No Rock And Roll Fun

A LUNCHTIME TREAT: An hour to kill, Sky Digital to hand, and a chance to see what exactly what filth we're flinging at our pop kids these days:
The random starting point turns out to be MTV2, which has Puddle of Mudd. When is Courtney going to sue over this blatant rip off of Nirvana? They might as well sing "Mum and dad went to a show/dropped me off with Gran'pa Joe..."
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The Box
Holly Valance is doing Down Boy. Choosing a follow up for Kiss Kiss was always going to be tricky, and she's got it wrong - another vaguely Turkish-sounding tune (but nothing like as good) is now going to have her pegged as making watered down belly-dancing tunes for all eternity.
Now there's a competition, offering the chance to win a night with Atomic Kitten - hanging about the slightly trashier Liverpool clubs might be an easier way, of course. You have to say who originally had a hit with The Tide Is High. The actual band isn't offered, of course - presumably they want Blondie as an answer.
NTrance - The singer woman, whose name I should know because she's meant to be the next big thing, seems to have tried to dress like Anastacia - i.e. badly, in a sort of cod-S&M style that, after Britney at the MTV awards seems to be coming in, to the bitter disappointment of real perverts everywhere. The song is forgettable.
Madhouse - Like A Prayer - wasn't their last video a woman in her bra sitting down doing a poor madonna cover?
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Kiss
Blazin Squad - Crossroads. Industry and parent pleasing hybrid of So Solids and Five. Consequently as castrated as a salmon fishcake, and nowhere near as tasty.
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Smash Hits TV. Holly again, and Blazin squad again.
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Magic
Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles - I'm against violence towards people, so for a half-hour let's reclassify vanessa carlton as a football, and slap her head over and over against the piano, screaming "We do not need someone who sits between Alanis and Natalie Imbruglia. And while playing the piano is a might fine talent, we don't need to watch you doing it in front of a chromakey screen."
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up. Jesus, that hair - how did it stay in place, overhanging his face the way the top floor of shops in Chester crowd out over the street. In retrospect, this video is clearly trying to ape Club Tropicana, but somehow comes across like the place hasn't quite opened yet - where are the people, Rick? Where?
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Q
Miss Dynamite - Dynamitee. The song is slick, and wonderful, and manages to even be about her without sounding like a cringe-inducing ego-wank. So why does she spoil it all by turning up to do the video in a bloody trackie? She looks like a scouser on the way to buy a couple of dozen fags.
Kylie - In Your Eyes. She steadfastly keeps her trousers on for this, and so is only of limited interest. Oh, and she wears a dress that looks like those strange plastic strip curtains they used to hang in bookies' doorways for some reason. Still, this is all head and shoulders above Holly Valance's effort. There may be a verse for Alanis in that Kylie is head and shoulders above everyone else, don't you think?
Truth Hurts - Addictive. Lobbing a bit of vaguely eastern-sounding music in, as apparently we have to these days (since when did pop take its instructions directly from Lloyd-Webber?) but not doing anything with it, beyond using it as an excuse for a spot of belly-dancing in the video. Actually, the stupidly named Ms Hurts is the worst thing about this. Oh, hang on, there's a rap in the middle, and the guy says "thinking of a master plan." Hmm, how's this for a master plan - recognising that line was hoary when Eric B and Rakim used it, pal? Why not go the whole hog and toss an "I know you gonna dig this" in too? Cross-cultural thievery with no understanding of what to do with any of it, mixed together in the worst way possible.
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Kerrang!
A tattooed man with a bad dye job is tossing and turning in bed, while a woman who looks like she has escaped from a Muse video alternates between watching him and poking about in the undergrowth. Someone who has mistaken groaning for power moans over the top as a B-grade grunge act turn out some noise underneath.
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Vibe TV seems to have disappeared
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MTV
A baby is being operated on by a doctor who realises - hey, this kid has been abused. Two pounds a month can stop this happening again. The NSPCC have just ripped off the cute dead kitten advert the RSPCA are running but, sadly, a baby just doesn't have the same heart-twang tugging of an ickle kitten. Apart from anything, if you save a baby it'll only grow up to be an adult, and they're so nasty we have to give two quid a month just to save babies from them.
Oh, and The Gap are using 'Bend me, shake me' as an ad soundtrack. Go for the youth market, lads, that's the way.
Pink - Just Like A Pill. Boy, it was worth sitting through the never ending commercial break. It's interesting - as everyone from Liberty X to Britney tries to truss themselves up in fetish wear - that you can just tell the people who actually do have the fetish, can't you? Someone should quickly take the stylists to one side and point out that, if the clothes don't turn you on, wearing them won't look sexy; it just gives you the air of a shiny duffle-bag. Pink, on the other hand, is only a director's cut away from doing the video in nipple clamps.
Incubus - Are You In? There's a guy in this video who looks like Dave Stewart. I hope he's there by accident - like the strange bloke you always seem to have in your holiday snaps, looming in the corner - and not because he's in the band. Maybe that's the question the song title is trying to answer.
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MTV Hits
Holly Valance again. It gets more irritating each time - whereas Kiss Kiss was a grower, on Down Boy they've tried to give the song hooks and just ended up leaving rough edges which give you splinters
Avril Lavigne - Complicated - I don't need a twelve year old to tell me that "Life's like this." You have no idea what life is like, do you? Your experience consists solely of not making the mouseketeers, getting grounded and apparently thinking that wearing a tie is a quirky statement of personality rather than a cloying affectation
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VH1
It's the 2002 No 1 video marathon. And since they're playing Will Young, it does indeed feel as rewarding and pounding round and round some murky city street looking at Bernie Clifton's arse for 26 miles while bystanders throw water at you.
