3 hours of MTV XVI-XVIII

Or (week of) July 11-25

Before Jesus Walks, a white-on-black card comes up. Warning: this video contain religious imagery and other material that some viewers may find disturbing. No shit. There are two completely different versions of this Kanye West video on mtv.com, one's the mtv.com version, one's the mtv version. The one shown on MTV itself is neither of these, it's completely different. If you see one and you're not entirely certain whether it's the warning version, it isn't. I don't want to say too much, as the sheer "what the fuck is going on" is hard to miss. The warning version also has the best match of song to video, and brings out the O Brother bits. The wierd beautiful high singing, the martial beats, not so much. Kanye's rapping isn't as good as his production, but nothing is better than the production on this song.

The bartender in the bar that Cold Hard Bitch is set in has lovely long dirty blonde hair, leading to the question: why don't Jet have hair like that, instead of looking like My Morning Jacket/Alfie/other indie chancers? They could be this generation's Poison, if they'd only turn to the light side.

Eve Feat. Gwen Stefani - Let Me Blow Ya Mind: This is the Dre-produced hit from a few summers ago, which I have embarrased myself several times by "dit dit dit" ing to remind people (It does in fact work). The video proves that every film director wants to make Animal House/Revenge of The Nerds.

Rollover DJ is a hateful song. I don't just mean literally, there's nothing wrong with that, anger is an energy and all. But Jet are mindlessly vicious about their target ("Got your Rhymes going round in my head / Got your supersonic beats mixing up my Keds / So dance little DJ come on / What's your name?"), while sounding like Oasis after being put into a camp where they make you play The Sweet over and over again before their reintroduction into society (but worse). The video is of a very live performance, where you can see how much they sweat. every drop lovingly captured on film, so that they can bring us this Real! Music!

There isn't a single real thing in the video for Basement Jaxx's Cish Cash, guest vocalist Siouxsie Sioux included. It's a Busby Berkely Apocaplyse, which occupies your brain enough to strip away all the useless layers from the track leaving only the bassline and the voice (not, thank the little baby jesus, the lyrics). Job done!

The best bit of Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do is "sound of the police!", though obviously this is not a serious criticism - many fine songs have that as the best bit. Neither is the fact that a video featuring a golf cart chase with all of Goldie Lookin' Chain outshines the song, for similar reasons. The real problem with it is that it's one joke stretched out over five minutes and given to three seperate rappers, none of which have a quality control button as such.

Let it be noted that the Paranew Android has nothing on file regarding Kelis's single Milkshake.

Goddamit, when will women stop sexing up the lead singer of Maroon 5? The litany of complaints in the video for She Will Be Loved is all shot in a 50's Hollywood style, like the director had seen Chinatown maybe one too many times. The women doing the over-sexing are even mother and daughter. The song is sort of pretty in a Counting Crows ballad way, only faster, with the balance more towards singing than bleating.

I have to admit that they do have a soft spot for The Thrills, because they make a nice sound, and because they pissed off a lot of the Dublin Indie Mafia by refusing to make their way up the ladder of "support by" gigs, and taking off to be famous. The video for Whatever Happened to Corey Haim looks like a Larry Clark/Whit Stillman effort: "twenty somethings get drunk and fuck. Aren't they precious". It's possible that the lead singer's vague resemblance to Vincent Gallo is responsible. Both song and the video, while not going to hit anyone's best of 2004 list, are shiny enough to reward regular exposure.

Is "Do you feel like a chain store/practically floored" the worst joke in pop? Coffee & TV overcomes this minor handicap, or course, to win through, much like the plucky carton of milk in the video. It's strange how it keeps being sweet no matter how many times I've seen it. It is also possibly Blur's last great song.

People who like to talk about how Madonna has her finger on the pulse of current everything seem to conveniently forget that she did a video (for a tidy little disco number called Music) starring a) Ali G and b) a poorly advised cartoon sequence. It didn't work for U2, it's not going to work for you.

The video for REM's Imitiation Of Life is a clockwork puzzle: a video clip plays of a big outdoors family party, and after 20 seconds it freezes and plays backwards to it's start, then forwards again, the digital zoom moving around the place, picking up people singing bits of the song to themselves, saying more about being alone in a crowd, but not too alone, than a hundred more 'naturalistic' videos.

A chainmail skirt, glitter paint. shiny lipstick, foot long horns on the drummer, random abuse of the zoom button. If you're thinking Give It Away, you're thinking right. Was this really the song that broke the Red Hot Chili Peppers? What a beautifully ridiculous world we live in.

The video for Pumping on Your Stereo makes it no clearer why Supergrass is pretending it's called that as opposed to the clearly audible Humping, nor why Gaz wossname is singing in a bad Bowie accent. But it does make it obvious that this sort of muppetry should only be done by experts. Also Muppetry, geddit?

End of a Century

More later...

UKATP/04. The Nightmare Before Christmas

Blatant Advertorial.

News. UKATP/04. The Nightmare Before Christmas.

ATP CONCERTS PRESENT THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun, but the time has come for a foray into the dark side of All Tomorrow's Parties. After 5 years of events in April, ATP Concerts add a new date to the UK festival calendar.

Now, some people are going to say "Camber Sands. In December. Are you mad!?!", but it's got to be more hospitable than Prestatyn in November Storms.

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.

Tom Waits, London, November?

Tom Waits is playing the UK (London) for the first time in 17 years in November. (New album due in a month) Anybody else fancy coming along? Or to Paris? :)

There's a lot of variation in reports of the when and where, but NME seems to have broken the story.

Who the fuck?

PJ Harvey.

Notes towards a later review: it's amazing what a decent sound engineer does with the Olympia. Bonkers guitarist deprived of sound for some tracks near the beginning (due to excessive flinging of guitars and cables). Sound. Fury. Photos. 2 encores. Crazy colour changing shoes.

Reeling. Legs. Big Exit. Good Fortune. A Place Called Home. One Line. The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore. 50ft Queenie. A Perfect Day Elise. Is this Desire? Down by the Water. Meet Ze Monsta. The Letter.

At least that's what a quick flick through iTunes leads me to think I heard. Not in any order, or by any means complete.

Anyone care to fill me in on the band members?

Tired now.