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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Videos

  • We Are The… Canada. Young Artists for Haiti take on K’Naan’s “Wavin’ Flag”

    “And then it goes back. And then it goes back. And then it goes back…”  And here it comes again. “Wavin’ Flag”, Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan‘s loving and mournful, hopeful anthem to his home city of Mogadishu has, in the year since its release, taken on a life of its own – or rather:  several lives of its own. A top 10 hit in his adopted home country of Canada (where he’s lived since his early teens), the song’s also been used on a video game soundtrack and later last year, was given a stadium ready bilingual remix (“The Celebration Mix”) when it was chosen as the official theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Then, a couple of months ago, after the earthquake in Haiti, K’Naan performed a delicate acoustic version of the song on the Canada for Haiti telethon. In a timely reminder that Haiti still needs help, a group of Canadian recording artists calling themselves Young Artists for Haiti got together in the studio with producer Bob Ezrin (producer of both Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Berlin’s Count Three and Pray) to re-record the song all “We Are The World” style with a the obligatory in-the-studio, right-hands-to-headphones, documentary music video.

    The guest list for this gig includes a few international stars like Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne, some super-hip alterna-faves (Esthero, Emily Haines of Metric, rapper Kardinal Offishall, the bands Broken Social Scene and City and Colour), along with a few alterna-also-rans (Deryk Whibley, of Sum 41 – remember Sum 41?); there are a few wonderful “only-in-Canada” names (Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans?); there’s a token old guy (Tom “Life is a Highway” Cochrane doesn’t rate a solo, but you catch a few glimpses of him in the video), and a lot of pretty youngsters including Fefe Dobson, Drake,  Nikki Yanofsky (who wasn’t born when Tom Cochrane had that big hit), and Justin Bieber, who also wasn’t born when people knew who Tom Cochrane was, and has the strange distinction of having sung the first lines of “We Are the World 25” and getting to sing the final words here.   This assemblage of stars gets an added kick of wide-eyed optimism from a gaggle of singing, flag-waving children at the song’s climactic key-change.

    The result may be a bit “over-inspirational” (as is wont for this type of project), but on the whole, it’s significantly less artistically misguided than “We Are The World 25”.  For one thing, it’s shorter.  Which is nice.  But I think the major thing it’s got going for it is that, while it’s still a remake (K’Naan does get the first few lines),  it’s a current song; it’s not attempting to re-conjure quarter-century-old charity-single magic.  The original “Wavin’ Flag” is still charting in the Canadian Top 10.  (How it continues to elude a significant American audience is absolutely beyond me.)   The rap section in “We Are The World 25” felt like a freakish appendage to a song written for a pop landscape that had no idea rap was coming, but when Drake drops a Haiti-specific verse leading up to that final chorus (you know, the part where the flag-waving kids come in), it makes absolute musical sense – it feels organic and right, and places that final flag-waving moment in an appropriately empathetic context.   On “We Are The World 25” it seemed like a bunch of rappers trying to out-machismo each other on a rhyme that seemed ghoulishly self-involved and self-aggrandizing.    (I’d quote it here, but I honestly can’t bring myself to watch it again… so:  sorry.)  Also, aside from the rap, there’s a general (and refreshing) lack of Auto-tuniness here.  These singers mostly just sing, and some of them sing pretty amazingly – amazingly enough for me to want to spend my evening Googling my brains out trying to figure out who they are and where I can get my hands on some of their other music.

    All in all, the song gets more right than wrong, and this actually feels like the proper heir to the original “We Are the World” and all the other idealistic charity singles of the 80s.  Even if the faces and names aren’t as recognizable as will.i.am and Barbra Streisand.

