While driving, I exclusively listen to top 40 stations. It began in college when I found myself road-tripping through the Blue Ridge on a weekly basis, sometimes driving straight through the night on an ill-advised Red Bull and cigarette high. When the caffeine buzz waned and my car companions had all gone comatose, I found myself completely alone on a deserted highway at 3 am. Virginia is not big on the street light, and being the lone car in the pitch of early morning puts you at considerable risk for Death by Deer. I remember once, while driving from Roanoke to Houston (a nonstop 26 hours), I found myself in what appeared to be the drop point for the local serial killer-- limbs were strewn across the road as though they had been dumped from the back of a pick up truck, and all I could make out were their spindled shapes, sometimes flattened, studding the bloodied ground. As I slowed (which still baffles me; in my right mind the instinct would surely be to flee) I caught site of the tapered nose from a decapitated deer. Some poor truck driver, no doubt, had unwittingly come upon a pack of deer; the impact was clearly so immediate that the bodies more or less exploded, leaving nothing behind but a 50 yard stretch of solid carnage.
Despite the fear induced by facing what appeared to be the opening shot of a B horror film (or worse, a Tarantino/Rodriguez mashup) I still found myself overwhelmed with exhaustion. Nothing in the world made more sense than to fall asleep. Right there. Wheel in hand. Surrounded by dismembered roadkill. And so I turned to the radio.
Sometimes, it's the obvious appeal of pop music: the catchy beats, the flashy vocals, the simple lyrics. One year, I went through a phase where the only thing that could keep me from nodding off were the first three songs on Britney's Blackout album, blasted at decibels rivaling the crowd at a Hanson concert circa 1998. I will be in my car, on hour 12 of straight driving, past the point where food or caffeine retains any kind of effect whatsoever, and Rihanna is my upper. The Black Eyed Peas. Justin Timberlake. Lady Gaga. The Pussycat Dolls. Basically, all the stuff you would never list under Facebook's "Favorite Music" section.
But sometimes I listen to top 40 stations because they get me riled. Some of these songs are so poorly written, so blandly executed, that I am baffled at their success. Take, for example, Ke$ha. Now, I have no animosity towards the girl herself-- she, like all the rest of the pop starlets out there, is a carefully crafted, heavily marketed image for the pop crowd who needs a breather from Gaga. She is plain ol' easy-to-swallow vanilla pop, whose heavily synthesized music can get your foot tapping despite her stupid name and asinine lyrics (The boys are lining up cuz they know we got swagger/ but we kick 'em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger). The less I know about the puppet behind the song that keeps me from crashing into a tree at night, the happier I am to sing along to, laugh at, and rant about the songs themselves.
But we all have YouTube. And I have the relatively common habit of looking up the photos and music videos of the people whose music prevents my untimely demise. Sometimes, I am pleasantly surprised: take Kanye's Love Lockdown, JT and Madonna's 4 minutes, or Gaga's Bad Romance (the Cremaster of pop music videos: over-budgeted, overrated, heavy with semi-ambiguous symbology... but visually delicious). But then you get videos like this, where the song is a flimsy pretext for an outrageous plot with bad acting and over the top product placement. It's like a bad porn without the sex, and maybe a little Super Bowl ad campaigning thrown in for good measure. Vomit.
No! No! No!!!! It's like watching Kate Gosselin on Dancing with the Stars--those vacuous eyes, the plastered expression of unmasked discomfort. Elly Jackson, what were you thinking?? I can run with the geometry-- I don't generally need to know "why" for my music-video-viewing pleasure-- but why did we go with "sad face" for this one?? I really thought, when I heard the song on the radio, we'd have some humor, something a little more energetic-- think Depeche Mode's gogo dancers from "Personal Jesus."
The music video is an absurd thing. To go back to my former comparison, it is not unlike a porn-- there's the basic premise of a song (sex), for which the video is responsible to accommodate. The storyboards these days seem to attempt the "plot line" more and more, which (as in a porn) generally feel groundless and wanton. I'm more into "Pick a theme" videos, where they run with some kind of general aesthetic and add some dancing. It's MUSIC. We don't need a 4 minute sitcom or documentary. We need costumes! Synchronized jazz squares! Maybe a few booty shakes and a little animation!
There's the old joke about rap videos showing nothing but booty, cars and money, and honestly I feel like it's a much better formula than the crapshoot that occurs when pop strays from their own group choreography, sexy faces, and glittery costumes. If you MUST stray, just don't axe the choreography-- we don't want to see you cry in your video and stare soulfully into the camera's eyes (or, the case of Elly Jackson, attempt to stare soulfully). We want to see you strut, pop and lock it. I'm not even going to qualify the statement as a generalization. It's practically science.
An example of how a well-crafted video made me overcome initial gag-reflex to the song. Well done Michel Gondry: we are not worthy.
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