-Music Videos on my Mind- Duck Sauce’s “Big Bad Wolf”

American-Canadian house group Duck Sauce is a strange breed indeed. The group consists of club legends Armand Van Helden and A-Trak, both big dance producers in their own right having remixed songs for artists as diverse as Tori Amos, Kanye West and Kid Cudi.

Duck Sauce's previous effort was the annoying dance tune Barbara Streisand, which was a monstrous success here in Europe (no accounting for taste in these parts), but its new single Big Bad Wolf has struggled to gain comparable traction.

Truth is, Duck Sauce seem nothing more than a novelty project that peddles out gimmicky house numbers appealing to kids who can't dance and, instead, prefer to drunkenly shout out cheap catchphrases when out clubbing. (You know who you are.)

In an effort to boost Big Bad Woolf's appeal, Duck Sauce has commissioned an absurdly surreal music video which Billboard describes as "the most disturbing [and] frightening video of 2011."

Directed by Keith Schofield, Big Bad Wolf gives a whole new meaning to the concept of being a 'dickhead'. (You know who you are.)

-Music Videos on my Mind- The Vaccines’ “Wetsuit”

British white guys with guitars love playing at summer music festivals. British white youths love attending summer music festivals. British ethnic minority groups love making fun of white guys who play and frequent summer music festivals.

The Vaccines new music video for Wetsuit is a sun soaked paean to the very Caucasian and middle-class ritual of summer music festivalling.

It was put together by director Poppy de Villeneuve (shamefully middle-class name) who assembled lots of images of music loving kids, and people who are old enough to know better, attending various summer festivals at which The Vaccines were headlining.

Ever since Beyoncé headlined last summer's Glastonbury, minority kids have learnt that erecting tents is no longer the sole exclusivity of white guys. Nay, minority groups are more than capable of slumbering in sleeping bags, just as long as there's a reasonably priced motel within a 3 mile radius on standby in case it gets a bit too much for them.

Wetsuit is, if you like this kind of music, a nice song and video that feels akin to a much needed shot of vitamin D during these depressingly drawn-out winter nights.

The challenge I present is this: How many minority groups can you spy in this video?

(I count two: a fleeting shot of a black guy smiling and a disabled dude crowd surfing in his wheelchair. N.B. people covered in mud and babies don't count.)

-Music Videos on my Mind- Jus†ice’s “Stress”

The Americans are in love with French dance music right now. David Guetta is so popular in the US that he could properly run for Republican Vice President, and Daft Punk can have a major American library named after them if they so wish.

It's a shame that type of veneration isn't extended to French electro-pop duo Jus†ice, a band that is pretty popular in these parts but neglected elsewhere.

Then again, who can blame the Americans for eschewing Jus†ice when they put out music videos like Stress, a 6-minute clip that got banned by nearly every broadcaster on account of its violence and poor taste. A God-fearing puritanical province like America probably would have quaked with fear if it ever got an eye-full and ear-load of Stress.

Set in Paris' socially deprived banlieues, Stress has been accused of everything from stereotypical racism to abject realism. It presents a group of delinquent youths―some black, others Muslims―who go around Paris groping women, smashing things in, beating people up, terrorising pensioners and wrecking cars.

Directed by Romain-Gavras, Stress is the type of clip that typifies a post-MTV music video industry. At a time when music video channels are sticking to reality television fare, Stress is the kind of work that transcends ordinary methods of broadcasting. It was, and remains, a viral sensation; a word-of-mouse classic that exists to get attention.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Toddla T’s ‘Take it Back’

This weekend Barnardo's children's' charity issued a worrying statistic claiming 38% of British adults don't believe that children who get into trouble need to be helped in any way.

The British have never been very comfortable with the idea of childhood. If you're rich enough then you can send your kids away to boarding school, and if you're too poor, then you let them roam the streets in gangs where they can get up to things like underage drinking, shagging and general misbehaviour. I guess you can say that Britain is not a very child-friendly culture. If you really want to be controversial, you can argue Britain does not like its children at all.

Sheffield DJ Toddla T released an album during the height of summer rioting called Watch me Dance. It featured a track titled Take it Back on which Shola Ama and J2K provided the vocals. The video to accompany the song brilliantly taps into the unique way British working-class kids have created their own community which, in the right circumstances, inspires and supports one another without the need of adult intervention. It's a world in which adults are superfluous. At best, grown-ups are nothing more than a pestering inconvenience that just pisses and moans. At worst, adults are a legitimate threat whom needs to be feared.

It's a fun video but there's more subtext to it than you might think. It is saying a lot more about British life than initially meets the eye.

The Midrange Men

There are times when certain thoughts concerning the world of cinema pique one's interest, such as the maligned career trajectory of Joel Schumacher, a guy who directed some seriously good movies like Lost Boys, Falling Down, A Time to Kill, along with not so good films like Batman & Robin, The Number 23 and Town Creek.