  • Gaga and Beyonce in a Lez-ploitation Epic: “Telephone”

    As inspiration for a music video, you wouldn’t think much of the latest Lady Gaga single “Telephone”, a thumping Rodney Jerkins instant-club-hit with a feature spot by Beyonce (returning the favor after Gaga guested on a remix of Beyonce’s “Video Phone” for the reissue of I Am… Sasha Fierce).  The song’s lyrics virtually write their own screenplay (girl wants to dance; boy keeps calling girl; girl takes no calls cuz she’ll be dancing), and in any other hands, would probably get a very literal music video treatment.  But, as we’ve come to expect, Lady Gaga and director Jonas Akerlund (who directed her video for “Paparazzi” last summer) have come up with something altogether more menacing, and hilarious – a “lez-ploitation” sequel to “Paparazzi” which finds Beyonce bailing Lady Gaga out of jail, only for the two of them to hit the local diner, off all the patrons (including a Beyonce boyfriend played by Tyrese), and then do a big dance number for an audience of fresh corpses before riding off into the sunset.

    The long-anticipated  video – Gaga’s been tweeting about it for what seems like months now, and the song has already bulldozed its way up into the Top 3 of the Billboard Pop Chart – made a splashy premiere Thursday night on E! News, which also ran clips of an interview with Gaga (praising the E! network’s “courage” in running it in it’s glorious 9 minute entirety, and noting her and Beyonce’s shared love of women) who was almost certainly encouraging those (like me, admittedly) who would draw parallels between this particular spectacle and the ceremonious unveiling of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” more than 25 years ago (before Gaga was born).

    Okay, so I’ll bite.  There won’t be another “Thriller” moment.  There can’t be.  In 1983, the music video was still a fledgling form – videos were cheaply made, poorly shot, and disposable – and with one grand gesture, Michael Jackson had turned it into a legitimate art form.  That kind of thing can’t happen now – the audience isn’t nearly innocent enough, which Jackson himself almost certainly had to have learned.   He never stopped making epic music videos (ahem, “short films”), but none came close to garnering the notoriety of “Thriller”, even when the actual quality of the videos (I’m thinking “Smooth Criminal” here) rivaled it for pure watchability while ditching the embarrasing dialogue and bad acting.

    But setting that singular moment aside, there are numerous parallels to be drawn between the videos for “Thriller” and “Telephone”.  Not the least of which is that they are both genre flicks with big-name directors.  Michael’s was a horror movie directed by John Landis of American Werewolf in London fame (and Twilight Zone infamy), while “Telephone” is a 70s-style exploitation flick with a decidedly meta twist and a pulpy lesbian plot line like a cross between Thelma & Louise and Natural Born Killers.  Like Jackson, whose song “Thriller” was actually the seventh (and final) single to be released from the album of the same name (a year and a half after that album’s release), “Telephone” – Gaga’s sixth consecutive top 10 hit since late fall 2008 – comes at a moment when the artist risks shark-jumping by sheer pop-cultural ubiquity.  Like Michael in 1984, Lady Gaga in 2010 needs no further exposure, and like Michael before her, she lunges for it, regardless, with a video that demands to be talked about.

    Both videos culminate in a menacing/comical dance sequence involving dead people (Michael’s are an undead dance army while Gaga’s are a still-warm flock of face-stuffers), and like werewolf Michael, lusty murderess Gaga is portraying herself (along with her oh-so-game partner Beyonce) as a monster – as in The Fame Monster, now on sale at iTunes for $7.99! – with a knowing nod to all the metaphorical implications of such.   If “Telephone” offers one major innovation, it’s a knack for wall-to-wall product placement that manages to be simultaneously witty and crass.   Half the fun of the video is spotting the shill.  Diet Coke cans for curlers?  Miracle Whip as murder weapon?  I didn’t even know that there was a real dating website called Plentyoffish.com.  I just thought it was a really good joke.  And just like Thriller when Michael confesses to actress Ola Ray that he’s “not like the other boys”, Telephone has at least one, great, defining, iconic, self-referential, media-tweaking one-liner.  But I’ll leave it to the prison guard to deliver it:

  • Kanye West’s Coldest Winter – First Look

    Goodbye my friend, will I ever love again?

    Who knew Kanye West was still releasing videos from his over-one-year-old album 808s & Heartbreak?

    This time, it’s for a non-single from what I can tell. Coldest Winter was track eleven on his last album and featured very few lyrics, but was also one of the more emotional songs on the album. The video features the Ice Queen from Narnia running through the forest. Ok, it’s not really the Ice Queen. Check it out.