Video Of The Week: Walk Off The Earth

One thing Walk Off The Earth specializes in is covering popular songs, and in their latest video, directed by Tom MacLeod, they take on Snoop Lion's Lighters Up - with special guest Snoop Dogg himself:

The video may not have all the visual and instrumental trickery of some of WOTE's earlier work, but it shows us a glimpse of studio life, and in particular studio life when a lifelong pot smoker enters the fray and gets the entire atmosphere to chill out.

Video Of The Week: Snoop Dogg (Featuring Stevie Wonder & Pharrell Williams)

How do you waste the talents of music legend Stevie Wonder, wonderful actress Nia Long, and filmmaker Warren Fu (who has made videos for The Strokes, Daft Punk featuring Julian Casablancas, and The Killers) in under six minutes?

Like this:



It's like everything Pharrell Williams touches turns to shit, like a reverse Midas. And yet, I know I'd better get used to it, because every girl I'll want to have conversations with will LOVE the fucking thing.

Video Of The Week: Eddie Murphy

Like, seriously. The guy who brought us Boogie In Your Butt and Party All The Time in the 1980s - and happened to be the funniest man of the decade - and hasn't made a decent film in maybe 20 years came up with a reggae song that's almost as good as something Damian Marley could write.

Yes, I'm talking about that Eddie Murphy, who has teamed up with Snoop Lion - the reggae Snoop Dogg - to make the most danceable song of the last 9 months; so much so that I think he should have released it in May rather than last September: it would have been the hit of the summer.

Director John Mazyck kept it clean and simple: the band (and Snoop) and background vocalists, performing in a big jam space, cut with footage of a young girl walking down the street and coming across situations of inequality, bringing rival factions to a more peaceful resolution along her way. (I can think of a few places around the world that could use that kind of thing right now).

Red Light. Stop right... there where you are.



Also, seriously, I didn't think Eddie Murphy could come up with such concise, direct and ''real'' lyrics about the shit going on in the world these days. Either I should apologize for having let my opinion the man who brought us Delirious and Raw go so sour, of he should apologize for Haunted Mansion, Pluto Nash, Daddy Day Care, Tower Heist and give me back the $150 I spent on his bullshit since The Nutty Professor and let's say Bowfinger.

Not My Day

Your boss tells you on Friday : ''no need to show up in the morning on Monday, 1 PM will suffice. Sleep in.'' Sounds like a great thing, right?

But of course Murphy will take exception to this and fuck it right up, evil scheming invisible bastard that He is.

So I go to bed at 10 PM-ish, I think, which is early as fuck for me. My roommate/little brother Yan got home at 3:30 AM and woke me up – and I couldn’t fall back asleep. At least I got some reading done – Pearl Jam Twenty (the book – while I await the arrival of the Blu-ray in the mail, possibly Friday). I’m at the year 2000 – Binaural.

But the worst part was the subway ride to fucking work: squeezed up, like fucking mushrooms in a can, and getting pushed by all those sweaty animals as they take the longest possible fucking route to the train’s exit, by bumping into 20 people rather than 5. For that kind of fucking swine, the fastest way from Point A to Point B is by Texas via the fucking moon, with a pit stop for coffee.

Murder might have been the case they gave Snoop Dogg, but I was tempted to follow that path as well. As a matter of fact, I was abnormally over-aggressive on the mid-day hour, considering.

The evening’s looming and my energy level’s dropping, my vision is blurring, and I know I’ll have to share another ride with those fucking worker bees in just a hundred minutes or so. I recently saw a phrase online, possibly on Facebook, that read ''You are not stuck in traffic; you ARE traffic''. Well, I’m not. Not at all. The 9-to-5 crowd is not my crowd, unless you mean the people who start drinking at 9 PM and only stop at 5AM to shower and start their day. In which case, that literally is my crowd, the one that comes to my fucking shows, the ones I owe a lot to.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Video Of The Week: Snoop Dogg Featuring Wiz Khalifa

Yes, I am aware I had Snoop Doggy Dogg featured in this segment a mere two weeks ago, but this new song just won't leave my head. It's already out despite being on the soundtrack to a movie that will only be released this summer, called High School.

The song features Pittsburgh rapper Wiz Khalifa whose recent single Black And Yellow hit the #1 spot of the Billboard Hot 100; his upcoming record, Rolling Papers, will be his first for Atlantic Records after an independent first release and an unsuccessful stint at Warner Bros.

The song marks a rare feat: Snoop Dogg actually rapping, not just spelling his name out fifteen times. It also advocates marijuana use in the way the best old Cypress Hill songs used to; in the past decade or so, it seems the legalization issue has actually been brought back almost 20 years, which is nonsense. Let the debate begin. Again.

Video Of The Week: Snoop Doggy Dogg

''Study long, study wrong''. Famous first words.

Not the first words Snoop Doggy Dogg uttered in a rap song (those were on Dr. Dre's first solo epic The Chronic), not even the first words on Snoop's own first major hit - that was Who Am I (What's My Name?). Nope. Just the famous first words from Gin & Juice, the song that defined West Coast for all of the 90s - otherwise known as G-Funk.

A laid back young adult who went on to become Snoop Dogg after fighting with one record label, joining another then starting his own entertainment imprint that produces records, live events, films, TV shows and sponsors sports leagues for kids.

The man's a giver, what can I say? He is the gangsta with the heart of gold, and the man you want to either spice up your chorus or just spell his name out in the middle of your song and still bring it to #1. Plus, he has a prescription for medical marijuana, which means he gets to smoke the high-quality stuff anywhere in the world without anyone hassling him at customs in almost any country.

The man is a genius.

Video Of The Week: Katy Perry Feat. Snoop Dogg

Disclaimer: it's everywhere. It's the song of the summer, like it or not. And the video is absolutely beautiful, especially on 'mute'.

And Snoop Dogg's cameo is yet another where he does little else but spell his fucking name out (seriously, Snoop, we know you can spell your name, but we also know you can release amazing fucking records like Doggystyle and Tha Last Meal and can participate in great collabs like on The Chronic and The Chronic 2001, could you at least try to repeat once in a while, like, say, once a year? please?)

The song is pretty much the West Coast's answer to previous Video Of The Week Jay-Z's and Alicia Keys' Empire State Of Mind, where they replace the grittiness and neon lights with candy, pastels and sunshine, and they chose the right ambassadors for it, although the song itself is not up to par, in my opinion. Sure, at least it's pretty much free of autotune, which is pretty much a blessing in itself, but my ears are still bleeding from its pseudo-techno/90s dance sounds from when I last heard the song almost a week ago.

In any event, there's no escaping this fucking song, so no point in trying. YouTube it here; they don't allow me to embed it here.

Maybe I should have boycotted it for that reason alone. Meh, too late, I wrote the blurb. Here are not-so-subtle pictures of the video...