TUNE IN: F'N MTV, Fuse Bonnaroo, MuchMusic Awards

A handy viewing guide for the weekend...

Friday, June 13, 8pm: F'N MTV Presents...
Despite the ominous debut date, F'N MTV Presents... is a good omen for the relevance of the music video. The weekly show will debut music videos and in a live broadcast hosted by emo idol Pete Wentz. The slate for week one offers something for almost everyone:

• FloRida f/ Will.I.Am "In The Ayer"
• The Pussycat Dolls "When I Grow Up"
• Snoop Dogg "My Medicine"
• The Tings Tings "Shut Up And Let Me Know

Tune in, or set your DVR for 8 pm tonight. Otherwise, you will forever relinquish your right to bitch and moan about how you never see videos in prime time on MTV.

Friday - Sunday, June 13 - 15, 9pm: Fuse Bonnaroo Front Row

No need to despair if you're missing this weekend's Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, TN. Not only is it gonna rain, but drugs may be in short supply. Fuse will be putting the cherry on top of its big Get Your Music On rebranding campaign with a tribute to what's arguably the biggest U.S. music festival. The channel will be spotlighting live clips previous years and honoring this years performers with special episodes of their regular video and music programming. The main event is Fuse Bonnaroo Front Row: live coverage of this years event each night beginning at 9pm — with the bulk of it coming via a three hour block on Sunday night. Performances scheduled to be broadcast include Metallica, Mastodon, Against Me, My Morning Jacket and much more.

Sunday, June 15, 9pm: MuchMusic Video Awards

This one is for my Canadian peoples. The annual MuchMusic Awards are this Sunday in Toronto. Performers include New Kids On The Block, Rihanna, Simple Plan, FloRida, Sean Kingston, Kardinal Offishall and many others. The nominee list can be found at muchmusic.com/events/mmva08/nominees.  Look for winners to be announced here on Monday.

PROFILE: Aggressive, directing/fx team, Refused TV

Don't let the name put you off. The creative duo of Alex Topaller and Dan Shapiro — aka Aggressive  — is mostly just tenacious about pushing themselves and some overclocked hardware in order to create striking videos. And they're nice guys. But, Aggressive is a better name than Affable for a directing team, so you can't blame them for going with something a bit harder.

The Aggressive vibe is a high-tech fuse of live action and CGI that belies their roots as a VFX team. The latest and greatest is a stellar new clip they did for Kerli "Walking On Air" that's on its way to hitsville.

Aggressive have also directed videos for Bloc Party, Megadeth, Juanes and several other diverse artists. Visit their feature-packed site whatisaggressive for high quality links and Making Of Specials.

name: Aggressive aka Alex Topaller and Dan Shapiro
company: Refused TV
title/job: Director & Visual Effects

first video: The first real music video we did was for Hoobastank "Born to Lead." We had just made the long-shot decision to push Aggressive from VFX into directing, so we were looking around for a production company to take us in. Through a series of fortuitous coincidences we met up with Cathy Pellow of Refused TV and hit it off grand. We shared the same hands-on, punk rock, "screw convention, we just want to make awesome work" attitude. She took a chance on us, and before long, we were writing on the Hooba track. It was an ambitious video: Fully green screen, sci-fi robots, epic landscapes, and an army of wild fans. (It awarded on Alex's birthday... maybe a sign?) Through the chain-smoking, coffee driven nights that followed, we pulled out all the stops, literally drawing every shot of the video into a shot-by-shot animatic (it's become our standard procedure since then). We had done live shoots before, but never on such a large scale, and since our previous CG experience never taught us cool terms like "AD," "DP," "grip," or "back to one," we boarded the plane to L.A. with our notebooks stuffed full of Wikipedia "How to Direct" pages. It was an incredible, whirlwind Hollywood adventure for two friends from Jersey... We were introduced to some of the amazingly talented people we'd work with on almost every video afterwards, like DP Damian Acevedo, and our producer JP Fox. The band was super cool to work with, there were dozens of screaming Hoobastank fans running around with sledgehammers smashing appleboxes, and we all had a blast headbanging on the biggest green set we had ever seen. Of course this was followed by two weeks of all-nighters with our PCs back at the studio. But, that's just how we do things... --> watch Hoobastank "Born To Lead" (YouTube)

strangest video: While we get ourselves into bizarre situations as a course of habit, the award for strangest video has to go to Black Label Society "Concrete Jungle." Since it's a fully animated video (Zakk Wylde is a big A-Ha "Take on Me" fan...), there was no live shoot. We did, however, need to get reference footage for the timing of our traditional animations. We ended up staging an impromptu renegade mini-DV shoot in a tiny trailer backstage at Ozzfest in Randalls Island, NYC. We spent hours waiting, hanging backstage and in the sweltering crowd watching metal. Finally, at the very end of the day Zakk Wylde and the band jumped in to do the shoot. They had just finished up a hardcore 2 hour set with BLS and Ozzy, so everyone was revved, drenched and stinking of sweat. So there, in this tiny trailer near a beer stand at Ozzfest, we had this legendary guitar god rock out in front of a cheap foldable bluescreen to playback from a $20 boombox, while the rest of the band downed celebratory Heinekens behind us. It was surreal. After 15 minutes we got exactly what we needed. Zakk gave bear hugs all around, and as a token of BLS appreciation, we received a case of beer as a gift that we triumphantly lugged all the way back to our studio along with our lights, camera, etc. --> watch Black Label Society "Black label Society" (YouTube)

what's next: Well, our heads are still spinning (very gratefully) with the response this latest Kerli video has been getting, and we've got a lot of exciting things on our plate for the near future. For one, we are expanding Aggressive into a one-stop creative shop for commercials and broadcast design as well as music videos. We just moved into a gorgeous new studio which will serve as home base for all of our post production/VFX needs. And as always, we're busy coming up with new video ideas for the tracks that come our way.

