Boring Stuff for Boys

Brain dead tv. The television programmes you can turn off your brain and just watch, no thinking required.

My favourite type of brain dead tv is the music channels. I'm not so bad now, but in my student days I could watch these for hours.

Although, if I'm honest, working life isn't the only reason I watch these channels less now.

The truth is, I find a lot of music videos unbearable to watch. They've gone from having pretty girls dancing, to having pretty girls looking and acting like porn stars. Fly girls are now "video ho's". Inventivness has been lost to the desire to make every single promo video look like soft porn, with the boundaries being pushed back further and further.

A graphic example is the plethora of "knicker shots", where the model is wearing tiny knickers and showing as much flesh as possible. Or they'll just set the video in a lap dancing club.

I find these videos not just offensive and demeaning to women, but boring. These videos are a wave of erstaz sexuality aimed at the "lad" demographic. Why should I watch them, when they so blatantly aren't made for me or other any women.

Music videos used to be (and sometimes still are, check out the works of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze or Sophie Muller) an inventive marriage of sound and vision. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching Michael Jackson's Billie Jean video, seeing the paving stones light up and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.

I want that sort of imaginative visual back, rather then this continued slide into sleaze.

Something like this: