Do Somethin’

Britney Spears

“Do Somethin’” is the worst song I’ve heard in three decades, and I’ve only been alive for two. The music defies description, and not in a good way. Still, this is a video review, and I have seen more than a few videos overcome atrocious songs. Unfortunately, the plot of this video centers around—you’ll never guess—a bad Madonna cover-band wooing 50 Cent’s bodyguards at a seedy Cincinnati strip joint. No joke.

Britney and her posse of what look like sloppily spray-painted mannequins from a run-down Urban Outfitters basement transition from a preposterously fake space-ship to a cloud-riding pink hummer to a club filled to the brim with a doped-up entourage of anorexic Hollywood dancer-waiters. I was, at first, reminded of “Dirrty”, but, after looking back, I realized that, by comparison, Christina’s video is a beautiful allegorical representation of the struggles of the working class.

Britney’s, on the other hand, sucks. Her drunken eye-rolling and writhing, jiggling lingerie scenes would make for beautiful satire of the teenie-bopper-turned-outrageous-whore movement, if not for the fact that she herself is the harried, breathless epitome of it all.

—Henry M. Cowles

Dream

Dizzee Rascal

“Dream”, the latest single from Dizzee Rascal’s sophomore album Showtime, is so good it’s apt to inspire a religion. I kid you not: this video will flush the scales from your eyes and show you a better way.

Like The White Stripe’s “Fell In Love With A Girl” video, “Dream” takes its visual motif from the toy bin. Instead of Legos, “Dream” features bubble-headed marionettes and dollhouse-scale tin cars and airplanes.

Like the denizens of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”, these puppets inhabit a fantasy world where then can walk, talk, and break dance just like real b-girls and b-boys. An adorably miniaturized Dizzee emerges from a jack-in-the-box atop a grand piano to join his puppet companions as they spit rhymes, beat box, and mack fly honeys.

These ’hood antics are underscored by an infectious piano driven beat—ostensibly being performed by the regular-sized elderly woman seated at the piano’s keyboard.

Dizzee’s video is a welcome reprieve from the conspicuous consumption, macho posturing, and glib misogyny of too many hip-hop videos. With “Dream,” Dizzee proves that you can kick it on an old-school (or maybe pre-school) tip and still bring it.

—Bernard L. Parham

Evil

Interpol