POPSCREEN: Timbaland

“Baby,” Timbaland says. “I’mma pull a heist and it’s gonna be dangerous. You gotta stay away from me. I love you too much to let you get mixed up in this.”

“Come on,” says former Pussy Cat Doll Nicole Scherzinger. “Let me in. I can be a dame. Won’t blow the whistle. Get you cheesed.” Cue music, dance sequence.

Seems like a good beginning to a rap video, no? The Bonnie and Clyde homage has worked before—remember Jay-Z and Beyoncé back in ’03?

While “Scream”—the video for the fifth single off Tim’s 2007 album “Shock Value,” has no such format. In fact, it has no format at all. The introduction provided above is entirely my own, and the video actually opens in medias res.

Ostensibly, “Scream” is about a theft of some sort. Otherwise why would Nicole Scherzinger sport a ski mask indoors? Or why would Timbaland have video screens installed in the trunk of his whip that read “Target Secured?”

There are other questions to ask though. Like why does Timbaland insist on going shirtless for so much of the video? And what, exactly, is this target that’s being secured?

In end, the clip’s most valuable asset is its sheer randomness.

Shots of Tim whispering into Nicole’s ear are intercut with shots of car hoods and the girls who dance around them, while Timbaland simultaneously dons a bulletproof vest. One could argue that the nonsensicality of these directorial decisions is in line with the nonsensicality of the song’s lyrics. These include “Can I have some of your cookies / Can I have some of your pie / May I cut the first slice / So won’t you scream?”

This argument, however, doesn’t embrace the wondrous stupidity of this video. Let us not damn director Justin Francis for being wholly uncreative, or for managing to fetishize perhaps the only thing that has yet to be fetishized in rap videos: ski masks.

Let us simply throw our hands up, exhale, and embrace Timbaland for the steroidal tub of love that he is. And then never watch this thing again.

—Ruben L. Davis