I’m generally not ready to feel Christmasy until after Thanksgiving, due to the fact that I like to take things one holiday at a time. But the big, commercial Christmas push comes so early these days that its sort of unavoidable.
Here’s Chris Brown’s take on a Christmas classic from the soundtrack of his new movie, This Christmas. He does a pretty good job, even with the silly, out-of-place choreography, but why would anyone really listen to C.B.’s version when Donny Hathaway’s is available? Or am I just being resistant to change?
Alicia Keys and Common are playing a game of trade-the-cameo. She appeared as his love girlfriend/wife in the video for “I Want You,” and now Common is playing Alicia’s ill-fated man in her “Like You’ll Never See” video. Not bad at video-acting, these two, but their videos are kind of depressing me.
Anytime you have to open your new video with a too-long taste of your old hit single — “I Get Money,” in this case — you’re kind of telling people that you don’t have that much faith in the new stuff — “I Still Will,” featuring Akon, in this case. And you didn’t really need to tell us, 50. All we have to do is watch the first couple of minutes.
The video for Jay-Z’s new single, “Roc Boys,” premiered today, and it certainly is an improvement on “Black,” I mean, “Blue Magic.” Even if you hate the song, playing “spot the cameo” in this Chris-Robinson-directed video is entertaining enough. Is it just me, or does he clearly have a crush on Cassie? I hope he knows that Diddy will smack flames out his ass if he gets too close to his girl artist.
Omarion and Bow Wow are obviously trying to recreate some sort of Best of Both Worlds vibe with their new joint album, but they’re Bow Wow and Omarion. So we can predict how this is going to go, before we even see their so so clip for their lead single “Girlfriend.” Interestingly, Bow Wow had this to say about this track:
“[’Girlfriend’ is] probably gonna be one of the biggest records that I’ve ever done in my career,” he added.
But his career hasn’t even been that short!
It’s interesting that John Legend releases a video that kind of looks like every other R&B video ever made for a song called “Another Again.” It goes along with the theme.
[CL]
• Wow, this show just gets worse and worse. [MG]
• Black lawyers rarely go before the U.S. Supreme Court. [AP]
• Humiliating workplace stories? You know you have them. [Jossip]
• Another Sean Paul song for you to get tired of after three plays. [CL]
• Jay-Z’s American Gangster tour sold out within 1 minute in Chicago, LA and Philadelphia. I guess he wouldn’t want to help Kelly Rowland out with a guest appearance on her tour? []
Mary J. Blige is back! And better than ever? Eh, I definitely wouldn’t go that far. She just released her new video for her happy dance song, I’m Fine, and it’s, well, fine. I think I’m going to go watch Common’s new video again.
Finally, a new video I can stand behind! Not T-Pain in whiteface. Or Nelly being annoying. Or Ja Rule being trite.
We have Common, both handsome and hatless, which I didn’t know was possible, Kanye, Derek Luke, Alicia Keys, Serena Williams, and of course, Kerry Washington, who starred as the slightly stalkerish ex-girlfriend and directed the video for “I Want You,” which may or may not have inspired her and Common to get together in real life. How could the video not work?
T-Pain’s new video for his song “Church” seems sort of pointless and confusing. But then again, those are two words I would use to describe the man himself.
After watching it, I did come away with one thought. He is even less attractive as a white man than he is as a black man, and I didn’t think that was possible.
[C&D]
