3 hours of MTV XXXI-XXXV

No real changes over this five weeks, we continued to be ruled over by Steriogram, Gwen Stefani and the Scissor Sisters' Mary. Dark days, dark days. I've officially given up on the red text now: if it's modern, I heard it here first.

I remember positive feelings about the Chris Cunningham-directed video for Windowlicker, and most of them remain. The fantastic dance-choreography, the simple derangment of seeing bikini-clad girls with Richard D James' face are still there. The extended version howerer starts out with a constant stread of niggas, motherfuckerzs and bitches, like what your mum thinks hip-hop videos sound like. And there does come a point in the main video where you have to ask yourself "is spraying nubile ladies with champagne and observing the results really any better if they all have the face of Aphex Twin"?

The director of the video for the new Roger Sanchez is a Master! of visual! metaphor! There's a prettyish girl with an enormous plastic heart, looking for love on the streets of New York. So over the course of an evening, her heart shrinks, then she meets a nice man, and they hand around until the evening. The next morning, her heart is monstro-sized, and he spots it and runs away. This is War & Peace by the standards of bobbins trance tracks, which is what Another Chance definitely is. They even drop the track to barely-audible for the meet-up, just to show who's boss.

Is it just me, or is the vast amouts of female flesh in the video for Lapdance not that sexy? I don't mean in a "ugh, strippers" way, just that the presentation all seems ultra seedy. It's possible that the mustached Pharrell might have helped there. The song itself seems really strange in light of N.E.R.D.'s new ELO status these days. It's really lyrically tough and it's hard to see if they really has a vision of themselves becoming this band on a permanent basis (and whether this plan included their friend Harvery the Duff Rapper).

It must be breasts night at the OK Corral, because here comes The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up. Whatever you might think about the song (probably the last great single they'll ever release, for my money), the video is striking, first for it's shock ending, then for they way that repeated viewings bring out it's devotion to its ethics. It is in its own way very pure.

In a reversal of the usual D12/Missy Elliott fashion, My Boo has a completely superfluous song stick on the start instead. The main attraction is a pretty lightweight affir, with the videos showng the Usher & Alicia Keys as from the same side of the tracks. Will the world never be fair for two rich people in love? Alicia seems to be hoding him close in the later scenes partly to suppress his dancing.

Apart from the body-horror of Chris Cunningham's Aphex Twin videos, there's another side, fascinated by techology and humans and various borders between, and it's the one shown on Bjork's All Is Full Of Love. A simple, spare song, just her voice, a drumbeat like a limpng heart and some synths, and a video tha't simultaneously beautiful and reallly disturbing. The shot of two apple-like robots kissing while various mechanincal appendages are plugged into their backs liek enormous parasites is the shot that convinced me that he could well be the man to make Neuromancer (Though that appears to have gone the way of the arse).

Another "I can't believe that I haven't reviewed it before" video, courtesy of The Darkness. I've said somewhere else that the video for Don't Let The Bells End harks back to the time when bands would pretend that they spent Christmas together, and I Believe In a Thing Called Love takes us back to the non-existent tradition of pretending that the band roams the galaxy in a spaceship together. Oh all right, non-existent apart from N.E.R.D.'s She Wants to Move. A fantatically silly video for a fantastically silly song. Note: the gratuitous knockwurst that Justin uses for a microphone for the line "Guitar!" and the brief inexplicable she-devil.

So now that U2 have, in their own words, reclaimed the title of best rock and roll band in the world, what will they do with it? The answer is implausibly "Release a track that sounds like the Ash single before last". The video for Vertigo is almost certainly the product of a conversation that included the line "we would everyone watching to be perfectly clear that this cost an appalling amount of money"

It's not unexpected for an Eminem video to court controversy, but when Mosh starts with an overhead plane crashing into something, then to cartoon Marshall Mathers as the president in a classrom full of kids, you have to wonder what this is. This in fact is an all-out assault on George W. Bush, relased the week before the election. Eminem being Eminem, it takes a verse for it to get off the subject of himself, but after that it's vitriol pure. The video looks flash animated, but where that usually means ridiculous simplicity, here it's just simple - a story of unidentified everypeople who've reached snapping point. The backing track is pretty martial - foot stomping, humming, gothy piano chords, not a million million miles from Jesus Walks. It probably wouldn't stick in my head bveyond the first few listens and a few nice lines, but the video is absolutely incredible. Shown on MTV it's slightly cut: a raised middle finger is blurred, but the silencing of the first word in "fuck Bush" makes it sound 10 times louder. In years to come I'll probably look back on this and sneer. I'll be wrong.

