We're not quite sure why we like this...but we like it. The Young Hov Project is a series of music videos featuring Jay-Z songs and starring a 13 year old, Samgoma Edwards, as a young Jay-Z (directed by his 21 year old brother).

Basically, they're shot as if they were Jay-Z videos except with an actor playing a teenage Jiggaman. It's an interesting homage concept...you have to wonder: "so are they trying to get a video directing deal with Def  Jam or what" but as we said, they're still fun to watch.

There's several videos available through youtube.com, including "Lucifer," "PSA," and our favorite so far, "Dear Summer."
(Source: Hip-Hop Blogs)

--O.W.

The initial response by hip-hop artists to the Katrina disaster felt few and far between, some what surprising giving the music's political traditions in days past, but it seems that, for some, they were just lying in wait. The new video for Juvenile's "Get Ya Hustle On" has hit the internet and it definitely pulls no punches in assigning blame and taking a political stand.

The stark video shows Juvenile rapping in the midst of the devastated Ninth Ward (former home to many New Orleans rappers), where a group of black children are playing amidst the rubble. The kids eventually find masks and don them and they turn out to be masks of Dick Cheney, George Busha and Mayor Ray Nagin, clearly suggesting that the local and national leadership bears responsibility in the Katrina disaster. (To be honest though, the video has powerful images but Juve's actual song seems to suggest that Katrina is a justification for him and others to cook up crack cocaine. Doh!)

The NY Times also writes about the Juvenile video in a recent piece on how the return of music to New Orleans has brought with it an incisive new energy of anger and justice. (Sources: Youtube.com, NY Tiimes)

Deeyah, the so-called "Muslim Madonna" has had death threats issued at her after appearing in a video, stripping off a burka to reveal a bikini underneath. The song, "What Will It Be," is ostensibly an anthem in support of Muslim women's freedom of expression and besides the burka/bikini scene, there's another where Irshad Manji, a feminish Muslim writer, is seen tearing off duct tape that had been covering her mouth.

For the Norweigan-born Deeyah, she now has to travel with bodyguards for her tour in Britain after receiving death threats but this isn't the first time she's run into danger over her music and videos. When filming the video in India, she says that her and her crew were followed around, "the bumpy roads of Mumbai by a truck full of Muslim men who are angry at the [sight] of the sultry pop star being filmed."The video was also meant to point out the hypocrisy in how Muslim women are treated in societies where modesty is enforced, sometimes upon pain of death, but other injustices against women go unpunished. Deeyah posted the following online:

"After years of being called a 'whore,' 'devil' and 'bringer of shame' by people who use Islam as their shield, I have decided to let this video speak for me ... I am tired of the people who clamour at the slightest hint of skin on a Muslim woman but who will not speak up when a woman is beaten and even murdered in the name of Islam."

Other Muslim activists have pointed out, however, that perhaps a show of skin is not the best way to making a political point. Canada's Hoda Fahmy, an educator who works with Muslim women, suggests,

""A lot of us are working for women's rights, particularly in the Muslim world. I think we have more self-respect than to dance around naked to make our point."

(Source: Canada.com)

If you're a hip-hop fan, chances are someone has sent you a link to video for "Lazy Sunday," a skit that aired on Saturday Night Live last Saturday. Featuring comedies Adam Samberg and Chris Parnell and written by the comedy team at The Lonely Island, the skit finds Samberg and Parnell rhyming about going to go see The Chronicles of Narnia.

While rappin' white boy irony is decades old, for some reason, this video's got the internet goin' nuts. Even the Village Voice is opining that it's a fake rap song that's better than a lot of real rap songs:

The beat isn't one of those faux-old-school jernk-jernk-skritch boilerplate things. It's solid: hard heavy piano, subtle snare shuffle, a nice little bass-riff sample every once in a while, convincingly hard and cinematic, like, you know, a real rap beat. ... Both [rappers] share lines and jump in on each other and generally avoid sucking for the entire length of the song, wisely opting not to use the look-at-me-I'm-rapping karayzy-white-guy overenunciation so common in rap-comedy. It works.

Whether you agree with that or not (and frankly, we agree ... it does work), this video now has the kind of cache we typically associate with the old Chappelle Show skits. Expect any of the following to start entering into the hipster lexicon:

"double true"

"Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious"

"You'd think we were Aaron Burr from the Hamiltons we were dropping."

"Matthew Perry"

Lionel Richie's "Hello" has been voted the worst music video of all time. This is based on a poll by the UK music video channel, The Box which asked viewers to pick their least favorite music videos. Richie's "Hello" earned its honors through its rather bizarre narrative that finds Richie wooing (or stalking, depending on your perspective) a blind sculptor who ends the video with a clay bust of Richie's face. It manages to be both campy and creepy.

Following "Hello" is "Ebony and Ivory," another mid-'80s song, this one by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder and in the #3 spot, it's MC Hammer's dance-o-matic "U Can't Touch This" (what, people not feeling those parachute pants?) (Source: newkerala.com)

Green Day's been making (almost) as much news at 50 Cent of late. First was their departure from Lookout Records which we mentioned last week. Now they got the internet chattering about their "Wake Me Up When September Ends" video which has been moving some folks to tears. Samuel Bayer directed it and he'll also be directing Green Day's next video, for the ambitious, five-part "Jesus of Suburbia."

Bayer plans to retire from video-making after this and plans to go out on a high note:

"It’s going to be very raw, sort of be like Larry Clark’s film 'Kids.' We’re going to cast all unknowns, real kids from Los Angeles and Northern California, and tell the story of 'Jesus of Suburbia.'"

Hmm...ambitious video. Five-part song. "Raw." This all sounds very familiar ... (Thanks, Top 40/Pop Guide)

The New York Times' Jon Caramanica writes on "The New Age of the Music Video", chronicling the rise of the video from novelty to cultural event to such a fact of life, it's more or less background noise (albeit, background noise at a $1 million a pop for the showiest examples). The problem, as Caramanica reports, is that there's too many videos for too few television outlets - anyone who's followed MTV since its early days knows that the channel (and now its sister MTV2 channel) have been easing out of the video-screening game for many years.

Bring in the Internet. Yahoo! Music's Dave Goldberg is quoted as saying, "Not counting porn, music video is clearly the most popular video content online." (And you don't have to hide it from your parents. Unless it's an uncensored 50 Cent or Snoop video...)

Moreover, with rumors of an Apple iPod Video in the works, not to mention the Sony PSP's ambition to be a combination gaming/video/music/internet/espresso/tanning/etc. platform, it could be that music videos are going to make a major transition from the small screen to the computer screen to the really-really-small-screen within a few years.