Videos thrill the radio star

Music to feast your peepers on

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

As the CD industry coughs up blood and stumbles toward obsolescence, a few of its drones have recognized the desperately needed transfusion that the DVD explosion can provide. The digital video disc is the fastest growing consumer item in history, except for fire and maybe the wheel, and its usefulness in the MTV era of music you look at hasn't escaped the attention of record labels big and small.

Cases in point might be the value-added CDs from people like Moby (whose new 18 B Sides includes a full DVD of videos from the original 18 album, live shit and various hijinx) or the Flaming Lips (the re-release of last year's lauded Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots benefits from a variety of videos and other junk).

Another stellar example is Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the cantankerous canine cut-up commanded by animator Robert Smigel. The audio half of the new masterpiece by this puppet pooch features skits, songs, disses and guests like Conan O'Brien, Jack Black and Adam Sandler. The second disc is, you guessed it, a DVD of various classic Triumph moments, such as the interviews with Janeane Garofalo and that Jared guy from the Subway ads.

Speaking of dogs, Snoop Dogg's dubious attempt at filmmaking Bo$$ Playa inverts Triumph's funny-to-offensive ratio quite nicely. It follows "Big" Snoop Dogg through a less-than-eventful day in his fantasy life as a master pimp. Gaze in rapt attention as Snoop mumbles incomprehensibly, pets his cat, shoots the shit with real-life ultra-pimp Bishop Don Magic Juan and chases down his fiscally-delinquent whores on his Segway. Wonder who actually bought those things? It was Snoop.

Just like being there

Of course, the live concert is now a staple of the DVD section, but a couple truly merit a mention. Kiss Symphony is the double DVD to go with the live CD released earlier this year. You know, the one where Kiss got the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to slap on greasepaint and back them up as they run through the classics. Yes, it is every bit as obtusely ridiculous as it sounds, but by the time they wrap up the closer "Rock and Roll All Nite," Kiss have again achieved that apocalyptic bon-temps scenario which made them legends. Plus, Gene does his whole "God of Thunder" bit, with the spittin' blood and the flying up to his little parakeet perch. Excellent.

Can anyone match the excessive tech of Kiss? Perhaps Blue Man Group, whose The Complex Rock Tour Live DVD captures a performance of the same show many of us saw here in town this past summer. Centred on the three silent blue-hued dudes and their plumbing-pipe percussion, it's a non-stop frenzy of lights, lasers, gimmicks and guests, reaching a zenith with a massive cover of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love."

The greatest live-concert film ever, though, is Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii, wherein our shaggy heroes run through some of their finest material (the early '70s stuff) for an audience of no one (except the film crew). The gig, you see, happened amid the volcanic ruins of the lost Greek city, which for some reason is totally fuckin' heavy. Director Adrian Maben created a new version with incongruous and unnecessary (but hell, pretty) space footage and interviews, but don't worry - the 1972 original's on there too.

Lights, camera, rock 'n' roll 'em

Some more ambitious musical acts have gone well past the concert footage and collected videos. Top honours have to go to the French masters of neo-disco, Daft Punk. Having concocted a yarn about friendly blue aliens shanghaied into terrestrial superstardom, they approached none other than Japan's Leiji Matsumoto to make an hour-long, dialogue-free anime feature out of it, accompanied by the tunes off Discovery. Matsumoto, FYI, is the animator responsible for the space opera Captain Harlock, better known in Quebec as the cult classic Albator. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar is possibly Matsumoto's best work, and demands a place on the shelf not only of a DP fan but any anime otaku as well.

Likewise fusing an hour of film with cool, original music is Cinematic Orchestra's Man With a Movie Camera. The Ninja Tune DVD release sees J. Swincoe and company's blend of jazz, turntablism and chamber music breathing new life into the surprisingly accessible avant-garde classic by Dziga Vertov. This 1929 Soviet quasi-documentary not only broke the rules of moviemaking, it wrote a lot of new ones. Another dope flick for those with a taste for jazz is Space is the Place, the legendary (and largely thought lost) 1974 feature starring supreme cosmic jazzbo Sun Ra. A wild, cheap collision of black power and blaxploitation, B-movie sci fi and transcendent concert footage, well worth possessing.

Hip hop heads, meanwhile, need not feel left out in the cold on this one (the aforementioned Snoop foolishness notwithstanding). The commendable Plexifilm label, who also put out the Sun Ra flick, have brought the fabled 1983 PBS documentary Style Wars back to the surface. The doc touches on all four ways to rock as they manifested in hip hop's seminal days in NYC. Doc-makers Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant cover B-boying, rapping and DJing, but the focus is primarily on the writers, the graffiti artists who turned the Big Apple's subway system into a kaleidoscope of colour. A two-DVD set, Style Wars sports extra interviews galore, a half-hour loop of 200 burned cars and a gallery of graf masterpieces.