No Rock And Roll Fun

PHIL COLLINS HIDING OUT ON THE BOX: We were watching the news playing that love song to Saddam again - "My sir, it's the ballot papers that will show the love of Iraq/ This is more than an election/ It's the passion between us" and we realised it's been a while since we've surveyed the goodies on offer on the music channels. Seriously, though, the Iraqis haven't had it so bad, compared with this sort of thing:
MTV are showing something called something like Carmen Elektra's beach party - "see the host in a bikini" trills the EPG, seemingly oblivious that Carmen Elektra has never been photographed in with a shirt on. MTV bosses puzzle why they're losing ground to the other music networks - and here would be a hint. This isn't seedy, it's just lame - Carmen and some other pneumatic blondes jiggling to so-so dance tracks on an American beach. As a music show, it's rubbish; as an erotic spectacle it also fails - someone who has less clout than CE might have been duped into actually looking like the thought of undressing for an MTv audience of beer jockeys was turning her on; Carmen, clearly, has checked the contract for the bare minimum she has to do to get her check. On a large plasma screen over a Florida beach during Spring Break, this might be the most inspired piece of TV ever. A cold spring day in Liverpool, it just feels like being insulted by the school bike. When it ends - hey, a show of that quality can't last forever - the Justin/Nelly video at the Playboy mansion comes on. In the same way that there's the first law of political debate (the first person to mention the Nazis loses), there is the first law of grown-up entertainment - the moment there's a cameo by Hugh Hefner, you flip.

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MTV Hits
Avril Lavigne - I'm With You
Hey, she does what she wants, when she wants; she's not a puppet that's being manipulated by a shady bunch of suits. It's just, erm, she wanted to do the standard 'third single - pisspoor ballad', not because that's what the computer says is needed to portray Avril as a rounded character with the potential for mature emotions.
Sadly, at least when she's pretending to be a punk she looks like it's a lie she wants to go on with; when she struggles here to try and portray a bruised, emotional vulnerability she looks like she's been asked by the director to pretend to be third in line in the VIP queue at Cinderella Rockerfellas.

Craig David featuring Sting - Rise And Fall
What is this, some sort of a joke? It's a joke, right? Craig David meets up with Sting in some sort of downtown coffee shop; Sting looks worryingly like Dr Frasier Crane, and if there were any black characters in Frasier, I'd assume this was some sort of tribute to the Doc. But no, it's deadly serious. Sting adds to his tradition of not adding much to duets, which stretches right back to the Dire Straits one.

Robbie Williams - Come Undone
Awww, poor Robbie. All the drinking and partying has taken its toll. He thinks his life is as empty as his now abandoned and trashed mansion. And, also, of course, as this empty, 'pity me' self-obsessed ramble. "Rock and roll's so corporate suits" he wails. Oh, poor Robbie. Think of the money, son. Think of the lovely money.

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MTV2
Ok Go - get over it
Bless 'em, they only have one single, but what a single. The video features some spilled milk, over which - see - there is no point crying. The singer looks like a young Beck, and there's an amusing pause in the middle where they play ping-pong. It really would be great if they had something else to offer - the band come across as the sort of guys it would be nice to have around for a while.

Sadly, MTV2 - like all the other MTV channels - is obsessed with Jackass, and so instead of playing a video they have some people skateboarding and falling off. Do they not realise this on a par with, say, dropping slots from It'll Be Alright On The Night into the middle of Vh1 shows. I'm presuming they must have some sort of research which suggests this is what people want to see, or maybe they're just so desperate to differentiate themselves before the new Sky Music services come on, they don't care if it's good, just that its stark.

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MTV Base
Nas - I Can
This, we're told, is being played because Nas is the fourteenth sexiest person according to MTV base. It could also feature at number one in a chart of "Most curious attempt to resurrect de La soul in the twenty-first century." Nas might be sexy - okay, he is sexy, we would, we admit it; we'd love to nibble on those ears - but surely not at his sexiest when he's singing about bettering yourself and surrounded by a bunch of squeaking kids. Still, at least its sexier than Hugh Heffner.

