No kidding.  Obviously, the Frank Sinatra version is best:

Happy New Year, guys.

Man, when I talk about “mainstream American pop culture and hip-hop [circling] towards each other, until they’re dancing to some of the same steps.  Both of their moves have something to do with racial attitudes, whether it’s white Americans assimilating hip-hop style, slang, and norms, or hip-hop recognizing that rebranding and restyling could be a shrewd marketing move,” Jay Sean’s* video for “Do You Remember” is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about:





The visual signaling seems kind of obvious to me: the hanging out on the stoop, the tricked-out trikes, the muscle car, the aggressive sunglasses, the block party.  But it’s much more gracefully and naturally done than, say, the video for Christina Aguilera’s “Can’t Hold Us Down,” which I thought was a fairly clumsy attempt to recreate a street scene: kids jumping on mattresses and playing in hydrants!  Sassy and beleaguered women of color!  Men of color who are uniformly sexist and creepy!  Christina signaling her downness by wearing lots and lots of nameplate! (Although there’s something poignant in Lil Kim’s verse about men stealing her ideas.):





My go-too song and music video for this argument is usually Keri Hilson’s “Knock You Down,” though one thing I think is fascinating about that video is the way it sets Kanye up as a hipster artist, and Ne-Yo as a business-like rival for Keri’s attentions.  The critical showdown takes place in an art gallery, for goodness sake!  If that’s not hip-hop bourgieing itself up, I don’t know what it is (even though I adore the song and video):





But visually “Do You Remember’s” much more “urban” and it also has a dancehall verse by Sean Paul, and distracting (both sonically and visually) but probably marketable post-Usher-doing-”Yeah!” hypemanning by Lil Jon.  But the core of the song itself is pure candy: smooth sung vocals, super-sweet sentiments that seem almost at odds with how ripped Jay looks–lovermen tend to play the muscles down a bit.  Jay’s been described as a one-man boyband, and I think that’s essentially correct.  In other words, he combines a style I think a lot of us are embarrassed to have ever liked (though I’d never go back on the summer I spent teaching small children to sing and forcing them to dance every time “I Want It That Way” came on the radio.  Now that was the life.)  with elements we’ve come to think we’ve got to like, namely hip-hop and urban style.  It’s irresistible.  Not good for that, maybe, but it’s hard to focus on that in the moment.


*Can you tell I’m a little obsessed?  I’m shocked my neighbors haven’t filed a noise complaint.  Either that, or they’re dancing to the sound of these neat little pop ditties filtering through our shared walls.

Among the entrants to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry is the music video for “Thriller,” the first music video to make it into the collection.  This seems like a good thing to me.  Music videos are on a real creative upswing thanks to YouTube stepping into MTV and VH1′s long-abandoned shoes.  And for most folks, I’d bet music videos are the most significant exposure they have to short film.  I’m a big fan of the genre myself (music videos are on my list of things to write much more about in the new year), and I’m glad to see them, slowly and belatedly, getting some of the recognition they deserve.  While music videos might seem disposable, or mere marketing vehicles, I think they’re more important than that.  We live in a world, after all, where folks have pressed play on Susan Boyle’s first appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” 83 million times: that’s the crudest sort of music video, but music attached to visuals all the same, and available for free.

I know that things I sometimes complain or express doubt about include people’s willingness to make fools of themselves on camera, and overreliance on technology.  I want to carve out an exception on an issue where I suspend all doubt: flashmobs that involve dancing.  The specific flashmob that inspired that exception was this one, done to Glee covers, in Rome, forwarded to me by my sister (who also got me old-school Archie comics for Christmas.  My sister rules.):

Given the high-quality footage FOX put up of the event, and the relatively high quality of the dancing, I’m pretty sure it was a promotional stunt.  I’m not sure I care.  The folks who are watching look incredibly happy and surprised, a quality I think is both undervalued and underexperienced in popular culture today.

Over at The Sexist, blogfriend Amanda Hess is totally ripping it up with her long posts on masculinity and femininity in the aughts.  And damn is she bringing back the memories with her entries on everything from pop tarts to metrosexuality, along with the killer pop culture and gender analysis.  Remember this guy?

Probably the only triumphant fashion moment of my life is when Carson Kressley pronounced the outfit I’d put together of a rainbow bikini top, denim miniskirt, and bright red sneakers “absolutely fabulous” (his exact words, I swear).  Hey, it was 2003.  I had an excuse.


Or how about this particular piece of pop-cultural hilariousness?





Which raises all sorts of fascinating questions.  Such as, what happened to Mya anyway?  Why hasn’t someone sat down with Lil Kim and helped her figure out how to harness her enormous talent better in the second half of of the decade?  And why doesn’t Missy Elliot get more of the credit she deserves for generally ruling this decade (“Gossip Folks” for sure ranks high on my list of favorite songs of the decade, especially ones with lean production, and on my list of best Ludacris guest verses.  I would so go to a school where he was the principal.) musically?  One of the pieces I most want to write is a profile of Pink, the only one of the four blondes (her, Christina, Britney, and Jessica Simpson) to survive the decade with both her sanity and her artistic integrity intact without a single visible break.


But all of this is just random musing.  Some of Amanda’s commenters (on the whole they’re much less nice than y’all) have been complaining that she’s using pop culture tropes rather than so-called “real” people.  I think that’s sort of silly.  Pop culture is neither all-inclusive nor determinative of how we live our lives, of course.  But it’s an astonishingly powerful mirror of our aspirations and our desires, however lowly or lofty.  And because we spend so much time and money on it, it’s a strong indicator of what diverts us or encourages us.  Of course it makes sense to look to pop culture as part of our conversations about gender, as well as for our conversations about just about everything else.