confessional's excellent single "Stolen" as the movie campaign theme. So maybe the movie's not awful? Yeah, OK.
Mariah Carey may not be known for her videos as much as other divas, but she's had her share of winners:
10. "Don't Forget About Us": Lots of lieing down.
9. "Someday": Oh the hair.
8. "One Sweet Day": Simple and touching.
Yeah, so I was going to try to post Madonna's new video "4 Minutes" this morning, but The Material Girl and her team of YouTube scourers keep pulling them down as fast as people put them up. Whatever. It's at iTunes for purchase only (!) if you want to see it. (There's also a clip of it at MTV.)
Instead, here's the cool video for Glen Cove homegirl Ashanti's new single "The Way That I Love You" since she and her people seem to understand that in the long run it helps having casual fans see your video on the Internet.
Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You"
According to Wikipedia, the band's name is supposed to be spelled out in all caps, though if you want to get technical it's actually ラブ・サイケデリコ. Hailing from Japan, Love Pyschedelico has been around for a few years, but it recently picked up a bit of juice from an Idolator post -- even though the site mistook guitarist Naoki Sato for a girl.
But there's no mistaking the lovely singer, known only as Kumi. She and the guy have a catchy tune called "Your Song" that's notable for two things.
One, it's actually a well-constructed and not entirely derivative pop number -- a rarity, coming from Japan. And two, Kumi seems to have studied at the Alanis Morissette School of Canadian English. She sings most of the song in her native tongue, but on the chorus she successfully wraps her mouth around a hard "R" like the Jagged Little Pill herself. All in all, it's a curio, but a thoroughly enjoyable one.
A compilation album, "This is Love Psychedelico," due April 29 on Hacktone Records, will mark the group's U.S. debut. Check out the video, below:
Eddie Vedder unveils his new protest song "No More" through MTV's think.mtv.com website, the first single from "Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran" (Sire), in stores tomorrow.
The new Britney Spears video for "Break the Ice" doesn't really make any sense, but why should it be different from anything else she's done lately, right? She fights monsters, jumps off buildings and is felled by an explosion! Maybe! Or it could all be a dream! Whatever.
Luckily, "Break the Ice" is an animated clip, which means that Spears had as much to do with the video as she did with the song that accompanies it. (Sorry. I really am trying not to kick people when they're down. No Spitzer jokes today, I swear. Get well soon, Brit.)
Since its debut in June, 1996, “VH1 Storytellers” has been a way for artists to give their fans a deeper insight into how songs developed. The franchise has expanded to include “SoulStage,” an R&B-focused “Storytellers,” which will debut an episode featuring Erykah Badu tomorrow night on VH1 Soul. And the VH1 website storytellers.vh1.com is expanding to provide more from the shows, including footage that didn’t make the special, starting with Mary J. Blige.
Mary J. Blige, "Real Love"
video.vh1.com
And here’s a look at some of “Storytellers” best guests:
Jay-Z (2007): Jay debuted songs from his album “American Gangster” for the first time with a live band and enjoyed himself so much, he decided to go on a lengthy tour.
Continue reading "Best of Storytellers (Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z, Springsteen)" »
Director Vincent Moon divides the shoot into its various LES locations -- Inoteca, Bruscheterria, Babeland, Houston Street, the Bowery -- and shows the footage on Supernatural Superserious. The New York backdrop works well against the line, "Everybody here comes from somewhere."
The final cut
Yeah, that's Kanye West bound and gagged in the trunk of some lingerie-clad lady's car in his new, odd video for "Flashing Lights." It's clear 'Ye is looking to stretch a bit with the clip, which debuts on BET today. (You can watch it here now.) Not sure exactly what he's going for -- will there be a sequel? is this like a hip-hop "Lost"? -- but it's certainly different enough to gain some attention (the lingerie-clad lady doesn't hurt, either).
And, no, his kidnapper isn't Mrs. Vince Gill, a.k.a. Amy Grant.
Watch "Flashing Lights" here
Tell the truth.
When Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video first appeared on MTV, you and your friends stood in front of the television and practiced those monster dance steps that made the video famous. Thank God there are no videos of those moments. But in the era of YouTube, plenty of folks have no problem showing their love for the Gloved One's masterwork. To wit:
Inmates at a Philippines prison have all the right moves -- they even have an Ola Ray!! The warden swears it's just for exercise. The video was a viral hit last year.
Well, in case there was any doubt before, we can now project that the winner of the vote in CelebrityLand and its suburb MusicVille will be Barack Obama.
The independently produced "Yes We Can" video (hosted first at DipDive before going viral) includes a cavalcade of stars -- from Scarlet Johansson and will.i.am to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and John Legend -- speaking and/or singing along with his "Yes We Can" speech over an acoustic hip-hop beat. Not only does it show off Obama's oratorical skills, but it is also a shock-and-awe strike against the rest of the presidential candidates since no one else -- neither Republican or Democrat -- can match this kind of celebrity star power.
As more and more people watch music videos on their iPods and their small computer screens instead of on TVs, directors have been drifting to the style of using more closeups and fewer wide shots. For the new James Blunt video "Same Mistake," the great director Jonas Akerlund uses an extreme closeup on Blunt as the focus for the entire video.
In this case, he's using it to offer an interesting point-of-view to tell his story. In the future, though, look for hackier directors to copy this idea to make closeup-loving artist managers and record labels happy, using this video as the template.
Soon, we'll all be howling, "Ah-oooo-ooo-oo-oo-ooh."
Janet Jackson really does deserve better.
The video for her new single "Feedback" seems like yet another haphazard step in this good-not-great portion of her career. "Feedback" looks cheap, but Jackson has the dancing chops to overcome that. (Remember "The Pleasure Principle"?) The problem isn't that it's low-concept, but that the low-concept is ridiculously bad. First, she's apparently queen of the world. Then, she and her dance troupe colonize Mars. Then, they apparently flee to a bowl of milk where they dance while trying to avoid getting hit by Kix cereal, where they -- spolier alert! -- drown in the milk. Luckily, Janet survives to do a CGI-enhanced dance break in a brand new outfit with some giant Kix cereal. But, um, why?
What makes the video maddening is that the choreography looks good and Jackson clearly still has skills, but instead of making the most of them, the video's cheesiness detracts from it. Even if she simply danced in front of an amplifier, the "Feedback" video would have been better.
Concepts aren't really all that important when the video stars Janet Jackson. You'd think that she and her handlers would know that by now.
The folks over at JibJab rework Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" for their 2007 retrospective. And yes, there's a JibJab jab at Lindsay Lohan, as well as Sen. Larry Craig, Michael Vick and even O.J.
In a ranting, all-cap post on her blog, M.I.A. claims MTV has "sabotaged" her video for "Paper Planes," scheduled to premiere on the network today.
The song's hook features four gun-shots, but the video has replaced those sounds with something more like a snare-drum.
How did M.I.A. find out about this tomfoolery? Through YouTube, of course.
"I MADE THE PAPER PLANES VIDEO," the rapper wrote on her MySpace blog. "I MADE IT HOW THEY WANTED. NO VIOLENCE. AMBIGUOUS. MTV - FRIENDLY. NOW TODAY, I CHECK YOUTUBE AND SEE THE LEAKED MTV PAPER PLANES VIDEO UP FOR THE FIRST TIME. I CLICKED ON IT AND OUT COMES THIS ----UP MESS WITH DOUBLE-TRACKED ---- MESS."
This isn't the first time M.I.A. has run afoul of the Standards & Practices department at a network. In September, she performed the song live for "Late Show With David Letterman" with the gunshots similarly replaced.
By the way, speaking of sabotage, look for a couple of Beastie Boys in the "Paper Planes" video. Here's the unedited version, which M.I.A. posted on MySpace:
And here's that weird-sounding Letterman performance:
Do we really have to call him Floyd “Money” Mayweather, Jr.?
The welterweight boxer who felled Mike Hatton with a 10th-round TKO in Las Vegas over the weekend apparently believes he can rap.
A grainy, poorly-shot video for "Money" Mayweather's song “Yep,” credited to his own Philthy Rich record label, shows the boxer living large, drinking Grey Goose, partying in a pool and counting money while surrounded by women wearing G-strings.
“We got them guns,” Mayweather raps, possibly referring to his pecs rather than actual firearms.
The track puts Mayweather in the company of Allen Iverson, Deion Sanders, Kobe Bryant and other professional athletes who have tried to break into the music world with less than spectacular results. (Remember "K.O.B.E." with Tyra Banks?)
Mayweather's video has already met with negative reviews, including one from TheSweetScience, a boxing Website, which calls it a "disgrace" and blasts the champ for acting “like a world-class thug” and using the N-word.
“It's a gross showing,” writer Michael Woods says on the site. He also calls the video “some sad, sick stuff.”
PHOTO: Associated Press
A spontaneously-made video for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place," from Radiohead's new album "In Rainbows," is making the rounds on the Internet. It's essentially a performance-based video built around one oddball effect: As the band members play in the studio, their heads remain perfectly still while their bodies move and shift beneath them in unsettling ways.
That's the result of a "helmet cam," according to director Adam Buxton, who explains in a posting on his Website:
"It’s a mini surveillance camera mounted on the front of a bicycle helmet which makes the head of the wearer appear stationary while everything around them slides around nauseatingly. It’s a technique that’s been used a lot (Martin Scorcese and Peter Gabriel spring to mind), but it always occurred to me that the bike helmet version might be good for some kind of music video."
According to Buxton, he and his assistant Garth Jennings shot the video in just a couple of takes at the band's residential studio in the Oxford countryside. "After supper Garth and I loaded everything onto a laptop and it looked great," he writes. "We stayed up til 2.30am chopping the footage from the 5 cameras together and when we were finished it looked pretty good."
The video eventually became part of a Webcast aired at Radiohead.tv last month.
Check it out here:
As publicity stunts go, things couldn't be working out better for Neurosonic.
Neurowho? They're a punkish rock band from Canada currently riding a mini-wave of controversy thanks to the song "So Many People."
It's a direct attack on Ashlee Simpson, with particular focus on her famous lip-synching disaster during "Saturday Night Live." The video features a Simpsonesque blonde hanging out in nightclubs with a couple of Lindsay and Paris look-alikes. Meantime, singer Jason Darr unleashes his venom: "Everything under the sun going to hell in an episode of 'SNL' / Watch it on the TV / You ugly girl, you cannot sing / You can't even lip-synch."
Darr also gripes about the Billboard Awards (Simpson won Best New Female Artist of the Year in 2004) and wonders if any sexual favors were traded for hit records.
When Neurosonic played The Knitting Factory in Manhattan last week, Darr claimed that Simpson's boyfriend, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, "has a cease and desist out against us." That made Page Six of The New York Post, and gullible Internet sites quickly spread the news.
Yesterday, however, Wentz denied it on his own blog: "no i have never heard of that band or ever sent a cease and desist in my life. hope it works out for you."
Now, there's plenty of lameness to go around in any story involving Simpson and Wentz, but the biggest culprits are Neurosonic. Simpson flubbed her "SNL" appearance in Oct 2004 -- that's three years ago. The public has since moved on to other examples of idiocy (Don Imus, the O'Donnell-Trump feud, the mortgage crisis), but here's Neurosonic still seething about how Simpson won a Billboard award.
Check out the video here:
On tour, the country duo Sugarland has been performing an impressively boot-scootin' version of Beyonce's "Irreplacable," so it was no surprise to see Jennifer Nettles and company run through it at last night's American Music Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. But then Beyonce herself came out to lend a hand.
That turned the song into a cover of a cover, or a mash-up of a mash-up, or something. At any rate, it wasn't entirely successful -- Beyonce knows how to get down, not hoe-down -- but the whole thing made for a nice surprise. Check it out here:
Hear "As I Am" here [MTV]
This "behind-the-scenes" video of Celine Dion plays more like a "Saturday Night Live" parody than a promotional tool on Amazon.com for her new "Taking Chances" CD, which comes out on Tuesday. It has her saying, "It better rock!" It has yodeling. Weird mugging for the camera. All it needs is a good chest-thump.