DIVERSION: Grabb.it/tv And Every MTV Top 20 Video Thru '98

You may not know the name Joel Whitburn, but you should. Like most music fans, he's a bit obsessive — collecting records, poring over the liner notes and making categories and lists. But, Joel veers off into a sort of statistician field of dreams. He began to compile the data from Billboard music charts — and later, video charts, which we'll get to in a moment — and decided to publish the results. Whitburn's company, Record Research, has been doing exactly that since 1970 — compiling and publishing over 100 books that are essentially the quantitative history of popular music. (And in a very bad-ass aside, Whitburn also has a record collection that includes every song that hit the Billboard Top 100 dating back to 1936, every  charted pop album back to 1945 and pretty much everything else. Except, maybe, that new Fuck Buttons album everyone seems to dig.)

This leads us to something called The Whitburn Project, in which similarly obsessive stat hounds decided to start sharing this data online through insanely detailed spreadsheets. It's all sort of underground and requires a fairly high level of geekitude to get the data. And, as Waxy.org points out in their story that shone a light on this project, it's all surely in violation of several copyrights so please note that I'm not encouraging you to hunt it down and distribute. And I don't say that just to cover my ass. It's for your own safety and sanity. This is the holy grail for music obsessives: Once you look, you may never look away.

This, finally, leads to the point of this already too long post: Grabb.it TV.

The brave souls from Grabb.it used the data as a basis for a site that features The Weekly MTV Top 20 Music Videos dating back from MTV's launch in 1981 up through the launch of Napster in 1998. It's a time capsule. An instant look into the music video zeitgeist of any week during the prime MTV age. Take a look back at the Top 20 MTV Videos for this week 20 years ago. We 're talking George Michael "One More Try" at #1, Samantha Fox "Naughty Girls" at #5. We have the slow fading of 80s pop from the likes of Rick Astley, Debbie Gibson and Belinda Carlile contrasted with the appearance of hair metal pop like Poison and Lita Ford. And, we have Pebbles. And Al B. Sure. And trust me: Most weeks are just as dizzying as this one.

Grabb.it TV has embedded YouTube links of it all, broken down by week with accompanying news headlines culled from Wikipedia. The interface is a a pull-down menu of each year and then a corresponding timeline that goes from Week 1 to Week 52. It's all pretty intuitive and guaranteed to eat into your productivity. Be careful.

--> Visit Grabb.tv/TV for videos videos videos (all YouTube)...

PHOTO: Meaghan Smith and Director Roboshobo

Another rough day on a music video set. Sire Records signing Meaghan Smith and Revolver Film Co director Roboshobo on-location in New Jersey for her debut video shoot. Roboshobo directed four videos in total for Smith: "A Little Love," "I Know," "Poor" and "Drifted Apart."

Roboshobo is repped by Labuda Management.

SHOT: Ingrid Michaelson - Josh Forbes, director

artist: Ingrid Michaelson
song: "Breakable"
label: Secret Road Management
director(s): Josh Forbes
production co: Winch+Pulley / Ghost Town Media
rep: Lanette Phillips Management

SHOT: Alkaline Trio - Josh Forbes, director

artist: Alkaline Trio
song: "Help Me"
label: Epic
director(s): Josh Forbes
production co: Winch+Pulley / Ghost Town Media
rep: Lanette Phillips Management

WATCH IT: MGMT "Electric Feel"

Looks like the MGMT boys and director Ray Tintori watched the Ewok dance party from Return Of The Jedi a few times too many. MGMT and a trippy crew are seen getting down at a rave deep within an enchanted and very random forest. There's hippy chicks a'plenty, shofars, a happy bear lounge band, and even a guy drinking a 40 oz that's presumably filled with some electric Kool-Aid. The bacchanalian madness crescendos when they pull down and slice open the moon to unleash a stream of sparkly goo that they spread all over one another. And just when you think you've seen it all: A daring motorcycle stunt that would even impress Ghost Rider. --> watch "Electric Feel" (streaming quicktime link)

MGMT "Electric Feel" (Columbia)
Ray Tintori, director | Stephanie Scire, producer | Partizan, production co | Andrij Parekh, DP | Ryan Bartley, editor | Ghosttown Media, fx | Lizzie Owens + Molly Lowe, wardrobe | Willow Mayer, make-up

SHOT: Snoop Dogg f/ Willie Nelson - Pook, director

Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg, together, in Amsterdam. Hmmm, wonder what the common denominator was there....Oh, yes, the tulips. Or, maybe the windmills. Can't be the "coffee" shops though, could it?

Look for the video on the series debut of F'N MTV Premieres... this Friday night.

artist: Snoop Dogg f/ Willie Nelson
song: "My Medicine"
label: Geffen
director(s): Pook
production co: Big Pook FIlms

SHOT: The Cab - Mark Allan Staubach, director

artist: The Cab
song: "I'll Run"
label: Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen
director(s): Mark Allan Staubach
production co: The Valencia Co.

SHOT: The Bridges - Lex Halaby, director

Director Lex Halaby (third from left) with the extended family act The Bridges at the pre-war (Civil War, that is) house that served as the set for "Pieces."

artist: The Bridges
song: "Pieces"
label: Verve/Universal
director(s): Lex Halaby
production co: The Valencia Co.
rep: Lanette Phillips Management

note(s): Lex Halaby is signed with Refused TV. Photo by Johnny Ching