Yes this week saw the debuts of two videos by - and it pains us to say this - two of the most popular male acts of our time. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and Justin Bieber. Both are horrifying - the first, for its overblown ego-centric budget-busting monstrousness, and the second, for, well, LITERALLY EVERYTHING ABOUT IT.
First up we have good ol' Bill. We know we weren't the only ones who threw a handful of glitter-confetti when The Black Eyed Peas announced their hiatus from music, but it turns out that all that means is we have to deal with even more of Will.i.am on his own. Which in its own way is even more terrifying, since we don't have the buffer of cutaways to that one dude in the group with long hair who doesn't actually do anything to protect us.
So Will has gone off and done another solo track to fill his time, but AS IS THE WAY NOWADAYS, it's not actually solo at all, and features J.Lo (The Cell!) and Mick Jagger because of course it does. The song itself is actually not terrible - it features some "sick beatz" etc. - but we just can't get over the video in which Will.i.am does "crazy things" and appliances rain from the sky and then nonsense happens in bombastic and heavy-handed fashion. It's not that the video is bad, really, it's just that -like most of the Black Eyed Peas output - it's kind of a buffet of "lowest common denominator." It's as if some focus group wrote a stream-of-consciousness list of all the expensive and flashy ways to make Middle America think a pop star was "balling" or whatever the kids say these days, and then Will.i.am read it and was like "oooh this is good - let's do all these things but also make them suck."
So there's that and it's out there and we all just have to deal with it.
Which brings us to Bieber - pop's premiere mouse-lesbian. Now, just to make things clear, we don't hate the Beeb. He's a talented kid who just had everything go exactly right for him, and there's no reason to begrudge him that. But as much as we approve of his modern day rags-to-riches story, we cannot sign off on his new, literally frightening, Mad Max Christmas nightmare of a video.
We'd go into the specifics of why, exactly, it is the video antichrist, but to do so would require reliving each chilling moment of the tinsel-tainted shitstorm that is "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." And that, dear readers, is something we just cannot bring ourselves to do.
Pray.
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