The Truth Served Cold

It’s been a good while since I last gave 2 fucks about watching a music video of any kind. The last time I watched them regularly, The Luniz ‘I got 5 on it’ was a popular song and ‘The Box’ wasn’t a sexual slur. In olden times, a lot of hiphop music videos were visual representations of the narratives given in the songs. The really popular songs that the old folks didn’t like at least tended to have a story to them, and conservative people like my mother and father openly expressed an appreciation for the artistic flair and creativity of the videos and their expression.

Then last Saturday rolled around. As  James and I waited around for our friend Mon to show up for a night of drunken lunacy, this New Orleans bred asshole turned the television in the basement to MTV Jams and filled the house with the sights and sounds of the modern-day hiphop video for the next thirty fucking minutes. The following happened as a result:

- The value of the house dropped 50%
- My IQ dropped to 74
- I killed James – at least in one of several…
…Nightmares I had featuring Lil’ Wayne proposing to my daughter

The music videos I saw on Saturday were the most remarkably retarded cookie-cutter manufactured works of ‘creativity’ I have ever seen. I don’t remember who any of the artists were (with the exception of Lil’ Wayne), but I do remember that each video borrowed from the same bag of reusable hiphop music video elements:

-Some asshole getting a haircut
-Some asshole ’singing’ or ‘rapping’ three inches from a chick’s face
-Some asshole in a barn or barn-like structure for no apparent reason
-Some asshole wearing a t-shirt with the name and image of a dead friend
-Some asshole with 40lbs of gold in his mouth constantly baring his teeth
-Some asshole dressed like an ex-con with easy access to glitter successfully seducing some professional looking chick
-Some asshole flaunting his ‘thuggishness’ out of spite in a country club, high end restaurant, or equally inappropriate venue
-Some asshole driving a giant SUV with spinning rims
-Some asshole constantly self-affirming his gangster status
-Some asshole flashing a giant wad of $100 bills at some doe-eyed chick
-Booty

Every single video featured one or more idiots, each more unattractive than the last, singing exclusively about vapid materialistic bullshit. This isn’t anything new – ever since Viacom dug its claws into hiphop the music has always included some degree of this. But what’s different now is that ENTIRE TRACKS feature nothing more than dudes talking about their haircuts, grillz, shades, rims, clothes and cars.

As much as five straight minutes of this shit in each video…over and over again…for thirty minutes. Despite the fact that watching it was more traumatizing than watching video of the human aftermath of car crashes, my psyche was pretty well postured to recover itself back to normalcy. Until a Lil’ Wayne video came on…

FUCK!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.