Reading VH-1

I like to watch music videos with the sound off. Weird, perhaps even counterintuitive, but I find that the videos are a lot more fun to watch without all that horrible music getting in the way. I also like watching TV shows in languages I don't understand, but I'll save that for another post.

When I was going to the gym regularly in my pre-fatherhood days, I watched a lot of VH-1 while listening to my iPod. The TVs all had closed-captioning, so I could read the lyrics. I do that at home too. It's often hilarious to see a singer overemoting and then read the caption and see that the words are painfully trite. In this context, Avril Lavigne's perma-sulk expression makes perfect sense. Why should she get worked up over words that are so cliche-ridden that they're meaningless?

Anyway, so I was engaging in this oddball hobby of mine at home the other day whilst feeding a bottle to my son when I saw Mary J. Blige in black and white. The words that appeared looked familiar. I thought, what song is this? I turned it on. Yes, it was "One," by U2. And who was that band playing with her? It was U2! Bono looking like Bono, Edge looking like Edge, Larry Mullen looking pissed off. I could see why he was mad, too: Blige was oversinging the song like crazy. Total post-Whitney melisma everywhere, like she had to cram as many notes in there as possible. She even does this little coda thing at the end, after the music has stopped: "Wu-oh-u-one-ahhhh."

Who listens to a U2 song and says, "That's perfect, except that Bono is too shy"?

It was like karaoke, except not funny.