Wait, why is Robbie Williams answering questions in a Hong Kong customs office? Oh right, because this dreadful rubbish, by name Misundertood, is off the soundtrack to Bridget Jones 2.

On the night of the election, along with an actual current song from Eminem (see above) we get Shoot The Dog from George Michael, from a few years ago: not that this kind of political commentary ever really ages: it was rotten to statrt with. The video is that rubbish animated one starring George as everyone except Tony and the other George, and the song is GM as your embarrassing uncle, who only stops ripping off Pop Music long enough to steal a lengthy chunk from Love Action.

Time Is Running Out is the other "topical" track tonight, it's Muse at their worst and most grandstanding, while standing on the table in The War Room, while the generals march around the table, and some of the sexier ones dance a bit. Matt Bellamy looks 20% more like Tom Cruise than usual in the video, and sounds 100% more like Thom Yorke (from an impressive start)

Toxic strings and marching band drums. Synthstring stabs and one of most insistent vocal performances from Destiny's Child since Jumpin' Jumpin', that's what Lose My Breath is all about. The video is a dance off between them in yellow, and them in red, Truly, everyone wins.

Bah. Stop being boring, Green Day! Boulevard of Broken Dreams is a sub-Bush plodder, with a video that looks like 12 graduates of the Avril Lavigne film school fighting it out.

I'm not entirely clear that the world needs two bands that take their cues from Television, but Mando Diao seems to be the yin to Razorlight's yang, or whatever. Paralyzed sounds like prepunk + horns and a bit of Hammond and I should probably like them on that basis, but I don't. The video is just them looking thin.

I'd never really though of Jay-Z as a nu-metaller, though they share certain traits - the love of turntables, the pomposity, so the news of a new cd of collaborations by Jay-Z and Linkin Park is sort of interesting. There's reason to think it could be rewarding, but there's no reason to believe that it could be as great as the first single Numb/Encore is. Part of the trick is that the track for the video isn't the studio collabroation, it's the live gig in the Roxy from July, and the energy level is quite noticable. The rest of the video is just footage from the bands in the studio. It would have to be said that Linkin Park look more geeked by being in the same studio as Jay-Z than vice-versa.

The very last thing I expected to see now is a brand new Michael Jackson single, and I suspect that Cheater isn't it. It sounds more like a B-side from Off The Wall or such like, the sort of thing that might be thrown onto a greatest hits or something. If this is off the new album now that might be interesting (except if this is the first single off the new album, er maybe not). The video is a compilation of concert footage, and is a deliberate reminder of the things Michael does when he's not (allegedly) molesting children: he dances. And Jesus, does he dance. His choreography and control is fantastic - there's a moonwalk halfway through that looks like a special effect. If this is (please please) the last single, it's only fair that it leaves with the enduring image of Michael and his greatest love/worst enemy, the public, taken back when things were just fine between them.

The video for Ghetto Musick is a bunch of skits around the central premise of a courier company called Fed Up, like something that the GTA people would write. This is a pretty good match for the actual track, which sounds like someone made a (foolish, foolish) bet with Outkast that they couldn't put blurty-bass rave, a slow bump'n'grind number and an organ break in the same song.

I thought this was supposed to be the Beastie Boys old school album? The beats on Open Letter to NYC are spectral, like rolling dried peas around in a pan. The wee bass runs are pretty cool. The Ode To New York is great by being shameless, and because at the end of the day, it is New York. Love shines through on this one.

In fairness, they're not actually showing the video for We Will Rock You, they's showing Queen's performance from Live Aid, as a way of promoing the fact that you can soon buy it in the shops. And thery're not even doing that, they're interspersing it with a lot of footage of The Who, Sade and ships being launched etc. It still doesn't explain why they apppear to have reedited the song to insert a guitar solo right after the first chorus. No-one escapes the gaze of the ages, except understandably David Bowie. and Freddie Mercury, too. Something that the reediting shows is a minor matter of against-the-clock professionalism: during the final guitar solo Freddy actualy wanders off to the left, and ends the song sitting at the piano for the next track.

Could Well Be In the the first track on A Grand Don't Come For Free that really exhibits the precision evocation that's in the rest of The Streets's album. The line about talking for as long as that again is so simple and carries such a punch, that the rush of pleasure you (I) get from hearing it seems easy. The video is one nice idea + Mike Skinner: there should be more visions of people haunted in good way by happy memories. It mirrors the Dry Your Eyes video in its canny manipulation of the distance that you have to put into the video of a narrative song.

