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Current Video Reviews

Corinne Bailey Rae - “Put Your Records On”

Christina Milian - “Say I”

Kelis & Too Short - “Bossy”

Nelly Furtado & Timbaland - “Promiscuous”

Gnarls Barkley- “Crazy”

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Take the last exit off the BQE in Kingsborough – just before you get on the Williamsburg Bridge – and you’ll be on Brooklyn’s own Broadway, a well-traveled, still seedy but rapidly rehabbing road now groaning under the yoke of developers and city planners. The new construction projects are ringed by pro forma plywood walls, and for the past few years, record companies have been targeting these as instant billboards. If you’re curious about what’s coming out and when, a quick walk down Broadway will clue you in to all the new release dates, and affix faces to names you might have heard in the pop press. Bills are posted in a whirlwind of promotional monomania and overkill: one day you’ll wake up, and forty glossy portraits of Matisyahu will have been scraped off the walls, replaced by forty new posters of Juvenile. This is a history of contemporary pop iconography, wheat-pasted in deep layers, a vertical catalog of scripted sex appeal and rented jewelry. Anyway, when Corinne Bailey Rae debuted at #1 in the U.K., EMI decided they might have something on their hands that could play in America – and a few weeks ago, Broadway between Driggs and Bedford was transformed into a gigantic ad for CBR-brand entertainment. That the fetching Corinne Bailey Rae looked more like a young woman you might see on the street in Williamsburg than a celebrity wannabe in a South Beach nightclub pleased me plenty – you know where I hang, and why. But evidently it didn’t please somebody else. Because mere days after they were pasted to the plywood, every single poster of Corinne Bailey Rae had been defaced.

It wasn’t random or chaotic vandalism, either; it was a particularly thorough, systematic, and violent assault on her image. On each poster, Bailey Rae’s face was covered with white paint. This whitewashing – a decapitation, really – made Broadway an eerie stretch to walk for a couple of weeks. What was it about Corinne Bailey Rae that prompted such a severe reaction? Was this a statement about her liminal racial identity; the act of a mad R&B purity crusader erasing her from public consciousness for the sin of throwing so much tweepop into her grooves? Or was it her sheer preciousness, and the boldness with which she advertised her soft femininity that offended a city that has come to demand something tougher? In any case, it was a portent: on the U.S. charts, Corinne Bailey Rae slipped faster and harder than a fat man on a bar of soap, and “Put Your Records On” was banished to the outer reached of VH-1 Soul.

The video is about as sweet an ice cream cone as mainstream U.S. rock video channels are scooping up for us these days; far closer to clips by Belle & Sebastian than anything from Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, her apparent models. Bailey Rae smiles and demurs and rides her bike on a country road, and stops to frolic in a field of flowers. If that’s not enough to stop your indiepop heart in its tracks, she’s followed by about ten equally adorable young women, all on their bikes, and all radiant in the summer sun. Bailey Rae and friends are decked out in those high-waters and faux-maternity blouses that are all the rage lately, but even the awful fashions of 2006 can’t wreck the feeling of bliss. That it turned out we’d rather watch Yung Joc fingering his bling bling than lovely girls playing on their bikes is deeply disturbing to me, and suggests that our cultural sickness, and our attraction to and preference for ugliness, goes even deeper than I initially imagined it did. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-22504801-videos--Corinne-Bailey-Rae

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The girls just can’t win. Forty years ago, women were not allowed to be tough in videos; now, they can’t be sweet. Corinne Bailey Rae tried to win our hearts by posing as the perfect girlfriend, shy, smiling, compliant, impossibly approachable and friendly. In the “Put Your Records On” clip, she never looks at the camera directly – she’s coy, casting her eyes to the sky, or shutting them halfway and singing with fluttering eyelids. Your Women’s Studies professor will tell you that this is not the way for a woman to behave, and obviously she’s got a point, because patriarchy demands resistance. But if we’ve lost the ability to appreciate what is wonderful about smiling girls on bikes, then no political gain is worth the price we’ve paid in sheer dehumanization – especially when, all too often, the alternative has become an exaggerated coarseness.