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VH1 Classic
Just missed the Spice Girls from when they were good, and get terence trent d'arby instead. He really did look like a haddock, didn't he?
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MTV2
Incubus again. Shouldn't they be shouting and angry?
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MTV Base
They're doing a flashback to 1996 - a lifetime ago for most of their viewers, I suppose.
Oh god, its Ginuwine. I wonder where he is now? Probably spelling his name out down the social, I guess
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MTV Dance
Its an advert for not smoking, from some sort of pan-european campaign which shows someone being cool, and ends with the words "Doesn't smoke." This guy is feigning disability to get attention, which is meant to be cooler than having the odd fag. Debatable - I mean, if being in a wheelchair gets you loads of mates, just think what having lung cancer would do for you
dj sammy - heaven. There is nothing so hackneyed that it won't get made into a dance track sooner or later, is there? This is Bryan Adams remade with a weedy drum beat underneath it. It's as shit as you'd imagine.
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The Box
Sugababes - round round - This version of the video has been recut to have scenes from The Guru in it, scattered in a random fashion throughout. It's every bit as successful as that Atomic Kitten video which had bits of The Parole Officer stuck in at various points. It does at least mean less screen time for the irritating swirling conceit of the usual video, which must have sounded so good when it was pitched - "they're in the middle of a real-live twister" - but should have been abandoned when they saw what they could manage with the budget available. Clearly, only one of the Sugababes has ever worn clothes like this before (clue - its the one whose eyes aren't at a video shoot; it's also the one who should get out and start her solo career straight away)
They want us to go to the Smash Hits Poll Winners Tour - but how can there be poll winners so early? It's september, for christ's sake... you can't have poll time until at least the end of October
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Kiss
The Fugees are just coming to the end of Killing Me Softly, recalling a time when there were a lot more tunes to choose from when you came to do a pisspoor reworking and you weren't lumbered with trying to make Supertramp sound at home on a dancefloor.
Destinys Child - Bills Bills Bills. At last, some real class. Though why the video is set in a hairdressers is anyone's guess. Maybe Beyonce secretly wishes she was Audrey Roberts? Maybe she's making a sublte allusion to the basis of Audrey's relationship with Alfie? Of course, the great thing with early destiny's child videos is being able to play the same game you play with Dad's Army - "gone now, gone, still here, gone..."
Milk Inc - who are you? Another fairly plain looking girl in a bikini singing over a fairly plain backing beat. I'm sure it's great in a club full of fairly plain girls in bikinis, played really loud. However, not being drunk on Archers Aqua, it's time to
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Smash Hits
S Club Juniors - seriously, even watching a minute of this makes me feel dirty and scared; like that feeling you get the first time you get incest spam in your mailbox and you think "christ, I hope that doesn't mean I'm going to get arrested." I can't imagine any reason why a child the same age as the Juniors would want to watch kids their age having a better time than them - isn't it just maths prodigies set to music? - so presumably the whole point of this bands existence is to provide an innocent outlet to paedophiles?
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Magic
Stereophonics - Handbags and Gladrags. I think I was happier with the kiddie-fiddler videos.
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Q
Robbie & Kylie - Doing It For The Kids. Mildly better than doing it to the kids, I suppose. But only mildly.
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Kerrang
Bowling for Soup - Girl all the bad guys want - for plot reasons, the too-pretty-to-like-this-sort-of-music-in-real-life girl has to lean forward for the entire video. And too much is made of the pissing/shitting gag. But the extended spoof of Fred Durst - lampooned by those he'd imagine would be the ones who'd champion him - would surely hurt.
Marilyn Manson - Tainted Love - Or the goth 'the tide is high', of course; a cover that might sound halfway decent if you were young enough to not know that there are other, better versions available. You know that mazza thinks that the video should be read as "outsiders turn up at party, and take it over"; really, though, it's "old guy turns up at teenage party - what's with that? Has he no friends of his own? Is he incapable of forming his friendships with people of his own age? Isn't it a little sad that a man like that is reduced to picking on kids only a couple of years beyond their jelly-and-musical-chairs party years?"
Harry - So Real - She looks like the blonde one out of Steps. Why do rock acts bother with the quiet, tuneful first verse things? It's on fucking Kerrang TV, we know it's going to suddenly turn loud and shouty; cut to the bloody chase, won't you?
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Play UK
Boy George is interviewing Jenny Eclair. Oh god almighty, and they wonder why this channel is so underperforming its going to be axed?
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MTV
Again, we crash in the middle of a charity appeal. £3 a month can help animals. Why does the RSPCA need more money than the NSPCC? Is pulling kittens out of litter bins really more expensive than saving kiddies from their parents? Or do they merely feed their doggies better than the NSPCC feed the rescued children?
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MTV Hits
Ronan Keating - what the hell is that bulge in your trousers, Ronan? If that's really you - which I doubt - why aren't you making gay porn videos? Personally, I think its as fake as the package which Russell Crowe swings as he comes downstairs in white nix during Romper Stomper, but somehow Crowe's nazi-cant is more musical and less offensive than Ronan's song
Sugababes - Round Round. MTV Hits going with the non-Guru version of the clip, which probably makes sense. Although they could perhaps cut it with another film - lets face it, the connection between the song and the movie is pretty loose anyway, so why not? Maybe it could be enlivened by having some scenes from Women In Love slotted in here and there
Eminem - Without Me. Just as there are two standard Eminem songs - jolly, ironic, self-obsessed; and dark, gloomy, and self-obsessed - there are also two Eminem videos. One sort has a grave in; the other throws loads of ideas at the screen and never quite gels. This one... oh, but you will have seen this seventeenthousand times, so you don't need me to tell you, do you?
That's it, I'm going for lunch