This month saw the release of Schumacher's latest film Trespass starring Nicholas Cage and Nicole Kidman. The reviews have been awful and box-office was even worse (it made $18,200 from ten theatres), all this despite a powerhouse cast and director. What's more surprising is that Schumacher released the decent gritty teen drama Twelve last year, from which it seemed the 72-year old director was still capable of making thoroughly cracking films about American adolescence.

Schumacher is simply one of countless midrange directors working in Hollywood. Midrange filmmakers are a uniquely Hollywood phenomena in that they are nothing more than jobbing movie directors who go from project to project without an overriding sense of authorship or signature to any of the work they put out. They are, essentially, a safe pair of hands to shepherd a scripted movie to completion.

The film industry is replete with midrange filmmakers. Some of them like Ron Howard even won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. Others like Richard Donner have made totally satisfying films like The Goonies and The Omen. There's an ever growing number of midrange directors like Shawn Leavy (Real Steel) and Rob Marshall (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) whom represent the new breed of functional - if uninspired - filmmakers making no frill features that appeal to the masses.

Midrange filmmakers are essential to the Hollywood machine because they know how to create corporate-friendly movies that demand little intelligence from the audience, yet, in their own right, these guys are actually very smart people who are more than capable of imbuing their movies with greater intelligence if their taskmasters demand it from them. (Roland Emmerich's prestigious Shakespearean conspiracy drama Anonymous is the antithesis of his past 'event' flicks like 2012, Independence Day and Godzilla.)

Midrange filmmakers know exactly what the studio requires and will make the film according to their bespoke specifications. If the studio tells them to lose a scene or post-convert their finished product into a 3D mess, they won't put up much of a fight and will do exactly what the shareholders require.

What's more, midrange filmmakers aren't as expensive as say an A-list director like David Fincher who asked Twentieth Century Fox for $10 million just to sign on to helm its pricy adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (this despite the project's original midrange director McG agreeing to slash his $8 million quote to a palatably $4 million), nor are midrange directors a risky bet as say someone like Spike Jonze, whose auteur crafting of Where the Wild Things Are resulted in an expensively esoteric kids film that left a big hole in Warner Bros. pockets.

Midrange directors constantly fall in and out of favour with studio executives. For example, Martin Brest was the toast of Hollywood when he made stuff like Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman. His reliable direction meant that Universal allowed him to make the $90 million bloated melodrama Meet Joe Black and assured him they would consent to his 3 hour cut of the film being the definitive version. The movie was a spectacular flop, grossing less than half its budget on release. (The studio later re-cut the film to ribbons but it was still unsuccessful.)

Brest made a comeback in 2003 and directed the $75 million J-Lo and Ben Affleck starrer Gigli. The film killed the careers of everyone involved, with J-Lo and Affleck only now being given a second chance in different guises. Brest, on the other hand, was never to be allowed to make another movie again.

Midrange directors are also good if you're thinking of launching a lucrative film franchise. That's why Warner Bros. hired Chris Columbus to helm the first few Harry Potter flicks. They knew that Columbus' track record with family films was accredited by past successes like Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. The studio knew he was the person to lay the efficient, if hardly daring, foundation on which more leftfield directors could come along and experiment with. Even if the choice of appointing a risky director resulted in a less profitable instalments (aka: Prisoner of Azkaban), the studio could always return to the franchise's reliable core and start afresh.

It was because of Columbus' midrange reliability that Fox went to him to launch its Percy Jackson franchise. Last week the studio announced it has greenlit the film's sequel Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Sea of Monsters, though there is no indication if Columbus will return to direct. I suppose now that the groundwork has been capably established by Columbus, a more interesting and less expensive director can immediately come on board and carry on with the franchise.

The key thing to remember as a movie buff is that you cannot trust a midrange director. They are like the husband you figured was reliable and then you catch him going back to his philandering ways. That's why a director like Brad Silberling, who started out making crap like Casper, seemed to have changed his frivolous habits by helming more introspective projects Like City of Angels and Moonlight Mile, only to then start making inane rubbish like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Land of Lost Things. Even Ron Howard went from the critically acclaimed Frost/ Nixon to the insipid pile of junk called The Dilemma.

There is also the strange case of dynamic new directors who come on to the filmmaking scene with startlingly original voices, only to somehow lose their way in the system and become directors for hire.

Take for instance John Singelton whose debut feature Boyz N the Hood clinched him a best director Oscar nomination and enabled him to go on to make personal movies like Poetic Justice and Higher Learning. Something has definitely gone wrong in his career because his last few movies have been things like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Taylor Lautner's latest abs-bearing vehicle Abduction.

There are even high-minded arthouse filmmakers like David Gordon Green who began his career making poetically cinematic films like George Washington and Undertow, but has now metamorphosed into a midrange blunder. Green made the decision to migrate from Little Rock to Hollywood and, rather bizarrely, his last few films have been inane comedies like Pineapple Express, Your Highness and the upcoming Jonah Hill comedy The Sitter.

