Janet Jackson brings the sexyback, Def Leppard is still a band and has some dystopian carnival words of wisdom for you, world famous rock curmudgeon Steve Albini is turned into song and he doesn’t give a fuck, and more, in a thoroughly entertaining 40th week of the year’s Best Lyric Vids.
Powell – ‘Insomniac’
Long story short, Powell, a British dance producer, sent an email to rock’s Prince of Curmudgeon, Steve Albini, in an effort to clear a sample for a song he wanted to make. Albini responded with a now infamous perfectly curmudgeon ‘club culture detesting’, IDGAF response that Powell first turned into a London billboard ad, and now a video for the song Albini said he doesn’t give a fuck that Powell makes. Powell may be cashing-in off the absurdity of it all, but it’s still entertaining in both industrial-house creativity and iconoclast neon-green Youtube lyric video ephemera. The medium is the message, as a great man once said:
Wakey!Wakey! – ‘Adam & Eve’
The dude from One Tree Hill has an achey pop band called Wakey!Wakey!, that can get a bit bloated over the AOR top from time to time, but if you’re feeling like getting orchestral cathartic, “Adam & Eve” isn’t all an empty calorie experience. And this iMovie sketch filter, likewise, ain’t a bad dressing for showing the edit process of struggling relationship:
Def Leppard – ‘Let’s Go’
“I think we’ve got the loudest, biggest, slap-you-in-the-face, guitar album that Def Leppard’s ever done,” so said guitarist Phil Collen to Ultimate Classic Rock, in promotion of this single and new s/t due at the end of the month. Which is a classy way of putting a veil over the fact that they’ve been replicating the formula for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” for near 30 years. To the video’s credit, though, this is some odd dystopian future world they’ve created that turns an otherwise flaccid chorus into a narrative with a bit more depth — Heavy Metal meets The Matrix as a cgi hair metal action figure commands a drone from a futuristic warehouse:
Janet Jackson – ‘BURNITUP!’ ft. Missy Elliott
It’s been a while since we’ve seen the “Nasty” side of Janet, barking for a beat. “BURNITUP!” might not be a return to form, with Missy Elliott clunking up the joint with cat meows and a “brand new style” court-jester of an announcement, but when the Queen of Pop does enter the court, she does bring a large amount of sexyback to the stage with this crunchy lesson on how to burn it up. And whereas the “No Sleeep” lyric video fell flat on its boring face, this tour, fan and stage crew-packed dance-off with cue-cards is bustling with personality:
Family of the Year – ‘Carry Me’
Pop can get away with a lot of piss-poor, over-sentimental turn of phrases. Especially the wispy folk realm. And this isn’t hate just to hate — the LA upstarts wrote a beautiful song here, lush and swirling with hints of Badly Drawn Boy in the verse and a bit of a Lulac male-female harmony in the chorus. And the twilight-hour video is a treat to watch, lyrics scrawled over the screen in a kind of Where the Wild Things Are font. Just these words of broken-heart wisdom make me want to punch someone in the face:
