POP SCREEN

Chemical Brothers ft. Q-Tip

For those of you without access to VH1, here’s a quick and dirty history of popular music from the mid-’90s: The legendary hip-hop collective A Tribe Called Quest were producing socially conscious, jazz-inflected rap, and people were still pretending to care about “electronica.” There was also “The Macarena,” but the less said of that the better.

Two relics of this bygone era—Q-Tip of ATCQ and club stalwarts The Chemical Brothers—have collaborated on a new track: “Galvanize” from the latter’s new LP “Push the Button.”

The song itself is standard Brothers’ fare—all drum machines, robotic voice samples, and pulsing synth melody. Q-Tip’s nasal flow complements the track nicely, but it’s nothing remarkable for him.

The video, however, is a thing of beauty. Shot in stunning black and white, it features a plot straight out of “Our Gang.” Three smooth-cheeked youngsters, their faces painted like Pagliacci, sneak out to a downtown dance club.

Once they gain admittance into the club, the video shifts into vibrant color a la “The Wizard of Oz,” and the kids’ ringleader initiates a highly stylized fight/dance with another clown-faced patron.

The beautifully choreographed dance contest goes a long way towards elevating the comparatively flaccid track. Pay particular attention to the way the strobe lighting and Steadicam “stutters” complement the dancers’ movements.

All in all, the video is pretty terrific. Maybe those electronica enthusiasts weren’t pretending after all.

—Bernard L. Parham

Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

Jack Johnson

[Review written backwards in the spirit of the video style.]

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—Henry M. Cowles

Dragostea Din Tei

O-Zone

If you put a thousand Eurotrash monkeys at a thousand homosexual typewriters, told them to write a three-minute-long porno with cameos from a cyborg and Santa Claus, hired Jar-Jar Binks and his twin brothers as the leads, and signed on an obsessive-compulsive nine-year-old to direct the whole thing, you would be the most awe-inspiring filmmaker of all time. You would also have created the music video for “Dragostea Din Tei,” more widely known as “The Romanian Pop Song That My Floormate Plays At 4 a.m. Every Night”. Hats off to you, my friend.

Holy living spirit of the Lord, is this video incomprehensible. O-Zone is flying a cargo plane (the least sexy aircraft imaginable)? But sometimes they’re on the wing, caressing each other’s hairless chests and coming tantalizingly close to making out? And at arbitrary moments, they turn into absurdist comic-book pictures (my favorite is the one of two Indians playing a soccer match against a cowboy)? And in the end, it was all a dream? What?!

Far be it from me to judge this video. All I can tell you is that you should watch it and pick out your favorite Dadaist moment for yourself. Meanwhile, I’m gonna contemplate moving to Romania, where even myself, the gayest straight guy around, can score with some hot post-Soviet babushkas.

—Abe J. Riesman