ROCKIN’ ROUND THE FLAG

Is it too late to reschedule the Bicentennial? Now that rock ‘n’ rollers finally are getting into the American spirit en masse, about a decade too late, the MTV channel is starting to look more like something that could be called the USA Network.

This “New Patriotism” takes many forms. There’s Jackson Browne singing that he wished these United States were in the right (“For America”), and then there’s the America-right-or-wrong flavor of novelties like the collaboration between wrestling heavyweight Hulk Hogan and rock lightweight Rick Derringer (“Real American”). Neither vision of the red, white and blue way is very compelling, unfortunately--at least not in the video translation.

There is something uniquely American, though, in the fact that the bottom of this barrel of current video clips is scraped by a bad actor taking on a new career. Ratings are based on a scale of 0-100.

Vid clips picked to click:

Simple Minds’ “All the Things She Said.” Director: Zbigniew Rybczynski. After a couple of disastrously bland collaborations between the Minds and Rybczynski, the award-winning director is back to his best tricks: special-effects gimmicks. First, multiple visions of singer Jim Kerr cascade past the camera as if on a people-mover, all slightly different but all singing in unison; then, a batch of guitarist Charlie Burchills floods by; then, an army of Robin Clarks appears to sing the funky chorus, and so on. All these superimposed images eventually get smaller as they fade into the distant star field and are replaced by new ones, creating an illusion of one continuous shot. Rybczynski’s off-the-wall optical trips may be a little too close to an experience with drugs--they’re that fascinating and that annoying--but when he’s as inventive as he is here, it beats the visual Valium of his contemporaries. 77