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Current Video Reviews

Shaggy - “Wild 2 Nite”

Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - “Welcome to Jamrock”

Young Jeezy w/Mannie Fresh - “And Then What”

Ray Cash - “Sex Appeal (Pimp In My Own Mind)”

Paul Wall featuring Big Pokey - “Sitting Sideways”

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Stylish and often sexy clip with another winning performance from the sharp-dressed clown prince of dancehall. Or semi-dancehall, if you want to get super-fussy about it; Shaggy isn't from Jamaica, in case you couldn't guess, and he's never felt the need to sacrifice sales potential in the name of keeping things roots. Shaggy himself doesn't bother with nappiness this time out, and though the video girls he's hired are much classier than those who hang around the Ying Yang twins, they also look about as "island" as Don Mattingly. So where is this party supposed to be at, anyway? There's a Jamaican flag on the wall, but that hardly distinguishes this dancehall from the common room of a thousand frat-houses across the nation. The outdoor shots feature hanging lanterns and a vaguely Caribbean motif, but evoke a Williamsburg outdoor patio more than a Kingston bar. I don't think it bothers Shaggy any: if the inauthenticity knocks that he's always gotten were ever going to sting, they would have sidelined him long ago. I'm more interested in that prominent flag, and why it's there. American pop singer or not, Shaggy still feels the need to stand in front of the emblem of Jamaica, and draw on everything it suggests to Club Med-conscious listeners: music, endless fun in the sun, sex, blunts, bliss, and beautiful women. Jamaica-as-party-nation is no new representation, of course. Consider, just for starters, last year's clip for "No Letting Go" by Wayne Wonder - some very convincing makeout sessions on the beach, and three minutes of sun and surf made palpable enough to give you heatstroke. In clips like these, Jamaica becomes a national manifestation of the sort of endless party you normally see in rap videos - kind of a nation-sized Hype Williams set, a hypersexed bacchanalia, a land of endless (and mindless) pleasure. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.shaggyonline.com/default.asp

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So, in short, a fun place to inhabit on your television screen. But I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that if you yourself were Jamaican, this might really piss you off. The flipside of the party-island video is the ostensibly politicized impoverished-island clip - meant, at least in part, as a compensatory gesture. "Welcome to Jamrock" can be heard as a loud and violent fuck-you to island tourists, even - and perhaps especially - those who only visit Jamaica in their breezy, marijuana-hazed imaginations. Damian Marley has actually been criticized harshly by some business-minded Jamaicans for his "Jamrock" clip, which is best described as a graphic eco-tour of the most jaw-droppingly horrible slums of Kingston. He shows us the dilapidated housing projects, the shanties held together by string and clothespins, the brutal poverty of the Trenchtown alleys, and the angry, betrayed-looking men who stare at the camera with narrowed eyes in scarred faces. in short, it’s one of the most affecting pieces of agitprop that MTV has ever aired, and you have to believe that if Jr. Gong's last name weren't synonymous with enlightened social protest, it wouldn’t have gotten within a thousand miles of the American airwaves. Now, it's arguable that Marley's version of Jamaica is just the flipside of Wayne Wonder's - that both are hyperbolic expressions of popular stereotypes. From "Paper In Fire" to Akon's deathless "Ghetto," poverty-show videos are often sheer exploitation; at best, they're triggers for easy emotional response, and at worst, they use poor pedestrians (rather than poor actors) as human markers for the toughness and "realness" of the artist. Damian Marley is guilty of a little of both here. But I'm inclined to give him a pass, since the popular representations of his country have often been so insulting that they probably require some extreme correction. In any case, the clip is visually arresting: shot in washed-out greens and blues, and blessed by a performance by Marley that radiates intelligence and harsh righteousness. If it doesn't rise to the level of Chaka Demus & Pliers' marvelously immersive, ideologically ambiguous clip for "Murder She Wrote," it's still the definitive island video of the moment, and it seems destined to be one of the most talked-about clips of 2005.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.damianmarleymusic.com/multimedia.html

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For me, the "Jamrock" clip is utterly redeemed by the inclusion of a shot that will be familiar to any hip-hop video fan: the luxury automobile, driven by the artist and surrounded by a motorcade, rolling in regal slo-mo through the dirt-poor streets. It's an image we've seen time and again - "Wanksta," "Still Tippin'" "Roll Call," to name a few videos - and it reoccurs frequently in g-rap lyrics, too. Mannie Fresh, who rides shotgun on Young Jeezy's breakthrough hit "And Then What," took the trope to its absurdist extreme in "Real Big," landing his jet plane in the projects. Flossing like this outrages rap-haters, who see it as nothing but the worst sort of conspicuous consumption. And it is that, of course, but it's something more, too. When Young Jeezy drives past the broken windows of depressing housing developments in the slums of his unspecified southern city (could be his native Atlanta, but I have a feeling that it's Fresh's less-developed New Orleans we're being shown), he's not doing so to merely boast about his ability to transcend the horrors of the ghetto. That's because he doesn't imagine himself as separate from the streets and those who inhabit them; the message here, one common in good rap videos, is I have gotten myself a Lexus and all that goes with it, and since I am identifiable to you, it therefore follows that you can, too. Never mind that Jeezy "the Snowman' has attained his upwardly-mobile status by unscrupulous means: we all ought to know by now that rap is all about the celebration of the grind, and metaphorically speaking, one hustle is as valid as the next. Only serious cultural alarmists imagine that Jeezy is leading his listeners into a life of cocaine dealing - more likely, the young Atlantans who make up his fan-base are applying his exhortations to "stack flow" and "stack some mo'" to their entry-level jobs. Jeezy knows this, instinctively, and his day-in-the-life clip is filled with warmly mundane detail. Begin with his crib: no Technicolor daydream a la Snoop's "Let's Get Blown," but rather a handsome, narrow urban dwelling. Jeezy on the street is not a superstar, but part of the crowd (well, to be fair, it's a crowd whose members are all wearing his t-shirt); he chills on the stoop, counting his bank. And the parking-lot party he attends is, by rap video standards, decidedly on the hook -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/jeezy_young/artist.jhtml

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Rappers party in parking lots not simply because they need room for the dancers or because Dr. Dre did it in the clip for "Nothing But A 'G' Thing." They also need fresh asphalt for the automobiles. The cars, as thoroughly human as any other members of the supporting cast, are full participants in the celebration. As the ultimate status symbols, an observer might be tempted to say that they're the reason for the celebration. In the preferred position, they're perpendicular to each other, but diagonal to the camera - two luxury autos, brights on, shining their light on the rapper, who stands between them. This is his cornucopia. The open space, the angle made by the cars is stuffed with people; video girls, mostly, but also his own crew. The automobiles are like the walls of a martini glass, and the cup runneth over. Ray Cash makes an excellent cocktail-glass stem, as he is as scrawny as anybody you'll see on MTV. He opens the video by playing a car mechanic, and again, the shoe fits: he looks like the sort of guy who hangs out in the office at the Jiffy Lube and makes jokes about how your transmission is shot. But once the song starts in earnest, his tow truck turns into a styling ride, and our ultimate destination is the same sort of parking-lot party that crowns Jeezy's "And Then What" clip. In between, we're treated to shots of Cleveland - a city that doesn't make many appearances in mainstream rap videos. Mostly that means repeated cuts to stock footage of the facade at Jacobs Field, but at least it's not the Hollywood sign, know what I mean?-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-16201052-videos--Ray-Cash

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"Still Tippin'" was one of the all-time great automobile videos: vintage model sedans with big rims and neon lights in their trunks weaving slo-mo patterns on the Houston streets. But subsequent clips from the three principles have mostly served to confirm how old the Swishahouse single was when it blew up. The bloom of youth is off the cheeks of Mike Jones and Slim Thug - and especially Paul Wall. The Undisputed King of the Parking Lot stole the "Still Tippin'" clip not merely with his much-quoted line about having the Internet going nuts: he also exuded a kid-brother's optimism and sense of personal security uncommon among the chopped and screwed. Wall is still confident, and his persona is intact, but he sure isn't a kid brother anymore: he looks like he's put on ten years and twenty pounds since "Still Tippin'". The directors recognize this, and spend most of the first half of the clip cutting away from Wall as fast as possible to be sure that his audience doesn't get a good look at his changed face. This technique didn’t work with Mike Jones on the "Back Then" video, and it doesn't work here, either. To make matters worse, Wall has brought back the same neon sign and the same gleaming grill, and there's something oddly perfunctory about both; "Still Tippin'" may be a stone classic, but it's still a little early for a victory lap. Good sense dictates that if you're going to deliberately echo a triumph from your younger days (much younger, it's now clear), you'd better be sure you can reanimate its tropes with sufficient gravity. But instead of coming up with an inspired extension or reinterpretation of "Still Tippin'", Wall wastes time indulging in the worst common practice in recent hip-hop videos: rapping directly into the ear of the girl he’s sitting with. It looks worse than weird or rude. It seems downright painful. I still like him a lot, and think he's the most interesting Swishahouse emcee, but this clip is a flameout. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/wall_paul/artist.jhtml

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