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Matisyahu - “King Without A Crown”

Sean Paul - “Temperature”

Ghostface Killah & Ne-Yo - “Back Like That”

LL Cool J & Jennifer Lopez - “Control Myself”

Prince - “Black Sweat”

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Well, of course it’s gimmicky. You don’t expect to see a Hasidic Jew toasting, and the sheer novelty of the act allows him to get away with some over-the-top melodramatic pop indulgences. But credit Matishayu for anticipating potential misapprehensions and doing his best to defuse them. For instance, a Hasid fronting a live hipster rock band might look a little incongruous. In the “King Without A Crown” clip, Matisyahu includes performance footage, but renders it in high-contrast solid colors against a bright white background. The images of Matisyahu rocking are thus rendered as live-action mid-Twentieth Century political posters, complete with slogans taken from the lyrics of the song. All the cultural signifiers familiar to anybody who has spent any time in South Williamsburg are there – the beard, the hat, the long coat – but stripped of their particularity and detail, they feel inoffensive and even oddly natural. The branding has done the trick, or at any rate, it hasn’t hurt the author: “King Without A Crown” is a hit, and Matisyahu has become the most unlikely pop star since…. well, frankly, I can’t think of anyone more unlikely. There’s an important lesson about cultural representation buried here: that while explicit and particular signs of difference are still freaky to mainstream America, a crude caricature of difference is usually acceptable. This is something that the cartoonists have always known, and it’s the reason why assimilating subcultures have always been initially represented by animated or drawn characters that wildly exaggerate a few carefully-selected marks of distinction and ignored the others. It might have something to do with the way our American brains access interpersonal difference – contained and classified, it’s digestible, but too much of it throws static into the system and causes a shutdown. So yes: Matisyahu clearly knows what he’s doing. And if his mangy black beard coupled with the vaguely Stalinist tone of the broadside images in this clip put you in mind of John Walker Lindh, that’s probably intentional, too.  -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/video/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=1915274

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Matisyahu’s next bright idea was the superimposition of choice words over the frames in his clip. Often, when you’re listening to Ja-fake-in’ music like this, it’s next to impossible to follow what the toaster is saying. Without the visual aids, I don’t think I would have has a prayer of parsing the chorus of “King Without A Crown”; with them, I’m singing along by the 2:30 mark. Now, Sean Paul is ten times as inscrutable as Matisyahu is, but his music is usually so infectious that he doesn’t care. Paul’s clips, which lean toward the abstract, don’t tend to help, but every now and again, he’ll throw you a bone. I think he figures that if he can give you the general idea, that’s about all the legibility you’ll need – you can access the hook and remember it long enough to make it to the record store (or iTunes), and watch the fly chicks while you’re zoning out to the rest. In the “Gimme The Light” clip, for instance, he dances in front of a bunch of lights; in “Get Busy”, he shows us a room full of girls getting busy. “We Be Burnin’” was a little trickier since the song is explicitly about smoking marijuana, and MTV regulations prohibit the video artist from rolling a gigantic spliff on camera, but the emcee was able to do a deft end-around by appearing stoned out of his mind. “Burnin’” (and The Trinity in general) didn’t do quite as well as his prior singles had, or perhaps didn’t measure up to his multiplatinum expectations, so for the follow-up, he’s decided to put safety first and be as literal as possible. So the video girls are dressed, un-ironically, in seasonal outfits, and do their ass dances in front of horizontal bars of color representing spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In case you miss the point, Paul gives copious screen time to mercury crawling up a phallic thermometer. I’m a Sean Paul fan, and I recognize that this isn’t meant to be rocket science – but his prior expressions of the Main Idea were always casual and stylish. By contrast, the “Temperature” clip looks like a Target commercial. I know that the air at the top of the pop charts is thin and productive of self-aggrandizing hallucinations, and the pressure to justify initial investments by appealing to the LCD is immense. But “Get Busy” was one of the simplest and best videos that you or I will ever see, and it’s hard not to think that he’d regain his form if he – or his handlers – would just relax a little.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/video/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=710346

