The MTV awards have always been kind of a crapshoot (or crapfest, depending on how nice you want to be.) In twenty-five years of its existence, the network has yet to figure out whether or not to be celebrating the best videos, the flashiest videos, the most entertaining singers, or just the videos for the songs that the tweens are most likely to be enjoying at that specific moment, regardless of how boring the clips themselves might be.Maybe that’s why they’ve decided to make pretty much every category a Viewer’s Choice this year. You can go to mtv.com now to vote for Best Female Video and Best Male Video. Former AS220 resident Marissa Nadler’s up for the former, along with 123 other people (literally.) She’s not getting lots of votes, I don’t think, since she’s currently listed in the ninth row of the third page of nominees, and I can’t imagine that anybody but me is bored enough to read that far down the list. She is beating Lykke Li and Karina Pasian, though, which is something. I really likethe video for “Bird On Your Grave”, actually, and the song’s grown on me since I first heard it last fall.

In the Best Male Video category, the top 40 nominees are all hip-hop videos from boys that twelve-year old girls like (Chris Brown has three of the top eight videos, currently) but Rhode Island native Elvis Perkins is currently the 177th most viewed nominee, ahead of the far more endearing Thurston Moore and Jens Lekman.

For some ungodly reason I woke up at four this morning, which means that I had hours and hours to dwell on the fact that one of the biggest festivals in the city this year is trying to pass off Tiffany as an exciting musical option. And, being the way I am, I started thinking about other gay-ish bands that I’d actually like to see performing downtown today. Like, for instance, bands who may have actually been culturally relevant in this no-longer-new millennium. Here’s eleven suggestions for a homo music festival that people might actually enjoy. To the Youtube-mobile!

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The anthropologists of 5,000 years from now are going to have a hell of a time piecing it all together:

Q: What is Rick Roll, Rick Rolling, Rick Rolled?

A: An internet prank or joke. Rick Roll, Rick Roll’d or Rick Rolling is an internet spam trick in which people post a link to a Rick Astley video on Youtube, but say the viewers of the video are being led to another video, usually proof of unconfirmed gaming news or trailers. (courtesy of Yahoo! Answers)

Rick Rollings tend to dump you hereabouts — one of the several “Never Gonna Give You Up” videos with far more viewings than they deserve:

Is anyone else offended that Hillary thinks this can win over the young people demographic? Here’s my advice, H-bomb: if famous people aren’t making videos in your honor that bring people to tears and spur them to vote for you, you should probably keep relying on your experience instead of trying to fake being cool.

L.O.A.D.E.D. (it stands for nothing) is back and tonight I’ll speak for myself (and K-Leav) by saying I’m going to play a shitload of Primal Scream. Who the hell were Primal Scream? Yikes! I’ll give you a brief video primer on their classic Screamadelica album after the jump. Meanwhile, as always we’ll be at Local 121 tonight for our Tuesday night romp thru all the britpop, indie rock and glam classics you can handle. We like to party.
Local 121, 10pm, free!

Screamadelica, the video primer: (more…)

Get to know Joe Strummer.

If all you know about Joe Strummer is that he was the lead singer for the The Clash then go pick up Rock Art and the X-Ray Style, Global A Go-Go, or Streetcore the albums he recorded with his get-up The Mescaleros. In my admittedly all-over-map opinion these albums include some of the best songs of Joe’s all too short life. Some of my favorites are Mega Bottle Ride from Global A  Go-Go, Yalla Yalla from X-Ray Style, and Ramshackle Day Parade on Streetcore.

Just think, the Coen bros. could have taken Lebowski in a whole different direction.