Consider JC’s own Christina Milian, a middle-of-the-pack R&B singer attempting to distinguish herself from her peers by donning the well-worn gangsta girl mantle. Where Bailey Rae demurs and looks away from the camera with a smile, Milian stares at the lens in every shot like she wants to punch out the photographer. CBR frolics in the country; Milian surrounds herself with graffiti and cement, and does her best to appropriate their grim solidity. The friends of Corinne Bailey Rae seem thrilled to be coasting along on their dimestore bikes; the members of Milian’s tough-girl crew pose in a stationary candy-colored Cadillac. So far, so good, if rough chicks are your thing. But then Young Jeezy hijacks the video for an interminable cameo (hey, even Flash had the courtesy to drop a few lines and get the hell out of the way on “I Feel For You), and Milian is shoved to the rear of the set and given some lame dance moves to discharge. Let me repeat this for emphasis: Christina Milian allows herself to be reduced to the status of a video girl in her own promo clip. I mean, how tough can you really be if you’re willing to cede a full third of your breakthrough video to a mediocrity like Jeezy the Snowman? -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-285396-videos--Christina-Milian

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See, Christina Milian, no matter how tough you want to front, everybody knows you don’t hold any of the cards. A man writes the words you sing, a man produces the track, a man shoots the video, a man changes the money that puts your voice on the charts, and a man can take it all away the minute he decides he doesn’t like the way you’re playing the game. Observe the fate of Lauryn Hill, the one woman resourceful enough to put a legitimate dent in this system: because she had the audacity to follow her own personal vision, she is now popularly considered insane. If a guy does that, he’s celebrated as an idiosyncratic genius, even if he does spend his entire adult life recovering from megadoses of blotter acid.

The irony of it all is that since the mid-Nineties, R&B sung by women has had exactly one subject: self-empowerment. Women are now expected to sing about how they are independent, and they don’t want no scrubs, and they’re real and they’re free and they’re still Jenny from the block, and they’re emancipated like Mimi; and when they deviate from this script, they’re accused of being weak. This is how anxious we’ve become about the idea of women speaking for themselves: men now provide female R&B singers with quasifeminist boilerplate that is meant to preempt intelligent discussion, and which satirizes itself insofar as it is completely detached from objective reality. “Put Your Records On” and “Say I” are really the same song divided by a common language: they’re about young girls asserting their rights and privileges and finding themselves through self-expression. Bailey Rae’s British iteration is cast as advice, because they’re slightly more communitarian over there; Milian’s American version is full of dime-store defiance and making it happen and keeping it gangster, because…, well, because it’s American. “Bossy” takes it one step further, as Kelis is wont to do – not only is she going to seize what’s hers, but she’s going to be as aggressive and obnoxious about it as she can be, and God save you if you happen to be in her way.

The entertainment value comes from the sadistic pleasure of watching Kelis impose her will on others. The clip for “Bossy” opens with Mrs. Jones (hey, I’m not insisting on it; she keeps on flashing to a big gold chain that announces her to the world as the property of Nas, and by extension, Ill Will) cutting her hair. But this cosmetic move is not one of liberation from male expectation; instead, she’s just trying to make herself look more like a dominatrix. In case you miss the point, there’s her stiletto heel pressing into the bare back of a man prone on his stomach. Milian, who has something to prove, tried to outstare the camera lens; Kelis wears sunglasses at night and disengages from both the viewer and the eye candy that accompanies her around the set. She, too, has her vehicle in motion – but she doesn’t roll with friends, because she doesn’t require any. Artfully-shot glasses of champagne and oysters and submissive boy-toys and poodles dyed blue emerge for a second or two, and then they’re pulled away, swallowed up by blackness. The streets are deserted and the men are impassive; and Kelis been so successful in her project of self-actualization that she’s effectively drained her surroundings of anything that doesn’t reflect her desires. The solipsistic result sure looks beautiful – but it feels like a horror show. -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-295031-videos--Kelis

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That those desires have been constructed by a bunch of guys with cellphones, demographic reports and hard-ons goes without saying. “Bossy” exists at the horizon where female self-determination becomes just another male-authored S&M fantasy. That Kelis is willing to play the role to the hilt merely means that she understands her market niche, and how best to please Big Daddy. There will always be men willing to splash out their fantasies on the great canvas of mass-consciousness, and there will always be women waiting in line to be willing accomplices. But if a ceasefire in this siege of the imagination (I won’t call it a war of the sexes; it hasn’t been that in my lifetime at least) is unimaginable, isn’t there some possibility of role reversal? Could a man ever allow himself to broadcast a message designed by a woman? Consider that in the late Seventies, Lindsey Buckingham’s vocals made a few Christine McVie songs world-famous. Since then, there have been countless examples of hit songs written by men and delivered by female singers. But I can’t think of any other male pop singer who has served – even fleetingly – as the mouthpiece for a woman in his band. Authorship is the man’s guarded prerogative, and the last line of defense against social change. It’s sad to think that Fleetwood Mac represents the high-water mark of gender equality on the American pop charts, but even a cursory examination of the historical record suggests strongly that it’s all been downhill since Rumours.

