Star fucking

KINO-EAR has, as you may have noticed, spent some time on the idea of "celebrity." This is the bread and butter, the essential stuff of so much pop culture. A celebrity is defined as someone who is "widely known and often referred to," and music video's primary purpose is to make its subject widely known and often referred to – a state that, in turn, will stimulate sales.

Cameo appearances by recognizable people from other media forums and forms (TV, movies, fashion) date back to video's beginning. Marketing your mug is a key factor, but dropping an even better-known puss into your video makes for some good branding in the collective memory banks. The worst of these clips smack of celebsploitation at its basest; the best blur the line between the iconic, the ironic, and giddy postmodern chic.

And then there's Moby, who wants to shit on the celebrity cake and eat it too. The clip for his duet with Gwen Stefani, "South Side," sent up music-industry narcissism by deconstructing glamorously banal video clichés one by one. His new single, "We Are All Made of Stars," finds one of the most identifiable poster boys of techno-tronica culture taking on the entire Hollywood Hills area code. Clad in a space suit, the detached DJ wanders through a city of angels packed with failed child stars, nubile young actresses, porn legends, supermodels, and Tinseltown trolls (et tu, Robert Evans?), baffled by the "alien" life-forms he encounters and numbly observes.

Of course, in between biting Gary Numan's body-electric monotone and the "Star Child" ride through a frozen-food aisle, Moby litters the landscape with celebrities designed to push hot buttons. His "caustic" comment on Hell-ay's vapid star-fucking culture degenerates into a game of spot-the-famous-person: Hey, isn't that Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges lip-synching the chorus? And Dave Navarro, and Corey Feldman, and Angelyne, and ... the B-list goes on. You're so busy picking out familiar faces that it's easy to lose track of the fact that you're supposed to be laughing at the once-and-future E! True Hollywood Story subjects – or that Moby, the insider looking out from the VIP room at Skybar, forgot to include an allegedly above-it-all DJ who posed for a Calvin Klein billboard ... ah, fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain.

I'm not sure you could find more of an anti-Moby on MTV right now than Andrew W.K. A beefy alpha-mook and the current toast of the British music press, Andrew Wilkes-Krier is also a walking contradiction; an MTV news tidbit found the perpetually yelling author of "Party til You Puke" tinkling a note-perfect rendition of a Barbra Streisand tune ("It's just such a pretty melody to play," he rhapsodizes) before pushing and pummeling the baby grand like a Ritalin-deprived tot. He could make beautiful music, you see. He just chooses not to, because, like, he wants to rock!

"Party Hard," Andrew's ode to using "party" as a verb, is a so-simplistic-it's-brain-dead update of past meta-rock standards (see all of AC/DC's output), as well as his bid for the spotlight. And damned if his video is much more than a guy making the most of his moment, accompanied by some Neanderthal headbanging. Playing before a blow-up of his image-defining album cover (a close-up of himself, glaring and bloodied after a self-imposed smackdown), Andrew and his band flail about the stage, vowing to "throw a party / And we'll always / Par-ty / Haaaarrrrrd!!!" as if their lives depended on it.

The whole affair seems both calculatedly dumbed-down and oddly sincere – he's a novelty-act one-trick pony who seems genuinely delighted to perform his gut-level, guilty-pleasure trick for you. He's no Stiv Bators, much less Iggy Pop, but at least he seems to be having fun primal-screaming his way into minor-league celebrity. Moby's concept video is one clever dis, to be sure, but it just smacks of raging against a machine he helps to oil. Andrew W.K. doesn't have the time or the inclination to be a hypocrite yet; he's too busy partying hard with his newfound celebrity status.