Don't Stop Moving

I am utterly captivated by 3Oh!3. They are what happens when 2 men, one looking like a young Dave Grohl and the other a bank clerk, get together and sing completely peurile, disgusting, stupid songs about fancying chicks and getting laid. They have inherited The Bloodhound Gang‘s crusty, questionable crown and I think I love them for it.

Of course, if the songs weren’t any good at all it would be difficult to support my jolly approval of these gross douchebags, but luckily every single so far has been an irressitable rocked-up electropop NOISEBEAST, and 2 of those songs have benefitted from some saucy female interventions, these coming from, fittingly, two of the most Marmite ladies in current pop, Katy Perry and Ke$ha. For the record, I love them both, the screechy, mouthy, par-clad lovelies. What’s more, 3Oh!3 (I like to imagine myself shouting the “Oh!” in surprise but in reality I just…say it) know their way around a lyric or two, be it Starstrukk with its helium-Song 2 wolf whistles, or My First Kiss with the line “Your kiss is like whiskey, it gets me drunk / And I wake up in the morning with the taste of your tongue” – where I admit that I have never wanted more in my life for “tongue” to be replaced with “spunk”.

Anyway the first song I heard by 3Ohhhhhh!3 was this one, Don’t Trust Me. This features my very favourite lyric of them all: “Shush girl, shut your lips, do the Helen Keller, and talk with your hips”, and is set to a completely unrelated video. The “story” is apparently that Dave and the Banker are the last 2 men left alive in the WORLD, which necessitates them dressing in their pants and throwing fruit at each other, doing some wrestling in lycra, being savages, and all sorts, all with lay-deez in plentiful attendance and all as dees-gus-teeng-ly and dumbly as superhumanly possible. I don’t know what else to say to convince you: 3Oh!Oh!Oh!3 are amazing:

August Bank Holiday means Car-ni-val time hooray! I’m not actually going this year (I anticipate vuvuzelas, and fear a Tuesday hangover), but here’s a bit of jolly filth to get us all in the mood.

Nookie by Jamesy P is a beautifully summery song and it’s impossible not to want to bop around happily to it whilst doing the ironing, reading the sport section, cleaning the bog etc. And the songster’s name – Jamesy! P! – suggests a playful and cheeky little scamp, which happily turns out to be the case. But the song I’m talking about is not about having a lovely little dance, or how excellent summer is, or about going to the seaside, or any innocent pursuit at all. It is about nookie – which, given the song’s title, should come as no real surprise. Nookie, by which we mean sex, is being vigourously pursued by Jamesy P. “I am searching for one thing”, he says, jollily, “And I don’t care what it costs me”. A chilling message delivered with the utmost mirth. But just in case you’re not really sure what it is JP is after, listen to the wickedly catchy refrain with the subliminal hints from the backing singers. Although if someone were to chat me up by referring to my “pussy wussy” I may vomit all over them.

Which actually leads us quite nicely to the video for this awesome tune: Jamesy P fetches up on Nookie Island, where no men are allowed – uh oh! – EXCEPT FOR Jamesy P – hooray! All the inhabitants of Nookie Island are predictably lovely and all decked out in tiny tiny bikini items. JP is immensely happy, although hypocritically and confusingly dressed throughtout in at the very LEAST a vest but mostly a complete suit, obviously not one to observe the cultures of his chosen holiday destination. The thing about it is though, the ladies of Nookie Island, though lovely and naked and prepared to rub themselves over one another and JP, all look singularly bored and disinterested. Almost as if a large grinning man telling them repeatedly he’s looking for nookie tonight, as in pussy wussy, was in some way a turn-off. But don’t worry: he doesn’t say he wants them to enjoy it does he – so as usual in pop, everything works out for the best. I guarantee you will not get this song out of your head, so if you have a hot date lined up and you are hoping to get lucky, get listening:

I know it’s only Thursday but who needs the weekend for an excuse to party, right? And who among us DOES NOT like to party? Andrew WK, for one, loves a bit of it. As do the Beastie Boys from the 80s (you might have a bit more trouble edging them towards the naughty lemonade and boombox nowadays, admittedly, but oy, my back, these shoes).

