3 Hours of MTV XIV-XV

Being 20th - 27th June. Or more accurately, 20th Jun-1st July, because it was about then that I started recording stuff daily. The sign of madness, it's true, but to be honest I'm not getting more redundancy than usual, and so I have 40 minutes of fast-forwarding through a video othe next evening (which can be accompanied by reading/websurfing/listening to music) and maybe 15-30 minutes of actual writing on average, rather than multiple hours on a Monday evening. One of the things that more data shows up is that there are patterns in the handful of old songs that they throw up each week. For example, over the last few weeks, the list of tracks that have been played once is a mix of previous singles at the end of the bell-curve (Toxic, Harder To Breathe) and new ones just starting up (The Music, Mis-Teeq, The 411). And the current lords (Keane, Franz Ferdinand, Beastie Boys, Thrills) have playcounts in the high 30s. But only one of the six tracks that have been played six times is in any sense current; the others are all from a couple of years ago. Including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Give It Away: not played before six weeks ago, then steadily, building up to three times in four days this week. Anyway, on with the show:

Phoenix's Everything Is Everything sounds like an attempt by some evil genius to made a Basement Jaxx record out of indie. It starts with chopped-off guitars, and keeps sticking in more hooks, bits of triangle, snatches of Boys of Summer, anything to keep your mind off the fact that the band look like that guy from Space times five. It's strangely beautiful, if not perhaps quite as impressive as a full-on pop monster from Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens.

List of things that aren't funny: The Foo Fighters in fat suits, Dave Grohl as a young girl, people acting stoned. Also more than 10 seconds of Tenacious D, though the video for Learn To Fly comes un just under the line for that one. The people making the video earn points for ignoring everything about the strugglesome anthem apart from the title, and deciding to do an Airplane ripoff. However it's an unfunny Airplane ripoff, so they lose those points again.

The video starts in a school auditorium, panning past the seats/bleachers, and literally the first frame is the feet of some guy wearing scuffed Converse One-Stars, feet arranged so that we can see the label on his inside ankle. What blatant piece of product placement is this? It's Smells Like Teen Spirit. I don't really have anything original to say about the song or the video, I'm not sure that there is anything original left. I love it. I hope I love it forever.

I suspect that we're supposed to be surprised at the main plot of Fallin', which is that love almighty impels quiet piano lady Alicia Keys to visit a prison and talk to her love, a prisoner! However since I never saw the video when it came out, it just seems like a a sequel to If I Ain't Got You. There's also a blatant "Here's Alicia earlier, in the outfit from off the front of her album". It's probably a comment on the justice system that the prison officers are the only white people in the prison. I don't know what it's a comment on that the lighting regularly makes her look like the only other white person in the video.

House tracks must be a bastard to make a video for, if the artist decides you have to capture the "idea of the song". Here's the first verse to Lola's Theme, by Shapeshifters: "Looking Back I know I was walking around in disguise / It's a fact, I was just a lost soul, I needed a guide / And the moment that you came to change my life / You fired up my heart and made me smile" (cue chorus, which is "I'm a different person, turned my life around" 300 times). The fact that this is complete piffle doesn't detract from the fact that it's quite a nice uplifting house choon, but the video is two young people in love at the funfair, and frankly it's pants.

In retrospect, Girlfriend the single by 'NSYNC Feat. Nelly is more or less Justin Timberlake Feat. Nelly. It's more like a remix of the orignal 'NSYNC track, with new beats and Nelly takign over most of the track. And good thing too: the original was pretty rubbish even apart from being too obvious - signing "will you be my grilfriend?" went out with the Osmonds (NB: it is possible that teenage girl technology has not kept up with the times)

Even though Puff Daddy's I'll Be Missing You was omnipresent on release and much discussed as the start of both Puff Daddy's career and Sting's second one, thre's still some things that turn up on later watching, like the fact that Faith Evans actually starts singing a modified line from Apallachian-as-fuck I'll Fly Away which I didn't hear until it turned up on the O Brother How Art Thou soundtrack.

How Come is "MY Band, only 4 real". A breakup song about D12, probing the disparities in fortunes of Eminem and the rest like a sore tooth, and getting a lot of good material out of it, even for the usually cartoonish Bizarre. There's an unrelated short at the end, which estableished that they are mand band and dangerous to know (and also reminds us that we have been watching: entertainment)

Last Nite seems to have found The Strokes right as the bloom was coming off the rose (more likely it's right in the middle of their "fuck the everyone" phase) as they stumble about. They've rerecorded the tracj for the live video, and it sounds shit, not like the coiled animal of the original. They haven't even got fucking things up right.

The framing idea for In Da Club is brilliant - Eminem and Dre are building the perfect gangsta in the style of the Million Dollar Man, and now I understand what Bizarre was taking the piss out of in the video for My Band. The actual bits where they test the efficiency of their creation 50 Cent by letting him loose in the club look like every other rap video, though.

Kane's Rain Down On Me is big oakenfoldian electronica at the start and end, merging into big guitars very quickly. Like a cartoon view of what R&B is against. It's a live performance to a stadium, as a attempt to convince me that they are enormous somewhere. Further study proves that somewhere is Belgium.

I am concerned that I'm just going to end up writing "band = other band - on ACID!", but These Words, the second single from Natasha Bedingfield. really does appear to be a straightforward landgrab for the territory that Nelly Furtado used to inhabit with her first album. There's nothing wrong with that at all, it is bright summer music with a sense of humor. It doesn't have chart-pop's desire to continually keep you on your toes, preferring to find a nice sound and stick in it. As a result it drags a bit at the end (though it does pack two and a half verses into 3:35!). The video includes a bit where she probably thinks she looks like Pink, but in fact looks like a very young Joanna Lumley looking like Pink.