The Vids Are Alright

Britney Spears - 3.

Here’s the mostly-rubbish video for Britters’ Greatest Hits plugger (and here’s another link if the one above disappears). It’s rubbish because:

1. NEON TUBES arrrrhghahgahghrhgh
2. Pole-dancing where the pole is horizontal and a bit too high above your head = FAIL. Also the tragic memory of Brit’s previous disastrous attempt at pole-dancing is still too fresh (you all know which one I mean - I shall not link to it here so we can all forget about it).
3. Monochrome minimal post-‘Single Ladies’ backdrop yawwwwwn
4. One of the female dancers grabs Britney’s bum in a really weird fashion - it’s kind of uncomfortable to watch and I don’t exactly know why
5. The radio edit bleeps ‘sin’ and replaces it with ‘bliss’. I know ‘thing’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘sin’ either but ‘bliss’ DEFINITELY does not rhyme with ‘thing’ even in a squashed flat vocal.
6. Britney has flogged at least eight different perfumes but to my knowledge this is the first one that has required product placement in one of her videos.

It’s only mostly rubbish because:

1. At 2.59 she does her ‘dividing 3597 by 236’ face! I haven’t seen that face for at least four years.
2. Her tiny smile at 3.03 just kills me dead. I love you Britney.

Sugababes - About A Girl.

I wasn’t expecting miracles from the new ‘Babes lineup but this is just…bad.

Three stunt girls who I assume are meant to look like a bit like the Sugababes arrive at a desert shack to perform a baffling suitcase deal with some gangsters, while the Actual Sugababes jiggle around in a completely different bit of desert. But the stand-ins don’t actually exchange the suitcase for anything! They start doing some Adam West Batman ‘fighting’ without even getting the cash first! Then they all bugger off again and it turns out the suitcase is worthless in the first place. Why did they even turn up? Utterly pointless.

Heidi still manages to look wonderful, thank god.

(h/t Maura)

David Gray - Fugitive.

Last year it was neon tubes, this year it’s white surfaces being slowly covered in (or stripped of) brightly coloured paint. Tony Hart would be proud, but I am now BORED. At 2.48 Dave himself looks as fed up with the whole idea as I am. You can imagine the conversation that’s just taken place:

DIRECTOR: So we’ve got this brilliant idea right, where you’re sat in an empty white room…
DAVE: Oh god don’t tell me.
DIRECTOR: …and while you’re sat there playing your musical instrument or whatever it is you do…
DAVE: Please god no, not the…
DIRECTOR: …the walls magically become covered in…
DAVE & DIRECTOR: …brightly coloured paint.
DAVE: [reluctantly] Oh, alright. But can we make it slightly less bright? I have my ageing audience demographic to think of, you know.

Madonna - Celebration.

Oh, Madge. *shakes head sadly* You look fabulous in this video, you really do - great hair, nice dress, the same awesome boots you were wearing in ‘4 Minutes’, terrifyingly good complexion for a lady of your years. But I’m sick to death of you shoving your crotch in my face. There are so many more interesting things you could do with a high-nrg dancefloor track. Carry a suitcase between a beach and a futuristic cityscape, for instance. Or perhaps some sort of anti-gravity space dancing. Even walking on a supermarket checkout conveyor belt is more interesting than this. Your public demands an expensive narrative, dammit!

Raygun - Just Because.

Time for another installment of Kat’s Video Improvement Clinic! There are many ways this dreadful video could be tarted up into something watchable:

See? Much better.

Jordin Sparks - Battlefield.

I’m afraid this video is lacking the following: 1) a tank 2) some Civil War Re-enactment dudes with pikes and shields and whatnot 3) at least five canons 4) Jordin beating some dude at thumb war 5) Jordin appearing in a suit of armour for the ‘get your armour’ bit 6) two kids playing Battleships in the foreground 7) Jordin riding up and down the front line of her soliders yelling inspirational messages eg “they might take our middle 8 but they’ll never take our chorus!” 8) final shot fading out to some poppies (ok that might be a bit tasteless)

Some smoke pellets and a stationary car is just not going to cut it, Jordin. I suppose at least she did get the ‘field’ bit right.