LL Cool J - Loungin'
Thirteenth for Ladies Love, which is kind of encouraging - nice to see an older guy being given some respect for his body, even although he does go through this video wearing the sort of hat retired gentlemen wear for gardening or watching cricket. Again, this isn't him at his sexiest - 'I need love' used to require a floor mopping, as I recall.

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MTV Dance
Sister Sledge - Lost In Music
It's Dance Anthems day on MTV-D - isn't it always? - and you can't argue with this, can you? The video, of course, is of its time; when effects ran mainly to getting the Sledge to change costumes and pull focus in and out. There's a wonderful attempt to act the line "some people say to me 'why don't you go get a job' bit which is so hamfisted you wonder why they haven't been given cameos in Seeing Double, the S-Club movie.

The channel then plugs something called Dance Miami - which sounds like more cameras pointing at jiggling breasts - and then it's that awful ocean finance advert with the thing that looks a bit like a lottery machine. They should bring back the one with Frazier Hines. I'd trust Joe Sugden more than a bloke with a lottery machine - is that how Ocean underwrite their portfolios? "Dammit, if we'd got 23 instead of 47, we'd be able to pay out on those life insurance policies now..."

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VH1
Is it us, or has VH1 moved to the other side of the funkier MTV brands?
Madonna - Tell Me
VH1 is having a festival of Ms Don't Mention The War today - even, cruelly, giving hours to her movie career on constant loop - Shanghai Surprise! Who's That Girl! Swept Away! - not so much a celebration, then, as a pasting. There's a bit in the Tell Me video, where she's got some cowboys behind her, and her thumbs through her belt loops; filmed from below, she's trying to wriggle her hips in an alluring fashion, and she looks, for all the world, like she's an old woman trying to keep up with Geri Halliwell. I've asumed before that she may have used up all her secret powers, and she's come back - Ray of Light, for example - but as the months tick away, you're more and more forced to accept that Guy Ritchie is little more than Creative Kryptonite.

On a happier note, the Open University has apparently realised that its old adverts were shaming to an organisation which has its own TV channel, and made something a bit more interesting visually. I still don't think I'll sign up to become a lawyer.

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VH1 Classic Hits
Abba - Knowing Me, Knowing You
This is the one that ends with the two girls trampling off through the snow together, Agnetha casting a coy look over her shoulder. Tantalising. That's the way you do it, Tatu...

Lene Marlin - Sitting Down Here
For some reason this is still on an endless loop on Asda FM - maybe some store in Bridlington has still got a stock of her album they're trying to shift. Heartbreakingly, her one song that anyone half-remembers has lines like "You think that I'm a loser, but I don't care..." - words which probably ring through her head during the long shift at the Superbowl Bowlarama.

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TMF
Kym Marsh - Cry
I'm imagining that this single exists purely so that the next time New opens negotiations for a photoshoot, they can get an extra tenner and a cold buffet lunch thrown in on the grounds that "she has done something recently, actually. The song sounds really irritating - there's some little bits that are quite pleasing, but all the bridges go on a little bit too far and don't quite do their job. "Everybody knows my name even though I'm still the same" she says, which is uncannily self-aware - everyone knows who you are, but you do stay the same - as someone who briefly managed to get into a successful band and now will never reach such heights again. This self-pity gives way to the Williams track, so

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The Box
Luckily, I only catch the end of the Phil Collins collaboration with whoever it is. Who knew there was something more soul-destroying than Craig David and Sting? At the end, the lads get on a train leaving Phil stood alone on the platform, looking confused. Whatever happened to the outrage over Granny Dumping?

Busted - You Said No
Oh dear. Having tried to pass themselves off as grown-up before their time by shagging their teacher, and then cleverer than they were by getting caught up in the trouble of creating a coherent time-travel wheeze, they're now falling back on showing that they're really good at BMXing. And the song itself has an air of something left in reserve in case they needed a third single to keep things ticking over rather than a natural choice.