The Beastie Boys “of yore” straddled the exciting line between total filthy debauchery and cartoon devilry that allowed them to get completely off their tits and go onstage with caged go-go dancers and massive spunking willy edifices (edifi?) before telling Smash Hits all about it, en route to the Top 10 (although actually, this song only brushed up against the Top 10, peaking at 11, which all sounds a bit saucy if you think about it). All I really remember about the Beastie Boys in 1987 was that they encouraged Britain’s scampish youth to steal bits off cars. Or rather, the “red tops” got in a froth thinking about this activity. Meeja eh.

And on top of all this, or even in spite of it, (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) not only parenthesises to the fucking max, it also like totally rocks. It’s impossible to resist the party call to arms of “Maw-MAWWWWWW – KICK IT!!“, and even those of us who are now old enough to have teen tearaways ourselves can still cling on to memories of wild parties, square parents and terrorising dweebs, even if those memories come primarily from watching this video, in which Ad Rock looks not a little like Ad Buxton, and all the mean kids look like they’ve been drafted in from Hoxton, yesterday. KICK IT:

Time for something a little less sophisticated than old Donna Summers. It’s odd to think that Daphne and Celeste happened, looking back on it. There doesn’t really seem to be a gap in the market for potty-mouthed teen midgets nowadays, so what made 1999/2000 “so” different? Maybe Smash Hits and CD:uk still being in existence had something to do with it? Or maybe today’s charts, under the iron fist of dark pop overlord Simon Cowell, leaves no room for [sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip]..?

What-EVER, Daphne and Celeste were a perfect storm of bizarre little creatures bouncing around, shouting chipmunk-pitch insults at one another and us. Their two most wicked of songs are Ooh! Stick You and U.G.L.Y., both so astonishingly packed with amazing bons mots it’s impossible to know how they weren’t slapped with a lawsuit from Oscar Wilde’s estate. D&C didn’t take off their clothes, and they didn’t swear, they simply rolled out brilliantly strange and vicious cusses, including:

* Your fat mum Milly looks like Free Willy
* Everybody knows you pick the nails from your toes & you rub ‘em in dirt and eat them for dessert – or, alternatively -
* Everybody knows you put fleas in cheese, mix them with glue and use it like shampoo
* You’re scary you’re hairy I heard about you, you’re the main attraction at the city zoo
* You can’t disguise your googly eyes, in the Miss Ugly pageant you win first prize

And you can’t argue with a single one of them, can you. Not you personally, I’m not having a go at your googly eyes. I mean, generally. Sorry everyone, sorry. It’s really really hard to pick between these two tunes but I reckon Ooh! Stick You just edges solely based on the ping pong question (see 2:54 onwards):

Hooray, it’s Friday! And only 3 weeks to go until Don’t Stop Moving, so to get you in the mood for the weekend and to remind you what DSM is all about, how about some got-to-dance disco? I’ve always just thought of Donna Summer as the only lady my Dad ever admitted to us that he fancied, and I remember looking at his copy of A Love Trilogy and wondering what he saw in her, and also how could there be an album where side A was only one song.

Then I heard I Feel Love. I mean, properly heard it, not just as some aside on a disco retrospective TV programme, or on a “Most Controversial Songs Ever OMG!” talking heads snoozefest. It’s an amazingly sexy song, in the purest, least lechworthy sense of the word – the driving beat, draped in Donna’s silvery, ethereal vocals, which don’t really say anything at all (although I might just point out at one point it does seem she starts singing “Agadoo” but that is LITERALLY THE ONLY FUNNY THING there is to say about this song), they’re just there, all gorgeous and sensual and lovely, picking up layers and layers of harmony as the song pushes on, at over 8 minutes still not too long. Here’s the full length version with the brilliantly rude pulsating middle bit.

There’s not a video to this song as such, but here’s the next best thing – Donna in a spangly frock, alternating between a dance as fluid as the song, eyes half-closed all saucy, and some sort of robo-mime effect. It’s still brilliant. There’s really not much more I can say about it. Happy weekend everyone!

