POPSCREEN: Chingy ft. Ludacris and Bobby Valentino

Chingy’s tired. Hella tired. Chingy falls asleep, and oh my, does Chingy have a dream!

What no one’s told Chingy, I’d venture to guess, is that some dreams are best kept to oneself.

The video for his new single “Gimme That,” is an ode to the unfettered sub-conscious.

Generally, when the masturbatory tendencies of one’s deepest thoughts reach the point when they are freely allowed to rear their head in real life, you can be certain of two things. One, you’re crazy. And two, you might just end up being a pretty successful rap star (cf. Kanye).

But not long into “Gimme That,” it becomes sorrowfully clear that self-centeredness à la Mr. West does not necessarily make a good rap video.

The video begins with the St. Louis rapper nodding off in a chair, followed by a zoom-in on a table in the foreground. A stack of magazines lies on the table, the content of which seems to entirely focus on—guess who?—Chingy. Tabloid pictures of Chingy clubbing with friends and waxing his car, for example, come alive as he joins BFFs Bobby Valentino and Ludacris in stepping out of the pages. This unfortunately recalls the viewer to recall the latter’s Lilliputian role as elfin DJ Donnie in 2007’s “Fred Claus.”

As members of his crew extol the virtues of cruisin’ down the block with jewels on they watch, the lyrics of such poeticisms are streamingly “printed” on the pages which now serve as the video’s sets.

The clip is a boringly meta, dreary treatise on absolutely nothing new. The line between fantasy and actuality is blurred beyond belief and as a result, the video is pushed out of the realm of anything interesting or watchable.

Rap videos are supposed to be fun and titillating. This titillation, however, doesn’t only come from the video vixens and conspicuous consumption that have become a staple of the genre. It’s a result of a kind of double Schadenfreude in which the viewer is as much embarrassed for the people behind the video as they are embarrassed of themselves for actually kind of liking it. This time around, you kind of just feel embarrassed for Chingy.

I’ll eat my words tomorrow, but I’ll take the straight-up bottles-and-models rap video over this ill-conceived schlock any day.

—Ruben L. Davis