Dside - Speechless
The concept of singing rent boys isn't new, but usually they make some attempt to disguise the day job. Speechless. Winningly, the screen blacks out - or rather, totally greens out, and then purples out - and whizzes us through their dirge a bit faster; then Tatu appear briefly onscreen. So even the mighty Box playout computer can't stand this tired trash

Kiss
Junior Senior - Move Your Feet
Of course, clearly this video has just been fudged to make it look like it's been produced on an old skool computer - I'n guessing they were trying for a C64, as there's none of the clashing you used to get on the dear old Spectrum. I quite like the evil squirrel, mind.

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Smash Hits TV
Robbie Williams again.

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Magic
Jennifer Lopez - Aint It Funny
This is the one where she pretends she's a gypsy girl - no more unlikely than her pretending she's still in touch with her roots in Jenny From The Block. I think this was the last time she bothered doing one of those pointless extra dance passages in a video - maybe she realised that stopping the flow of the single in order to do a little dance was kinda like those old opening credits for Emma Thompson's 'Thompson' show, where ET seemed to dance for no reason other than to show off, ending up looking less assured than if they hadn't bothered.

It's Girls On Top week on Magic, where they're focusing on "five of the greatest female singers of all time" (Jlo, Kate Bush, Whitney, Kylie and Madonna, if you're wondering - sorry, Aretha), erm, so next they play The Spice Girls - Say You'll Be There - a glimpse back to when Geri had breasts and looked a whole lot better for it. If you ignore the head, obviously.
Q
Madonna - Die Another Day
Of course, Madonna fighting herself might have just been a metaphor for the struggle that goes on when she records a cack tune and has to decide if she should release it or not, although I find it hard to believe that she even considers not putting out substandard wank for a single moment.

Foo Fighters - on and on
Q never seems to change its playlist. Ever.

Kerrang
The new stereophonics single
Oh my. This isn't just poor by any system of analysis you wish to apply to it, it's shaming. If you remember the wrong turn the primals took when they'd spent too long with their Black Crowes albums, imagine if a bunch of half-hearted pub rock chuggers turned up and tried to recreate the Rocks era of Primal Scream working from that blueprint alone, but with the injunction to make it sound a bit more blokey? Oh my, oh my. This has been a long time coming, and it just makes you wonder what the stuff they couldn't use sounds like. Oh my. Oh my.

Chart Show TV
Amerie - I'm coming up
Who are you, and why have you made this note for note remake, other than "because the makers of Maid In Manhattan asked me to?" - although a lame clone of Donna for a lame clone of Pretty Woman does have a marketing synergy to it, I guess...

Brassy - Play Some D
Brassy rule in our house, although... not too sure about the sportswear

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VideoVault
The Chart Show's sister station, which - just as The Chart Show was a programme which became a channel - is a Chart Show feature which has blossomed into a channel all of its own. Maybe, one day, there will be Indie Chart TV, with lots and lots of spinning record middles for the bands who haven't had a budget to make visuals. Anyway, whenever we switch this on we get "Programmes start on..."; I suspect it's sharing carriage space with the Chart Show shopping channel...

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The Hits
Linkin Park - Somewhere I Belong
Visually, the shots down long untidy corridors and of the singer on a bed, this isn't a million miles away from the Robbie Williams video. And, to be honest, you could imagine Williams singing the song, too; just take the faux-sharp edge off the vocals and it'd fit in perfectly. Linkin Park are clearly, cleverly, easing their foot off the pedal for a long journey - betting they can calm down at just the right speed that as their audience starts to stop being all "fuck you mom" and becomes "maybe we should have the Feiffers over for dinner next week, with that promotion in the offing", they'll take the Park with them.
Oh. They've added some giant spiders in there too, which Robbie should try.

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P-rock
Yesterdays - good Riddance
More low-budget punk from the rolling 24 hour low budget punk channel. Sadly so much is interchangable here.

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Classic FM TV
Okay, okay, I'm sorry i called you Vannessa Mae All The Time TV. Now, stop showing pissing Nigel Kennedy, will you? Doing the bloody four seasons as well. Piss.

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Channel U
Eve - Satisfaction
We love eve but, damn, apart from that woman who does the Pentagon briefings sometimes, there's nobody in front of a camera with worse abilities to choose and use colours well, is there?