David Guetta, Nicki Minaj - “Turn Me On”

  We start out in a creepy laboratory that appears to be in the dungeon of one of those old-timey castles where the peasants are warned to never go near, but they do anyway. Some man is doing something near a really hot furnace, then he shuffles over and starts jacking with this metal contraption that is laid out on a table. Of course, we’re already wondering what in the hell this mess has to do with modern dance music and multiple-personality vocalists, but we’re polite little video viewers and we keep watching.

  We’re guessing the man must be some type of scientist, from back in the day when “science” meant “things you did in a darkened dungeon that were probably illegal and could get you burned at the stake”. Suddenly, one end of this metal thing turns into white lips and starts singing the song as the camera pulls back and we realize the metal in this section has been shaped into something that looks like a human head.

  The creepy factor just hit the ceiling, right? It gets even higher.

  As the camera spins around and gives us artsy shots of the goings on, we watch the man continue tinkering and adjusting, transforming the rest of the metal frame into the rest of a human body. The song continues while the weird white stuff forming the lips starts spreading out and filling in the skull and then the body, all mannequin-like. Then, as a pretty fire burns in a nearby fireplace, the mannequin gets a nice campfire singe and turns into a lovely shade of brown, presumably to match the skin tone of our featured songstress, Miss Nicki. How sweet.

  We get a full-body shot of Plastic Nicki, and I guess it’s not important for her to bother covering up her naughty bits because they aren’t actually real, but she’s a true fashionista so she hops off the table and runs to a convenient makeshift dressing room where she slips into something more comfortable, an ensemble that indicates what Jack the Ripper might have looked like if he had been a drag queen. Then Nicki scampers out of the dungeon without even bothering to thank the man who created her, because kids these days are really rude and unappreciative.

  Nicki wanders into some Ye Olde London cobbled street intersection, where we see some other mannequin people standing around and glaring at her. They still have the really-fake plastic look that Nicki doesn’t have after she changed outfits, so they’re probably mad that she’s prettier and they didn’t get to spend more time in the Easy-Bake oven.

  Nicki doesn’t care, because this is her song and all, so she struts down the street and bellows the vocals, trying to be all sultry in a Victorian Mad Hatter way. She passes by lots and lots of the Plastic People, so it appears that Dungeon Doctor has been really busy with his experiments. (People had a lot more time on their hands before satellite TV was invented.)

  Then we get some from-behind shots of somebody walking along and dragging an axe behind them. This is probably not a good sign, unless you happen to have some trees that need chopping. Some of the other Plastics grab a few torches and suddenly Nicki has a posse following her that is not the kind she would have ordered from the Pop Star Accessories catalog.

  Nicki doesn’t have time to care about that just yet, because we’re at the chorus again and she needs to focus on her craft right at the moment. She belts out the exciting part of the song while trotting down another cobblestone street, a street where people who don’t want to be hacked to death probably shouldn’t go. She’s a brave girl, that Nicki.

  Cut to the pissed-off Plastic People as they angrily bang on a wooden door, demanding entrance. Inside, we see the Creator Man working on another of his inventions while surrounded by even more mannequins. (These giant dolls are actually very pretty, so Nicki isn’t the only one who got the full spa treatment.)

  Suddenly, things become even more confusing as the dolls seem to turn on the doll-maker and either threaten him or yearn to have sex with him, not clear. One of them fiddles with something on the Maker’s back, and then peels off his skin to reveal that the good doctor is a Metal Man as well. He grins as he surveys the bevy of lusty automatons around him.

  Quick shot of Nicki still wandering the streets. Maybe she’s looking for the craft services table. Another quick shot of the horny people in the dungeon preparing for either an orgy or High Mass.

  Back to Nicki, who is now somewhere that happens to be a gathering place for lots of male dolls. (At least I think they’re male, based on their muscular chests. But their crotches, which the cameraman gleefully shows us, do not actually include genitalia. Do these dolls represent the advertisers who still won’t boycott Rush Limbaugh’s show?) I guess Nicki realizes she won’t get any satisfaction up in this grill, so she races outside and jumps on the back of a horse. A girl has her needs, right?

  Nicki rides the horse through town while once again hollering the chorus of the song, her lovely pink hair blowing in the wind. The last shot is of a trio of more Plastic People (the unbaked kind) racing around a corner in slow-motion as they chase-

  And the video ends.

  What the hell?


Click Here to Watch the Video on YouTube.