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Talk about pressure: lately it seems like the Gotham rap community is counting on Ghost and Fishscale to slay the Southern dragon and return NYC to its customary position of supremacy. But in practice, Ghostface is nobody’s idea of a pop idol – he just wants to fling around off-the-wall imagery and make dick and pussy jokes and hyperactively pile up weird stories like a mad architect. Really, it’s a miracle that a major label is still willing to put Ghostface Killah albums out, so different is he from both his sizzurp-sipping competitors down south and his meat-and-potatoes G-Unit rivals back home. “Back Like That” is meant to be Ghost’s national mainstreaming move, and he’s brought in Usher impersonator Ne-Yo to sing what passes for a hook. But even here, he can’t play along with the marketing plan: not only does he upset melodramatic breakup-song conventions by threatening to cut his cheating girlfriend’s finger off and to run her over with his car, but he alienates his few red state supporters by lashing out at D4L and indulging in a little mini-lecture (and Ghost just can’t lay off the mini-lectures) about general Southern ineptitude on the mic. Folks, it’s that big-city, big-pimping arrogance that fueled the Dirty South rebellion in the first place. In the clip, Ghostface plays the role of the self-entitled, mastermind New Yorker emcee to the hilt: he roughs up his girl with complete impunity, and has her shown the door by the dime he’s replaced her with, and he manages to orchestrate a beatdown of the guy who’s cuckolded him. All in three minutes; Jay-Z could not have done it better. Ghost promises us that the story will be continued, but where’s he going to go with it? Perhaps he can just shake down Ne-Yo for his ludicrous “thugged out” threads. It’s a good thing Ghostface is such a talented emcee and wordsmith, because his chosen visual iconography isn’t doing his reputation any favors. -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/video/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=1215

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Part of the problem with the “Back Like That” clip is the uninspired cinematography – the dark interior shots, and the umpteenth Mob-movie ripoff mise-en-scene conclusion. But getting your backdrops to look sharp is only ten percent, maybe, of the battle: your star has to rise to the occasion and deliver a performance worthy of heavy rotation. Like many words-first emcees, Ghostface Killah has never been very comfortable in front of the camera; here, he’s particularly bug-eyed and unsympathetic. It’s tempting to think that Hype Williams or someone like him could have coaxed something better out of him, or at least adorned his shots with enough eye candy that you’d find the emcee difficult to locate. But even Williams, busy as he is, usually tries to justify his frantic stylistic detours by working with frontpeople with legit starpower. Consider: in the past two years, Williams has gone as frames-crazy as a junior HTML programmer in ’98, subdividing the screen into tiny boxes and bands, splitting images in half, and indulging in weird juxtapositions just for fuck’s sake. But when you look past the mirror effects and hyperactive letterboxing, the visual signatures of the artists’ he’s hired to hype are always apparent. Jennifer Lopez (ass) and LL Cool J (lips) possess body parts that are justifiably world-famous. Both have made videos (“Waiting For The Night”, “Doin’ It”, for starters) that focus almost entirely on those body parts; that videographic history throws its shadow over any attempt to recontextualize those artists. Wisely, with “Control Myself”, Hype Williams doesn’t try to fight it. He can’t keep himself from playing ADD games with the screen, and even turns the center box into an Electric Company-style symmetrical vertical axis. But that just means he’s able to show us more shots – from more angles – of those body parts that are the rightful stars of the clip. Since this is an LL Cool J song and Lopez is only guesting, there are more lips here than there is ass, and in several shots, Lopez’s lipstick-frosted kisser is only used to support Mr. Smith’s. You could think of it as a returned favor for LL’s buppie-humiliating star turn in the “All I Have” clip; back then, Lopez was as popular as she was ever going to get, and she was calling the shots. Times have changed. But she can still shake it.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/video/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=932

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It could be the L.A. workout plan, or it could be buckets of andro: in either case, LL Cool J looks great, and much better than any forty year old rapper has a reason to expect to appear. Examine, by contrast, his peers from the Golden Age, all of whom now either look like disgruntled Black Studies professors or retired sumo wrestlers. Nevertheless, he’s still got nothing on Prince – the Dorian Gray of the pop charts, and the only man in America besides (maybe) Barry Bonds who acts and appears younger today than he did in 1988. His secret could be his unwillingness to repeat himself: “Black Sweat” returns roughly to “Kiss” territory, but couples the singers’ falsettos with some very modern drum and synth programming. The “Black Sweat” clip cleverly echoes the “Kiss” video: here, again, Prince and a female dancer exist in some kind of netherworld between identification and desire. His facial expressions are, as always, priceless: nobody can turn a look of feigned astonishment into one of lascivious glee faster, or with more precision. In fact, the next time you’re watching Beyoncé Knowles give one of her own magnificent performances in a video, notice how much of her voguing for the camera is lifted straight from footage of Prince. But that’s no surprise – before the conventions of R&B videos had even been established, we’d all seen Purple Rain three or four times. He’s one of the guys who invented this medium, and he continues to move like a dream. And we’ll be watching new Prince clips for a long time to come.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/video/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=14481

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