Music Video: Titus Jones "Dance Alarm" (Nicki Minaj / Eminem / Britney Spears / Dev / Taio Cruz / Lady Gaga / Owl City / Carly Rae Jepsen / Cascada / Avicii / Etta James)

So Titus Jones has a new "album"¹ out, as of last Friday. I haven't had a lot of opportunities to listen to it yet, so I'm not sure which tracks, if any, will turn out to be my favorites, but this looks like it'll be one of them.² Conveniently enough, this is also the only one for which a video has been made.

The video is a little . . . much, just to warn you.³



That was a pretty representative bit of the album as a whole, so if you liked that, you'll probably want to download the whole thing from Titus Jones' site. (It's free.)

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¹ Does the word "album" still mean anything? Discuss.
² "Close to Blowin' in the Deep" is also an early favorite, as is "I Wanna Believe in Fire Love." It's possible that I may just like Adele.
³ Hell, Nicki Minaj's outfits alone probably qualify the video for "a little much" status, never mind all the strobe-light editing and effects and shit.
I suppose that puts the video as a whole somewhere in the "way the hell too much" category.
Perhaps I'm just getting old: I was warned that this sort of thing would happen.

Music video: Weird Al Yankovic "Perform This Way"

In case anyone thought that Lady Gaga was unparodyable. (Almost, but Weird Al manages it.)



(I kind of love the octopus / Taj Mahal outfit.)

Music Video: Wax Audio "I'm in Love With Judas Priest" (Lady Gaga / Judas Priest)

I'm on the verge of taking back everything nice I ever said about Lady Gaga -- I loved "Bad Romance" (and still do, pretty much), and I don't hate "Telephone" (but I don't love it either), but all the singles since then¹ have been . . . well, I sort of feel like she's both trying too hard and like she's not trying hard enough. Like, she's working very hard to be shocking without actually doing anything, y'know, shocking. I mean, this is 2011: it's not enough anymore to go onstage, feign masturbation with a crucifix and call it a day: you have to put in some effort.²

Also. "Judas" particularly annoyed me, because it was not only too long by half,³ it was sort of deliberately harsh-sounding, and it's constructed almost identically to "Bad Romance."⁴ Plus there's the usual hodgepodge of religious references that don't add up to anything coherent, as last seen in "Alejandro" and "Born This Way," which, again, Madonna got there first.

She can't really be out of ideas already, can she?⁵



Anyway. So I was sort of surprised that I like this mash-up, because Judas Priest has most of these same problems, but it actually kind of works for me, because it smooths over the lurchiness of "Judas" and makes "Painkiller" (the Judas Priest song) a little bit poppier. Plus I think the whole "I'm in love with Judas (PRIEST!), Judas" bit is a clever bit of editing. Doesn't really make me like either original song any more than I did, and I'm not saying this is the pinnacle of artistic achievement in our time, but this mashup sort of takes the piss out of both songs, so I approve of the combination. If that makes any sense.

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¹ ("Alejandro," "Born This Way," "Judas," "The Edge of Glory")
² To the best of my knowledge, Gaga hasn't even done that much: Madonna did, not quite twenty years ago. I will grant Gaga some shock points for the meat dress she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards, but that was last September.
³ It sort of sounds to me like she took the bridges from five or six different songs and threw them all together without even trying to make them flow naturally into one another.
⁴ The "oooh oooh oooh I'm in love with Judas" is an awful lot like the "whoa-oh-oh-oh-ooooooh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, caught in a bad romance;" the "Judah, Judah-ah-ah" at the beginning is more or less interchangeable with "Rah rah, ah-ah-ah, Rama, rama-ma, Gaga, oh-la-la." I don't mind some nonsense syllables in my pop music, but Gaga could branch out, try some other vowels.
The actual melody of the chorus isn't the same as with "Bad Romance," but they're similar enough that when I get one song stuck in my head now, it flows back and forth to the other one -- it's like "I'm just a holy fool / Oh baby, he's so cruel / But I'm still in love with Judas, baby / whoa-oh-oh-oh-ooooooh, oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh, caught in a bad romance," lather rinse repeat.
⁵ (Feel free to use the comments to tell me how you never liked her in the first place, 'cause I know some of you must be dying to.)

Music Video: Titus Jones "Good Girls Burn Miami" (Sean Kingston / Cobra Starship / Shakira / Lady Gaga / LMFAO mashup)

Another thumpy/throbby club-type mix, like "I Wanna Bulletproof Dancer." I like "Dancer" better, but "Good Girls" has going for it that it's sort of made me okay with Sean Kingston, who I took an extreme and irrational dislike to when "Beautiful Girls" was on the radio all the time. (It was lunge-at-the-dashboard-if-the-first-two-notes-came-on-the-car-radio kind of dislike. I still feel that way about that song, but at least the disgust no longer bleeds over to Kingston's entire repertoire and makes me want to scratch out his eyes with potato peelers and stuff.¹) The Shakira helps.

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¹ I don't knoooooooow. I don't! I just hated the song the first time I heard it, and ever after. At least some of this has to do with feeling like it was trivializing depression, but that makes it sound like I had reasons, which I really don't think I did. Maybe some long-repressed childhood trauma involving a similar-sounding song. I don't know. For obvious reasons, I've never listened carefully to "Beautiful Girls" to see whether I could figure out the problem.

Music video: "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga)

I wasn't previously a fan of Lady Gaga's: I'd either pretty much missed ("Poker Face") or heard but not cared about ("Paparazzi") her previous stuff, but this I like. A lot of artists would have done three or four costume changes and called it a day: the sixteen I actually count in the video¹ would be unthinkable -- and they're also all very complex and detailed: it's not like she threw on a different t-shirt and called it a costume change. Plus remember that most of these are going to require the scene to be relit, her hair and makeup to be redone, and multiple takes for each shot.

I mean, you don't have to like her, or the video, but you can't deny that she's working hard.

Of course, there will at some point have to be a plant profile based on Lady Gaga as the "person,"² but I'm unable to think of a plant weird enough to withstand the comparison. Not a houseplant, anyway. Maybe Drosera. Any suggestions?

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¹1) Opening gold triangular thing w/ razor-blade sunglasses.
2) White plastic "Slim Jim" outfit.
3) Wide-eyed strawberry blonde in the bathtub w/ translucent white plastic (?) top.
4) All-black outfit with black "Slim Jim" headpiece.
5) Close-up shots of crying blonde Gaga with (sometimes) a snake skull (?) on her head.
6) Diamond crown + white boots + brown and black blanket/coat.
7) #6 without the blanket/coat.
8) Naked with snake-head (cat head? bat head? WTF is that?) in "shower."
9) #7 without the diamond crown.
10) Black mask and lingerie surrounded by diamonds.
11) Silver "gyroscope."
12) Terrifying green iridescent/metallic thing with the shoes. (Possibly appears later looking bluer -- or maybe that's a different outfit entirely.)
13) Floor-length white fur coat with bear-head train and large sunglasses.
14) Red "Fifth Element" bandage outfit.
15) #13 without coat = white lingerie + heavily caked-on mascara + a white rat (mouse?) on her head (!).
16) Sparky.
My favorites are 3, 5, and 14: don't ask me to pick one.
² After all, I did it for Amy Winehouse. Fair is fair.