Current Video Reviews
Missy Elliott - “Lose Control ”
R.Kelly - “ Trapped In The Closet (Chapters I-V) ”
Artist: Faith Evans
Video: “Mesmerized“
Director: Bryan Barber
Almost all rap videos look contemporary, and are set in a present-day party or cityscape. Not so with R&B, a much more backward-looking genre. Throwback rap certainly exists, but it can’t force its way onto contemporary playlists. But platforms like VH1 Soul virtually guarantee an outlet for artists trading in Motor City and mid-Seventies nostalgia. In R&B, like prog-rock, sounding old is a mark of distinction. Faith Evans, for instance, does her best to sound like Aretha on “Mesmerized,” but mostly just makes like Lenny Kravitz. Evans is a hell of a lot more watchable than Kravitz, though, and that’s not just because she has some vague idea of how to dance. It’s also that Evans, who is essentially a plastic person, slots well into the performance dioramas that R&B set designers dig. In the “Mesmerized” clip, she’s shot in a gigantic, gorgeous concert hall that looks like a Depression-era movie palace, and dressed like somebody’s blinged-out idea of a flapper. Like Amerie in the “1 Thing” video, Evans gets good mileage out of the classic bandstand setup. But the band is dressed like the Motown sixties, with a little Superfly-blaxploitation thrown in. The dance sequences, too, are dated, but indiscriminately; they’re meant to be suggestive of old girl group footage, or maybe the Fillmore West, or maybe Josie and the Pussycats. History is one big attic to rummage through for these guys, and they’ll come down the steps dressed differently each time, wearing something inexpertly mobilized and vaguely suggestive of the past. -Tris McCall
Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/evans_faith/artist.jhtml
Artist: Leela James
Video: “Music”
Director: Coodie & Chike
The strategy for Evans and so many other R&B singers in rotation on VH1 Soul seems to be to chuck as many old-timey signifiers as possible at the viewer in the hope that one or two makes resonance. It’s ideological, but just barely: there’s more desperation than design in these frantic attempts to connect with an idealized golden age. But every now and then you get a Leela James – somebody for whom the past is not a wardrobe to be mined for evocative props and costumes, but a firm reminder of a superior prior standard that current musicians can’t hope to live up to. A song that no fogey could fail to appreciate, “Music” is a crotchety, rap-hating complaint about contemporary radio worthy of C. Dolores Tucker. James has accompanied her hatchet job with a clip that flits methodically between past and present. See, we know we’re in the flashbacks when the film goes semi-tone; it’s just like Any Day Now on Lifetime. The putative plot traces the relationship between James and a friend through time – they start out as little girls holding hands and skipping down the street, and end up estranged before a reunion back at the gin joint they used to peek into as children. Once a performance space, the bar is now depressing and half-empty; this is what happens now that there isn’t any music anymore. Really, though, it’s all just an excuse for James to get onstage and ostensibly return the room to some version of its former glory by supplying it with the sort of sound that’s been missing since the singer was a child. Whether or not she succeeds depends entirely on how you feel about current radio pop and James’s performance capacities. I think you can probably guess where I stand.-Tris McCall
Check it out for yourself at: http://uk.music.yahoo.com/ar-303953-videos--Leela-James
Artist: Kanye West
Video: “Golddigger“
Director: Hype Williams
Like everybody else who has a serious axe to grind about contemporary African-American pop music, Leela James namechecks Marvin Gaye. I’ve always found this hard to understand: Gaye was a very forward-looking artist, and never had much time for atavists. Kanye West doesn’t, either, and what kind of ingrate would he be if he did? Contemporary music has made him a singing, rapping, producing, Bush-bashing superstar. No, the angel breathing life into West’s “Golddigger” is Ray Charles – the song is built around a sample of his voice, and the video has some of the sleazy spirit of a jazz speakeasy. The Godfather himself doesn’t appear in the clip, but Jamie Foxx, who apparently now believes he is Ray Charles, is content to wear the sunglasses and mince around. But the rest of the clip is ace, and extends the Louis Vuitton Don’s fetish for old periodicals: like the video for Common’s “Go,” which West directed, shots consist of reconstructions of vintage magazine covers. But while the “Go” images were toney, stylish, and Seventies-mahogany, the “Golddigger” images are meant to look like trashy softcore porn pin-ups from the early Sixties. West himself gives a great performance, arrogant, shrugging, dressed in a collared shirt and chinos like Dobie Gillis and rapping over his shoulder with his back to the camera. Beautifully lit and frantically cut, “Golddigger” doesn’t look like anything else on MTV right now – or, for that matter, like anything else director Hype Williams has ever done. He’s fully on board with the program, though, and willing to adapt his style to West’s frathouse vision. Williams is rightfully famous for digitally removing frames to make artists (think early Busta) approach the video audience with herky-jerky, freakishly unnatural movements. Here, he does the same thing, but adapts his effect to evoke the feel of a old-style, hand-crank coin-op film machine like those you might find in a blue movie theatre. -Tris McCall.
Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/west_kanye/audvid.jhtml
Artist: Missy Elliott
Video: “Lose Control ”
Director: Dave Myers & Missy Elliott
West fits history to his ends, James uses history like a weapon, and Evans (like many other R&B singers) flails around in history’s pantry, mixing pungent ingredients and hoping the cake rises. But no video artist plays with history quite as audaciously, or works its corners quite as masterfully, as does Missy Elliott, whose unprecedented winning streak continues with “Lose Control.” It’s not just that Elliott is irreverent and willing to court controversy – though the iconography in the liner notes of The Cookbook, in which she portrays the plantation house mother, the antebellum fieldworker, and the pimp/slavemaster, should give you some idea where her bee-covered head is at these days. It’s also that Elliott knows the permeability of cultural memory, and has the visual chops to play games with our own misremembered history lessons. The most remarkable sequence of “Lose Control” is shot in some kind of netherworld between slave quarters and a modern stage representation of slave quarters; the filter is so extreme that it’s impossible to tell. Magic realism intervenes: Ciara, who does her best to keep up with Missy, is thrown into the air and high against the rear wall of the structure, where she levitates above the crowd. Everybody is dressed in period costume, and, in strict accordance with expectation, everybody is dancing at the edge of hysteria. This is the slave experience as reconstructed by two hundred years of film representations. Elliott stares into the far end of the telescope – through the heavy filters of Roots, The Color Purple, the Oprah Winfrey show, and countless television documentaries – and reports what she sees. “Lose Control” won an MTV Video Award for best choreography, an award it deserved. Elliott’s lifetime achievement award is forthcoming, I presume. -Tris McCall
Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/elliott_missy/audvid.jhtml
Artist: R. Kelly
Video: “Trapped In The Closet (Chapters I-IV) ”
Director: R. Kelly & Jim Swaffield
Kelly, on the other hand, has had only a middling video track record – for every off-the-hook party he’s shown us, he’s given us twice as much footage of his physique and his equally boring weapons collection. Even at his best (and his best is very good), there’s always been a shallowness to his work. With “Trapped In The Closet,” he reaches for the stars: twenty minutes of over-the-top R&B narrative, five separate climaxes, and no choruses. Yet as amusing as it is to follow the story and to root for the overreach to succeed, there’s not much dimensionality here, and very little substance behind the tale. The “Trapped In The Closet” clip tracks Kelly’s misadventures word for word, matching each gesture and sex act described in the song with a literalized image. We’re shown the cheating wife, the gay husband, the scheming policeman; they walk on and offstage when prompted, in the histrionic-yet-perfunctory style of kitchen-sink drama. Now, the singer did cite Desperate Housewives as his inspiration, so perhaps we ought to cut him some slack, or just points for retrospective honesty. But even Eva Longoria changes her facial expression from time to time; Kelly, on the other hand, seems to have gone to the Harrison Ford school of perpetual consternation. His roguish charm and badass rep comes from some extramusical stuff that we all know about and that I won’t rehash here. But if you’re one of the few people in America who isn’t familiar with Kelly’s rap sheet, there’s nothing in his performance that you’ll find anything other than cartoonish. -Tris McCall
Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/kelly_r/artist.jhtml