Dolly Rockers - Je Suis Une Dolly.

Jesus H Cripes, what a dreadful mess - Vanilla must be breathing a sigh of relief now someone has finally relieved them of their UK’s Worst Ever Girl Group crown. I challenge anyone to find a positive aspect to the above endeavour.

I am also utterly sick of people filming viral dance routines in Liverpool Street Station. It’s ALWAYS bloody Liverpool Street as the City is deserted at weekends and has a higher-level walkway where you can get a good overhead viewpoint for the camera. There is nothing clever or subversive about this - it is difficult to stick two fingers up at the Stuffy Business Man (in his suit and tie etc) when he is 15 miles away in suburban Essex mowing the lawn. If anyone tried doing something like this at Victoria during a Monday-morning rush hour then bones would be broken.

The Saturdays - Work.

Nooooooooooo where has the colour scheme gone? It’s all very well trying to do the dimly-lit underground industrial complex if you are Liberty X and 2 out of 5 of you are clearly distinguishable by being blokes*. But now Frankie has grown her hair and Rochelle is stuck in the corner and this is dull dull dull. At least the Sound Of The Underground had some strategic lightbulb placement to clearly delineate Cheryl’s Croydon Facelift.

*Ummmm now don’t tell me…. Anthony and Brian? Tim and Dave? Chummleworth and Euclid? Where is my futuristic wikipedia memory brain-chip dammit…

Benny Benassi - Satisfaction.

I was originally intending to post the video to ‘In The Heat Of The Night’ by Star Pilots, which can only be described as a poor attempt at a Top Gun-themed Benassi: gratuitous bum shots, soapy girls washing a plane, superfluous slow motion volleyball playing, yadda yadda yadda.

The problems with the ‘In The Heat Of The Night’ video are manifold: 1) The dancers’ bums aren’t oily enough (surely engine oil = occupational hazard for airline mechanics?) 2) The soapy girls fail to reach their sleazy potential, somehow managing to be all-American clean-cut cheerleaders even in their skimpy bikinis 3) The volleyball bits don’t even have an arms-squishing-boobs-together action shot - in fact, the girls just jump around in the background, leaving the not-really-camp-enough blokes to do all the work 4) Enormous machines with vast innuendo potential are just left standing around as scenery.

So I decided to post the original (and best) instead. ‘Satisfaction’ maxxes out on the titilisation factor and has spawned thousands of imitators since its release in 2002* - if you’re going to exploit the female form then you might as well do it properly, with jiggling power tools and beads of sweat dripping down crevices that are normally off-limits even to gynaecologists. These women are so far removed from normal human females that it nicely shows up how over-the-top the whole ‘sex sells’ trope has become. You want sexy ladies? See how you like these ones! I absolutely love it - plus, you can’t beat a bit of sultry lip-biting, especially if it’s a Bank Holiday and no-one has to watch it on their work computer.

By trying too hard to emulate The Benassi, Star Pilots have got it painfully wrong. They should have played up the 80s spoof and had a girl pilot take off her helmet and shake her hair about with the sunlight streaming through behind her. They should have had a nerdy bespectacled companion for their Tom Cruise lookalike, giving him a high-five and a manly hug after a successful mission. For christ’s sake, they should have had a woman with large breasts straddling the nose of a fighter plane, holding on with one hand and waving her cowboy hat in the air with the other. SORT IT OUT, STAR PILOTS.

*Of course there were dance videos featuring sexy ladies before The Benassi, but since then it seems to have been mandatory for all chart bosh to feature at least 27% bum-wiggling.

Annie - Anthonio.

Excuses, excuses. Just because you’ve been trapped in a plane of glass like the baddies from Superman II there’s no reason why you can’t actually change your expression within the frame, y’know. That’s what computers are for (or so I hear).

Combine Annie’s static demeanour with karaoke lyrics overlaid in the style of the wobbly credits of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em and you have a truly terrible video for a rather lovely song. I pray for the sake of Annie’s career that this is some sort of viral ‘teaser’ video because this song deserves a lot better.