Aerosmith. Aerosmith, Aerosmith, Aerosmith. Smith of the Air. Aerosmith (I will stop saying it now) have been around absolutely aeons, eh, but it was only in the mid-90s that they came into their own for my generation, owing no small debt to the “rise” of music telly. Who amongst us (well those of us over the age of maybe 27) can forget those many happy hours of frustration and anticipation waiting for Alicia and Liv to roll around again on The Box? Who would have dared to question the ultimate perviness of Steven Tyler enlisting the help of his gorgeous teenaged daughter to act out the role of a deliquent Catholic schoolgirl who, with Alicia Silverstone, bunks off school in a convertible, takes part in a stripping competition, and goes “skinny dipping” with a bumpkin hunk? I’m saying nothing. Except that, astonishingly, that is not the video about which I am wittering today, because there’s pimping out your offspring and then there’s Love In An Elevator.

There’s nothing subtle about Love In An Elevator. It is built around a metaphor which describes having it off: “Going down” you see – that’s the basis of the whole thing. It’s rude, sure, but it’s not very sexy, so it’s fitting that the video is heavy on the Carry On tropes and light on actual phwoar (oh Liv, oh Alicia). It’s something that comes up a lot in pop videos dealing with sauce, in fact – all nods, winks and chuckles, a cheeky seaside postcard vision of sex, because what’s the alternative? The alternative is actual pornographic renderings of a song’s content. Hurgh. So instead of 5:45 of Steven Tyler receiving oral sex, the director has “storyboarded” a strange mixture of live footage (Steven wearing a red lace concoction Samantha Fox would envy, plus a frankly unflattering codpiece) enmeshed with images of various wacky characters getting in and out of a lift, sometimes engaged in rudery, possibly – possibly – in a department store? Although what the toss a butcher, various midgets/fat people, and a fully grown man in a Scout uniform are shopping for is anyone’s guess.

For all this, Love In An Elevator is a completely irresistable song, the massive guitars and harmonies and Steve’s throaty screech doing more to remove ladies’ undergarments than any amount of televised suckjobbing could hope to do. And let’s not forget about Joe Perry’s enormo-riff right there in the middle of the song. In short: Love In An Elevator is fucking brilliant. See:

There’s really only 2 ways a song called What About Us? can go. You can hear lyrics like “What about all of the things that you said, what about all of the promises that you made” and imagine a full blown Mariah divafest. Or you can get pop genius Darkchild to write the song for you. All hail Darkchild, responsible for this, this, and this, and for making What About Us? an irresistable grind, a jerking growl of a track. And then there’s Brandy – MOESHA for chrissakes! – abandoning the maxim “why settle for one note when 10 can do the job just as well” and totally storming her bitter, vengeful way through the song, the simple stuttering saying more than a 4 octave range ever could. When you first hear this song, you sort of wonder how it would be possible to dance to it, and then wonder how it would be possible to stop.

Anyway it’s not rude cos it’s about boobs or willies, it’s rudegirl, Brandy telling her stupid cheating ex to eff the eff off in no uncertain terms whilst rubbing his nose in all that he’s given up. The video is suitably weird and badass: Brandy floating around on a barely-there landscape, mistress of bizarre torture-pyramids of dusty chained up men; Brandy smashing the hell out of symbols of her cheating man with a baseball bat; Brandy…er…on a planet made up entirely of…bouncing Crayloa-coloured cars..? Well in any case, she looks pretty happy by the end, and that’s the main thing, right?

Well I’ve been enjoying these glimpses into boyband past so much that I thought it was about time I crossed the Atlantic to bring you an example of Britain’s finest. That is correct: Another Level. I was never lucky enough to see the video for Bomb Diggy at the “time of release” and in fact I didn’t particularly like them at the time (my heart belonged to Abs from Five) so I am now watching the video with fresh eyes.

The first thing that strikes one is how unnecessary it all is. The song is quite standard, albeit filthy (“I cant hold back the soul with one in the hole” – what can it all mean?) – man sees woman, man wants to boff woman, man makes up gibberish chorus referencing chocolate pudding. The only reasonable direction to take the video in, then, is an apocalyptic vision of the future in which music is BANNED and dancing is punishable BY DEATH, and some peasants sneak some vinyl into a massive building, where a featherheaded DJ spins a disc, thus invoking Another Level, who walk very very slowly up some stairs like old men, whilst dressed in a baffling assortment of leather and denim with a nod to cowboy chic, before doing a shit dance (it’s kind of interpretative though – check out the move that accompanies “wanna get a little bit of your goody goody”, by which they mean vagina). At the end of the video, the dance police storm the building but they are already TOO LATE because Another Level have danced and departed.