R&B has been, if anything, even more intractably sexist than standard Top-40 pop. And it shouldn’t be, because this is girl’s music – it’s music listened to by young women almost exclusively, with the occasional gay guy or rock critic thrown in for variation’s sake. But it’s a producer-driven genre, and the producer is the auteur, and the auteur is simply never allowed to be a woman. The interaction between the producer and his diva is generally straight-up Henry Higgins stuff, and that’s why so many of these tracks essentially ask Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man? But a few producers are more relaxed about it, and even if they’re loath to turn the steering wheel over to a girl, they’re willing to bring her out as something other than an extension of their own designs. I believe the relationship between Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams, for instance, is one of mutual respect, or at least one of as much respect as she used to get in No Doubt. Which probably wasn’t all that much, come to think of it.

And then there’s Timbaland. By now, when you mail-order your track from Mr. Mo, you know what you’re going to get, and the singer probably has little control over the finished product. But in videos, at least, he’s been willing to portray himself as an equal, or at least whimsical and avuncular enough to countenance some individual personality from his charges. The revolutionary shot in the “Promiscuous” video has nothing to do with cellphone split screen, or Nelly Furtado’s sexy-stupid gypsy dance. No, it’s shot in front of a blank white backdrop, and it begins with Tim on drums and Furtado, red-lipsticked like a punk rocker, singing. But when we return to it, the script has been flipped – and now it’s Mosley on the mic and Furtado setting the tempo. Drums have always been a metaphor for production and authorship in R&B, and not merely because it’s the producer whose hands are on the 808. The drummer is the driver, pushing the beat, claiming ultimate control of the rhythm and the music. Ceding that stool to Furtado, even for a moment, is, all these years after “Don’t Stop”, a pleasant surprise. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-302028-videos--Nelly-Furtado2

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But Tim Mosley grew up with Missy Elliott, the only woman besides Lauryn Hill who can say she’s walked the walk as well as she’s talked the talk – even if she had to sacrifice her seriousness to get where she was going. Although SWAT teams of cosmetologists have worked on her appearance, we all know Elliott is no beauty, and her videos have not tried to pull the wool on us about that. Instead, she’s gone abstract, and hid her weird appearance behind space suits, plastic shields, swarms of bees, sci-fi hooliganism. Male emcees can, by contrast, be as ugly as they want to be, and right under the stagelights, too. Cee-Lo is rounder than a Magic 8-Ball and just as bald; he looks like some old crank you’d see at a buffet table, shoveling helping after helping of mashed potatoes and gravy onto his plate. If Gnarls Barkley had been a southern rap project akin to Goodie Mob, and not an off-the-wall R&B-soul revue contrary enough to record a faithful cover of “Gone Daddy Gone”, there is no question he would have appeared in his video without masking his unbecoming appearance. But “Crazy” was a song meant to appeal not just to the ladies but to Whitey, too, and that demands some artful obfuscation. The visual metaphor here is a Rorschach test, and Cee-Lo’s face emerges and dissolves in the shifting inkblot. Occasionally, symmetry breaks, and one side of the reflection sings to the other – but even then, the shapes shift too quickly to give the viewer a clear fix on what’s happening. Gnarls Barkley throw in a few roaches and centipedes to keep things edgy and to suggest mental deterioration, but these, too, dissipate before they leave any lasting impression. The result is more Electric Company than Electric Ladyland – a strangely tame and abstract clip for a piece of buttoned-down soul that leans toward the flame but never exactly catches fire. It’s still an excellent song and performance, and will almost surely be remembered as this year’s “Hey Ya!” – but it’s Furtado’s single that really deserves the plaudits.  -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://search.music.yahoo.com/search/?p=Gnarls+Barkley&m=video

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