Even promising European directors are not immune to midrange banality once they relocate to Hollywood. German-Swiss filmmaker Marc Forster exploded on the directing scene a decade ago with the emotionally raw drama Monster's Ball. After a couple of interesting films, he has made nothing but average filler, including a poorly received Bond film. Forster's next movie will be the very expensive Brad Pitt zombie invasion epic World War Z, which is about a million miles away from where he started.

As you may be able to gather, it's not so much commercial American movies that are interesting; it's the peculiar processes upholding the system that fascinate me. Jobbing directors and the studios that hire them are reading from the same hymn sheet, both more committed to pandering to formula as opposed to shaking things up. Both seek stability and fortune, committed to reproducing the wheel rather than reinventing it.

It's a flawed system that seems to reward stupidity. Hollywood is so desperate for generic ideas that Warner Bros. paid social networker James Erwin good money to option his high-concept pitch Rome, Sweet Rome after he posted a thread on Reddit.com saying: "What if a unit of current U.S. Marines are suddenly transported back to ancient Rome and forced to do battle with the Roman legions?"

Erwin (aka: Prufrock451) is now an overnight millionaire thanks to a stroke befuddling fortitude and creatively bereft studio thinking, but do you expect anything more from Hollywood movies? Should you?

Joel Schumacher may be on a mission to only manufacture soulless Hollywood products (I can imagine he's busy negotiating a deal to come on board Rome, Sweet Rome), but Schumacher is a seasoned professional who can, sporadically, make really impressive films. He'll do whatever keeps him in a job, and in these vocationally volatile days, everyone can relate to that type of thinking.

-Music Videos on my Mind- R.E.M.’s ‘We All Go Back To Where We Belong’

If you grew up during the '90s then you'll have been a little bit downbeat over last month's announcement that American alternative group R.E.M. are to disband after 31-years together. In truth, R.E.M. are a band that hip kids of the '80s will say rightfully belonged to them, but it was actually in the '90s that they acquired global success, evolving from artsy indie rockers to full on stadium gods.

The argument back then among young music aficionados was whether R.E.M. was the biggest band in the word, or was it U2? Now neither group can lay claim to that title. They're too old and extraneous for mainstream commercial radio, and both have suffered diminishing album returns in recent years.

R.E.M. knew they were becoming increasingly irrelevant to the music scene, and U2 front-man Bono has confessed concern over his band's ability to survive in the current market.

R.E.M. has arguably done the right thing by calling it a day. The last song to be released is poignantly titled We all go Back to where we Belong and features a navel-gazing video starring Kirsten Dunst who narcissistically stands in front of the camera while trying to look cute and adorable.

After Dunst's past decisions to star in cringe-inducing music videos like Savage Garden's I Knew I Loved You, R.E.M. really should've known better than to have commissioned this one.

-Music Videos on my Mind- The Curious Case of Cher Lloyd

The Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author Søren Aabye Kierkegaard said: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

With that in mind, let us try and prognosticate, in reverse order of course, the key life events of former X Factor pop starlet Cher Lloyd.

• 2020 – Cher Lloyd dies in a south London crackhouse.

• 2017 – Cher Lloyd is admitted to a mental asylum because of her strange protestations about how Simon Cowell used to drink the virginal blood of female X Factor contestants.

• 2016 – Cher Lloyd is forced to relocate to a council house in Lambeth, London where tabloid newspapers report she has developed a dependency on glue sniffing and kleptomania.

• 2015 – Cher Lloyd gives birth to a son on a realty show called Washed-up Celebrity Maternity Ward. The kid is given up for adoption.

• 2014 – Cher Lloyd enters rehab but is kicked out after her cheque bounces. Efforts to resurrect her singing career fail as the music scene shifts from ersatz R&B to white guys with guitars again.

• 2013 – In an effort to convince Americans she is the British female equivalent of Eminem, Cher Lloyd moves to the US. No one is persuaded and Lloyd is deported by Immigration Services.

• 2012 – Cher Lloyd is dropped from Simon Cowell's record label SyCo.

• 2011 – Simon Cowell, detecting the scent of easy money, signs Cher Lloyd to his label and puts out the insanely catchy hit single Swagger Jagger. Cowell pays Mike Posner big money to feature on Lloyd's follow up track With UR Love.

• 2010 – Cher Lloyd auditions for the X Factor but reinvents herself as a watered-down urban vocalist. She performs Keri Hilson's version of Turn My Swag On and is put through to the live shows under the tutelage of seasoned pro Cheryl Cole. She makes it to the finals but doesn't win.

• 2009 - Cher Lloyd auditions for the second time on X Factor and sings a bland balled and is told to fuck off.

• 2008 – Cher Lloyd auditions for the first time on X Factor and sings a bland balled and is told to fuck off.

• 1993 – Cher Lloyd is born.