I’m not going to lie to you. This month I was far too lazy to pick up my CDs from the Elle offices. (In case Roxana Voloseniuc asks, I told her that my cat had died. I think she believed me.) Anyway. As a result of my ineptitude, I had to think up some way of doing a page full of music reviews without having a single CD to hand. The cogs that make up my mind cranked into action: “Let’s do an easy column. Something that doesn’t involve too much effort. I know! How about a quick summary of the music videos currently doing the rounds on TV? It’ll be a bit like doing CD reviews, except that I’ll be able to finish in half the time, without the unnecessary physical effort of opening and closing CD cases. Easy!”

Not having a TV is like some kind of bourgeois badge of honour. Forget 50” plasma-screen surround-sound systems with built in bidets: only footballers who live with their parents have these. If you want to be really middle-class, the thing to do is dispose of the TV altogether and invest in more bourgeois forms of entertainment, like gardening. However, the reason why I don’t have a TV isn’t because I’m terribly middle class. And it’s not because I’m a budding intellectual, being busy discussing post-structuralism with Patapievici. No. The reason I have no TV isn’t because I’m smart. I have no TV because I’m a moron.           

I can’t sustain a conversation when there’s a TV in the room. I turn into a dribbling buffoon, hungry to be spoon-fed the next tit-bit of information about Britney Spears not wearing knickers, desperate for the next episode of The Young and The Restless. That’s the problem: turning on the TV for me is like some kind of horrific foray into a parallel universe that I might never be able to disentangle myself from. The colourful pictures hypnotize me. The rapid-fire montage sequences keep me transfixed like a baby looking at a shiny bouncing ball.            

I found myself having to travel half the way across the city to a friend’s apartment, and began to question exactly just how labour-saving my brilliant idea was. Six hours later, after having watched three episodes of Crocodile Hunter and learned the names of all the principal characters in some Telenovela in which every character cried about two times per scene, I again questioned the efficiency of my brilliant idea. My televisual critical faculties hadn’t just been weakened – they’d completely abandoned me after years of neglect. I was watching stuff so boring that it would have even caused a seven-year old drugged up on Rilalin to switch channels. I had to get to work. I turned on Music Television and tried to pay attention.            

First up was Justin Timberlake’s new video clip for “What Goes Around.” Perhaps clip is the wrong word. This is a mini-movie, starting Scarlet Johansen, which cost over $1 to make. Oh, and it takes up a staggering nine minutes of your life. And what a nine minutes they are. Scarlet pretends to be dead in a swimming pool! Justin gets in a fight! Scarlet dies in a car crash! Needless to say, I was captivated, despite Justin’s acting being only marginally better than Oana Zavoranu’s, and the extended passages of dialogue that make you dig your fingernails into your palms in embarrassment.            

Next up: Akcent, a band who I’ve previously chastised for their comic use of English. Their entirely enjoyable hit “King of Disco” is again evidence of their scant regard for the fundamentals of grammar. Exhibit one: (quote) “I'm a young single man at the age 25, Ex-communist, I search American life.” (unquote). It’s as though they’d entered a ‘how many mistakes can you squeeze into one sentence’ competition. If so, they’ve probably won first prize.

To be honest, I couldn’t figure out what was going on in the video – it appeared as though Ackent were performing in some kind of ‘peep-show’ for girls, though the appearance of some respectable middle-aged women rather detracted from what should have been a sexually charged setting. Akent also forgot that, unlike men, women NEVER go to sex shows to feel aroused, as the women in the video appear to be. They go to sex shows to have a damn good laugh at men and their comically shaped gentiles. If Akcent really wanted to do a peep-show video, they should have populated their audience with furtively masturbating homosexuals and gangs of drunk women with tears rolling down their faces in hysterical laugher. Wouldn’t that make a good video?

By this point, after a full afternoon in front of the TV, I started to lapse into a TV-induced coma. I can’t remember too much – there was a lot of Marius Moga, including the new video for Cream. Then there was the latest Simplu track “Mr Originality”, with a genuinely loveable clip based around a 1960’s style football match. What I do remember was that everything was far too slick and well-produced. It was horrible – I couldn’t find anything to dislike, even vaguely. And if you hadn’t noticed, I love hating things more than I like liking them. What happened to the embarrassingly bad videos you can’t watch without wanting to smash something? Fizz, where are you when we need you? I had three music channels at my disposal, and nothing, NOTHING, to ridicule. I couldn’t even summon up the energy to dislike 3SudEst, and found myself vaguely (vaguely) enjoying their single ‘Iubire’.

Thankfully, my day’s research paid off. I switched channels and found myself watching Taraf TV. It is, without a doubt, the best TV channel out there. It’s cooler than MTV. It’s more entertaining than the BBC. It’s a reminder of the days when music videos were good fun, didn’t take up nine minutes of your life, and were made on a budget equivalent to half a RATB ticket. I spent the next three hours glued to the screen, literally dizzy with laughter.
Labour saving? Time saving? You’ve got to be joking. Next month I’m going to make sure I collect my CDs on time…