 VH1 All Access: Awesomely Bad Videos (VH1) Ha, ha. Bad videos are SO funny! Except that the show does not show especially bad videos, rather, they present videos that were or are popular, but aren't that cool. The videos they pick are at least memorable ones … the truly bad ones have long receded into obscurity (also known as VH1 Classic). For example: Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance." What's bad about that, exactly? It's super-nerdy, sure. It's got a lot of unusual elements, sure. But simply showing that video and gushing self-righteously about how it looks like a Renaissance Faire or has a midget dancing around in it doesn't make it bad, nor you funny for pointing these things out. Or Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield." Misguided? OK. Bad dancing? Sure. But everyone remembers that video, and usually has some level of delight in seeing it again. Doesn't that simply make it good? Isn't that what "good" is, that people enjoy the thing? Or Mariah Carey's "Heartbreaker." That video is pretty fun to watch. Hiring a fourth-tier comedian to mock the dancing, or the revealing clothes, doesn't amount to cultural criticism. The low point comes when they bring out the "Macarena" video. Why is everyone still so threatened by the Macarena? It's like feeling threatened by the Chicken Dance. Should these things actually cause you so much dread that you must do your best to assassinate them? You won't be able to, anyway. Just go with the flow, man. You might have some fun. And anyway, it's not even that bad of a video. It's this spirit of "Isn't that SO BAD? It's SO HILARIOUSLY BAD!" that causes ABV to fail. Instead of taking easy potshots at artists people reflexively loathe, they ought to have chosen some genuinely bad videos, to demonstrate the peaks of awfulness this format has been capable of. But there's no built-in "hilarity" factor to a video no one's ever seen by an artist few people know about. More convenient, apparently, to pick on Jewel, or Liz Phair, or Shaquille O'Neal, so that the fun can start right away and no one will have to challenge themselves to endure something actually, mind-blowingly bad. This paint-by-numbers nostalgia humor is already well beyond passé. Can we start simply liking things again? Review by La Fée © 2004 |