"Yes lads, this is Keane's management, We saw the video for This Is The Last Time. Do you not think it was a bit... good? Here's 50 quid to go out and make one that would remind people of A Hard Day's Night if they had never seen it"

Ashes, in which Embrace make a better stab than usual of defending their existence in a world which already contains Doves. The same pounding back line, but Mr Embrace's actual singing prowess give it some soar and speed in the choruses. The video is special effects trick #4 - things fall together.

Previous references to Natasha Bedingfield sounding like Nelly Furtado are completely surpassed by the similiarity on her new single Unwritten. The video looks like Coffee & TV for the bilbiophile set.

Rip It Up: Whoo, fun with Razorlight, whoo. Even Television are probably more fun to party with.

Blimery, what can you say about Band Aid 20?. For starters, Bono completely throttles the life out of That Line, even reverb can't help him. Justin Hawksmoor or whatever his name is does well wherever he pops up, rumour has it that he originally sang That Line, but turned out to be too good for Bono's taste. And isn't it strange that Bono seems to have taken possession of the whole deal? I have to suspect that there's a scene on the cutting room floor where the participants line up to kiss his ring. Anyway, now I know what Tory Busted look like for, how you say, future reference. Do They Know It's Christmas itself manages having a couple of bars stuck into it (so that Dizzee can rap a bit) rather well, possibly because it was never exactly a taut panther of a track. Similarly, it survives a bit in the middle where the singing stops so that the artists can sit around and watch old footage of Ethiopa (apprantly the message is we won, stop sending stuff?) but the song abides, and serves out its natural life. Unfortnately, the presence of Sir Paul Mcartney seems to have confused many present (we're looking at you, Fran Healy and Joss Stone), into thinking that this is in fact Love Is All Around, and things continue for a good minute after the natural end.

I wish I could remember what exactly it is that Goldie Lookin' Chain nicked the beat to You Knows I Love You off - I think it's I Need Love, which is a perfect match for this west-and-north-quite-a-bit 17. Some of the verses are pretty inventive, but again it's one joke (crap welsh verion of [X]) divided by four MCs = no fun.

A motorised, almosy Yello, bassline, glassy synths and rock steady drum machine, and the final layers is sweeping legion of Kylie, who makes the other elements sound like The Fatback Band in their warmth and humanism. The video for I Believe In You is classic disco, her in a well-lit halo of hair, inside spheres of neon lights, and tronned-up co-dancers. The song without vocal might well cross the line from disco to techno in a few places, not even it's closest neighbour, Eurythmics, seemed so lifeless. But then Kylie, like Annie Lennox, is no Annie Lennox these days.

Sick and Tired, by Anastacia, has a really strange and compelling twist in the video. They're casting for a kitchen sink play about the growth and death of a relationship - you know, the sort of thing that's in a lot of music videos. Two guys and two girls are auditioning for the two roles, and one of the girls is Anastacia. So we get a lot of mix-and-match scenes from the casting (in arty black and white), with direct and indirect emotional connection to Anastacia. Also we get the video for the song, with herself and an artfully arranged series of musicians, including an african chap with a flat cap who sings during the many bridges/choruses. The song itself is top.

The Hardest Button To Button is, it would have to be said, one of the few tracks that actually caught my attention on Elephant, The White Stripes' last album. One of the reasons for this is that it has a bassline, quite a departure from the usual one guitar, one drumset lineup. I'm not saying it's an actual bass, it could be one of the two instruments with some processing or something, but it's a definite bassline. The Video is Michel Gondry, still probably best known (in the music video world) for his painstaking Fell In Love With a Girl video. He doubles and redoubles his efforts here, and it's both fantastically beautiful and slightly empty stop motion. Thogh it certainly isn't helped by Jack White's dodgy mustache and general Michael Jackson impersonation.

Bah to videos with reading in them. Anyway, Soulwax's new single, E-Talking is back to energetic pop, which appears to be carved out of the Peter Gunne start of their Radio Soulwax mix. The video is a riot, though. And a handy A-Z of drugs!

A delicate spoken word into Only U, then - it's Prince, no wait it's not, it's just someone that Prince should be suing for theft of appearance appearance, but he brings a monstrous, building destroying backend. Ashanti brings the usual front end stuff, the video has her larger than god and seductive/chilly/destructive like, oh dear, Aaliyah.