The Fray - “Heartbeat”

  We start out with a few folks standing on what looks like a really cold beach, with the icy waves rolling in and the sun nowhere in sight. That doesn’t seem like a really happy beginning to a video, so luckily we switch to the band traveling along in a car. Everyone seems to be drunk, laughing and carrying on, so I’m definitely voting for Opening B, because you can basically deal with anything when there are adult beverages.

  The car pulls up into a parking area, with everyone piling out and lugging musical equipment down to the beach we thought we had escaped just a few seconds ago. Cut to a couple of women riding in the back of a truck. They’re trying to look pretty and everything, artfully draped in Native American blankets, but you can tell they are not impressed with the cold wind blowing their hair around. I’m guessing they really didn’t know what they were getting into when they answered the casting call.

  Back to the beach, where people are still lugging equipment and walking really far, so I’m guessing they messed up and didn’t pick the closest parking lot. A few of the fools decide it would be way fun to run splash in the cold water a little bit, even though you can practically see icebergs floating around. (That one guy looks like he instantly became sterile the very second the frigid water hit him.)

  More people show up at the beach, including the Poncho Twins, and everybody goes racing to wherever the band is heading. People are dragging coolers and sleeping bags, so this might be an Occupy movement of some kind, although the political injustices they are fighting are not really clear. (Every citizen should have their own beach? Rich people have too much sand in their cracks?)

  Suddenly, it’s night time, with the band performing on the beach near a really aggressive bonfire. Everyone looks very happy, so they probably did jello shots at some point. As the loving crowd sits around the band in a nature-loving circle, the camera focuses in on lead singer Isaac as he sings the lyrics and makes strained faces as he tries to get the words out. (Or maybe he’s just standing too close to that fire.) We also get some shots of the rest of the band, but they don’t look as strained and are not quite as interesting.)

  At 1:10 in the video, on the left, we are presented with the perfect example of a drunken frat boy thinking that the song and the band and the beach are all about him, doing a wobbly fist pump and nearly falling into the fire. A few of the people around him look more than happy to give him an extra push, should he need it.

  Now we’re in a slow part of the song, so we have a montage of the band members softly playing their instruments, the beautiful but deadly bonfire burning, and various people sitting around making life-long bonds that hopefully will be remembered in the morning. The editor also inserts some footage of people who seem to be in another place entirely, and it’s not clear if this was done just to help set the mood or if the drinking continued when they got back to the editing room.

  Isaac starts getting serious with the singing again, and we have another montage of people on the beach riding piggy-back, because what’s more fun than carrying someone on your back as you stagger through shifting sands, and shots of a girl with a now-questionable reputation being helped out from underneath a pier. Then it’s time for the chorus again, and all thoughts of sluts in dark places are forgotten as people run back to the circle and join hands.

  And that’s pretty much it, as the band continues to play, Isaac continues to emote rather strongly, and the sandy beach folk sing along, make out, avoid the death fire, and drink. There’s also some folks who attempt to dance, but attempt is the operative word here, as it looks more like they might be having mutual reactions to the broccoli casserole they had for lunch.

  Oh great, some fool has whipped out a box of sparklers, which is a completely safe thing to do, hand burning metal wands to drunk people and let them wave them through the air. Everyone has a great time with this bit, naturally, laughing and frolicking, because alcohol desensitizes you to the fact that your hair and clothing might be going up in flames. Oh well, we’ll just assume that somebody up in that mess has insurance.

  The madness continues with some of the party revelers taking off some of their clothes (not all of their clothes, of course, because it’s really cold and some of the guys want to avoid evidence of shrinkage issues) and racing into the icy water like there’s a prize at the bottom of the cereal box. This goes on for a bit, with half-frozen beautiful people getting each other all wet and showing off the fact that they clearly don’t have a single ounce of body fat.

  We finally wind it down, with the band finishing up the song, Isaac and his microphone posing dramatically near the fire that no one seems to be monitoring, and shiny, happy, wet people sitting around in a post-coital glow. As the camera pulls back, we see that one couple is standing far away from the death fire, wearing warm and comfortable clothing, and not drinking anything. These are the people you need to ride home with. Once you find your underwear…

Click Here to View this Video on YouTube.

Pitbull, Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer - “Give Me Everything”

  Note: Absolutely no storyline with this one (except some subtle mess about how you need really expensive electronic equipment if you want to successfully stalk someone) so we’ll have to do the time-stamp thing. And here we go…

0:01  Pitbull and companion are sitting on a couch that they probably stole from a Lady Gaga video.

