1. SmCity featuring Pro'verb, "My Own Boss"
Of all the rap videos that prominently feature Malcolm X imagery, at least 99 percent are sincere.

At first glance, D.C. rapper SmCity seems all confused in this video for "Twilight," a track from his upcoming The Indie Life: Hate, Love & Money. He's sportin' a limited-edition Nats hat, but that hometown W kinda gets lost in all those Brooklyn Bridge shots. And his sideman is Brooklyn MC Skyzoo. Why shoot the [...]

Grazia Toderi, an Italian video artist, presents two large-scale works at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, each of them fantastical and distinctly unsettling. Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits, 2009), projected in almost total darkness, features a multi-layered brew of photographic and filmed imagery, primarily city lights as seen from a distance. Far from romantic, these [...]

Like the best road treks, this cool video tour diary from locals The Ambulars goes from calm—sad-robot harmonies, ponderous landscapes, weird analog synth noises—to chaotic, with tortured, twisted riffs and parking-lot pyrotechnics. Big ups to the middle portion ("Marianne and Ferdinand"), whose bookish girl-boy vox briefly reignited my love of mid-'90s Midwestern indie pop.

Halloween may be long past, but Imperial China hasn't stopped creeping people out. The trio's new offering is essentially a video mashup, but with some snappy editing, eerie clips from the 1973 horror flick Messiah of Evil complement the darkness of the Imperial China song "Letter of a General" quite well. Check out the gruesome [...]

Everybody loves Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You," and I do, too. But this video? If it was with any other song, you'd think it was cute and then you'd forget about it. You could argue that the song/video combination is some sort of dialectic, but "Fuck You" alone has that kind of thing already goin' on. [...]

Compare/contrast:
Erykah Badu, "Window Seat," 2010:

One of my fave vids of the last decade, The Bronx, "They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)," 2003:

NOTE: That is not the lead singer of The Bronx.

Oh, hey, a lot of R&B and hip-hop artistes did their Summer Spirit Festival on Saturday at Merriweather Post Pavilion. If you added Cypress Hill and some shitty reggae-rockers, you could've called it Smokin' Grooves 2010! But what do I know? I wasn't there. People from WKYS-FM were indeed there, however. (They had enough corporate [...]

So, there was this show, EIGHT, presented as part of the Capital Fringe Festival that Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad MVP Ian Buckwalter and I both really dug. It's comprised of eight monologues, only four of which are performed on any given night, as selected by audience vote. The show is deservedly [...]

The Post's "Scene In" street-fashion video series is perpetually cheery, as if a handful of thoughtful fashionistas can make a rainbow in any neighborhood. We know better, of course: Spend 15 minutes on K Street at the end of a July workday, and style will appear to be a faint afterthought in the melted minds [...]