Destiny's Child

I'm still bothered by this new Destiny's Child video--"Soldier"--and it pisses me off. Usually, I'm ready to argue that Beyonce Knowles is some kind of super genius whose songs seem stupid on the surface, but are good, infectious fun. If not for the Butcher's superb money-management skills, I'd own her solo album, chock full of catchy shit I can't get out of my head. But this song is so dumb and the only thing that's catching about it is the "where they at?" part which is more interrogation than chorus, and the video--arlgh--it makes me stupider just to watch it. And this weekend, as I was sitting around with the Butcher because neither of us can afford to do anything thanks to his superb money-management skills (no, I'm not bitter, why?), I realized why I hate the video. I don't for a second believe these women would have anything to do with those men. I guess that's my problem with a lot of videos Beyonce is associated with. There's always that one thing in the video that the director means for me to just accept that I just can't get past. Take "Crazy in Love," for example. Jay-Z appears to be setting a car on fire at the same time that Beyonce is writhing around in the back seat of a car. How am I not supposed to assume that Jay-Z is setting the car with Beyonce in it on fire? That's how editing works. You show an outside of a car and an inside of a car and your viewer then assumes that those two things belong to the same car. Or "Naughty Girl" which contains shots from a camera down low, looking up at Beyonce and Usher, which has a different filter on it than every other camera in the video, making it look like we're occasionally cutting to the home movie of the making of the video instead of the video itself. Not to mention having Sean Paul in "Baby Boy," which leads to the obvious question. How did the Evan Seinfeld impersonator become more famous than the man himself?