0:05  Close-up of Pitbull so we can study his latest choice of designer shades.

0:07  Shot of Ne-Yo and companion in an elevator larger than most NYC apartments.

0:10  A supermodel joins Ne-Yo and friend, showing off her legs that are apparently longer than Ne-Yo is tall.

0:13  Pitbull does his impersonation of a revivalist preacher.

0:17  Shot of some nice urban lofts that nobody watching this video can afford.

0:20  Ne-Yo’s friend seems to have gotten her blinged-out hand caught in her hair. Ne-Yo keeps singing because they’re on a tight schedule.

0:27  Pitbull does some product placement for Voli vodka. His companion does some product placement for not really doing anything important in a music video.

0:32  Nayer comes strutting along in an outfit that clearly shows she’s a cheerleader for an intergalactic sports team.

0:35  Pitbull makes his trademark sneer that he is the hottest thing on this and several other planets.

0:40  Some woman with perfectly-applied lipstick is watching things play out on a network of security cameras. She probably has trust issues, but we’ll worry about that later.

0:46  Pitbull and Nayer start doing a dance that prominently displays her rocket-ship breasts and his interesting choice of choreography.

0:50  Ne-Yo’s friend still has her hand tangled. But she’s smiling, so she might have a slight bondage fetish.

0:53  Security Girl is watching a monitor where Pitbull looks amazingly like Max Headroom from back in the day.

0:57  Some happy, anonymous people appear to be heading up some fancy stairs toward a bordello on an upper floor.

1:00  Pitbull auditions for one of the “Men In Black” sequels.

1:10  Very brief appearance by Rae Dawn Chong.

1:17  Shot of party reveler being eaten alive by her own hair while her drunken friends just stand there and watch.

1:27  Pitbull and… one of the 4,000 women in this video… standing on a staircase and either discussing world politics or about to have sex.

1:33  Security Girl is unhappy about the politics of dancing on the stairs.

1:39  Ne-Yo on yet another staircase, singing. No sign of his little friends from the ginormous elevator. Maybe they went off to make their own video.

1:47  Security Girl fiddling with more of her cryptic devices. Starting to not care for her. She needs to get up and do a line dance or something.

1:54  Nayer, her tightly-bound twins, and some more bottles of the Voli vodka that apparently paid for this video shoot.

2:01  Pitbull appears to be playing “rock, paper, scissors” with himself.

2:08  Afrojack finally makes his first appearance, so he must have been late that day.

2:13  Pitbull and Ne-Yo appear to be the only males on a dance floor packed with women. Are they at a really progressive convent?

2:17 Female Extra #2,652 and her jacked-up hair does some product placement with a Kodak camera.

2:23  Confused dancer thinks she’s in Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” video.

2:27  Another dancer gets her arm caught between her legs.

2:35  Afrojack helpfully points the way to the bathrooms.

2:45  A UFO lands in the background. People keep dancing.

3:03  Pitbull is back to doing that revivalist preacher thing.

3:15  Security Girl is still watching. Completely over her. Even her lipstick looks bored.

3:19  Both Ne-Yo and Pitbull are stunned by the acting ability of Nayer’s bongos.

3:24  Nayer in a Pit-Yo sandwich. Hold the mayo.

3:29  Security Girl (I think, hard to tell when she’s not fondling a video camera) marches up to Pitbull and tries to strangle him with his expensive tie.

3:35  When Pitbull survives, she decides to just dance around and have sex with him instead.

3:47  Where are Ne-Yo’s hands and why is he smiling like that?

3:52  Requisite shot with everybody waving their hands in the air. The UFO is still in the background, people still don’t care.

3:59  Creepy shot of Victorian stairwell that makes me think of Mia Farrow giving birth to the spawn of Satan. This is probably not what the producers intended.

4:04  Several jump shots of Pitbull taking off his glasses and looking very stern. Are we about to get in trouble for not taking out the trash? (Oh wait, the trash is still dancing behind him, so that can’t be it.)

4:12  The music has gotten very mellow and suddenly Pitbull is standing outside, possibly on a roof of some kind, watching the sun either rise or set. (I’m sure the sun will do whatever he pays it to do.)

4:21  We’re in a long shot, and the camera pulls back to let us see a giant billboard featuring Pitbull in a Kodak advertisement. Pitbull might be guilty of a lot of things, but subtlety isn’t one of them. Fade to black.


Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.