The thing is, you might think I’m mocking Dane Bowers and his friends for making this song and allowing this video to happen but I am really really not – it’s a brilliant song, immediately catchy and all the better for being particularly weird. It’s also a great example of British pop in the late 90s which was so similar to the US version but distinctively different. What makes it different I find hard to say; maybe it’s just not as sugary? Not as white-toothedly wholesome? I can’t imagine *NSync or Backstreet Boys singing this, for example, tinged with sexuality though most every boyband song is (and needs to be). In any case, let’s hear three sexy cheers for Another Level. This does not, it goes without saying, mean I would like any one of their number to piggy back ride me all night long, and in this their song has failed.

Another Level – Bomb Diggy

Okay okay okay so after the faux-filth of *NSync yesterday, it’s time for some PROPER POP SMUT. Before Justin Trousersnake and his incredible sound-making mouthbox there was Jordan Knight from New Kids on The Block. For all NKOTB’s cartoon grinning, shoulder pads (it was just the fashion, alright?) and simpersome balladeering, they were nonetheless “five bad brothers from the Beantown Land” (Boston, non-NKOTB-fan plebs), ex graffiti “artistes”, a bit thick maybe, but most certainly Doing It left right and centre with all number of poodle permed Blockheads. So it should come as no suprise that when Jordan decided to go solo, he spewed forth this hit that was so amazingly close to the knuckle that it was, in fact, the knuckle. Sample lyric: “Anyone can make you sweat, but I can keep you wet”. I mean, that’s just about fucking isn’t it. Just about fucking.

Despite ALL of this, unbelievably, the video for Give It To You is actually a pretty staid affair. It’s set in a fairground – there are KIDS present, for Christs sakes! – and Uncle Jordan is dressed in smart Chinos, a lovely jacket and a sensible pulley. Sure, the hips are thrust camerawards with happy regularity (the one at 2:56 is an absolute gem) but that’s pretty much par for the course boyband fare nowadays, and besides, who can think anything rude’s going on when he’s looking at the camera so cute and soppy? “I can’t wait to give you some – I’m convinced you need it”, grin grin grin. And tho Jordan is a really great dancer, who can watch his Munchin/cossack stomp at 1:10 with anything approaching a groin twitch? Can’t be done.

But for all the strangeness of the video, it’s still an absolutely stupendo song, and should have catapulted JK into JTesque spheres of Cool Ex Boybander fame and adoration. Instead, this was pretty much as far as the solo career went, as I can testify after seeing him “perform” “live” at a tiny New Jersey club in the early 2000s, all pudged up and quite possibly off his tits on something a bit stronger than candyfloss IF you know what I’m saying (drugs, I mean). Oh Jordan. I would have let you give it to me. Enjoy:

It’s one solid month until the next Don’t Stop Moving, you guys! Do make sure and register your interest on the Facebook event page if you fancy coming along. There’s a theme this time, Dirrty Pop, to celebrate the sleazier, saucier, swearier side of chart success. So for the next month (or as I find the will and the time) I shall be entertaining you with my most favourite dirrty pop vids.

First up, how could it be anything other than the song which lends its lyric to the theme, Pop by *NSync? Not that this is a particularly “dirty” song, in point of fact. It’s actually quite clean, really. The filthiest thing about the video is arguably the fraudulent use of a dancer rather than Joey Fatone in the wide-shot routines (it was because he was injured, honest!), although the vid does have its fair share of “honeys” touching up the band etc. There is also a hefty amount of impressive “FX” and marks this as very much a late-90s early-00s product, when chucking in some Matrix style trickery was all the rage and camera frenzy was laudable and not yet known to induce epilepsy*.

What’s notable also about the song and video is its showcasing of Justin Timberlake’s talents, e.g. for being fit, impersonating Max Headroom, and then “executing” some crap beatboxing at the end (NB – there is a helpful cutoff point just before the ‘boxing begins in earnest to avoid mass dancefloor quittage when DJing). JT loves a bit of beatboxing, which must be the single most embarrassing amateur pasttime for a white boyband member, but amazingly he’s managed to survive the whole thing unscathed, which just goes to show how much people fancy him. Take it away, camera frenzy:

*Not a medical fact, GP fans.

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