Idolator

Last night, a few dozen UHF viewers got a little taste of international glamour at the World Music Awards, where America's pop elite and a bunch of foreigners were airlifted to Monte-Carlo to prove that middle-aged white people awkwardly bumping asses to "Ayo Technology" transcends borders. Or something. The WMAs' Model U.N. included winners Rihanna, DJ David Guetta, 50 Cent, Mika, and basically whoever else had bothered to turn up, but it turned out we were the real winners, because the show was really celebrating us for "buying albums and legally downloading." (RIAA propaganda is apparently also universal.) See, we thought the real winners were lovers of exaggerated comedy accents; if you were a fan of frighteningly stern supermodels who sound like they're hunting moose and squirrel or beefy rugby players who sound like Charo, this was the awards show for you.

Our headline was actually one out of the several hundred text messages that scrolled across a video ticker high above the stage at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, when a sold-out crowd of tweens and teens (and Idolator) took in the pop chart mish-mash of New York radio station Z100's annual Jingle Ball, and the junior high horndogs who sent in that text weren't talking about James Brown's sidemen, but the Jonas Brothers, the pre-fab pop-punk puppy dogs fresh off a leg of the Hannah Montana tour. All night, the mere mention of the Brothers' names prompted screams so loud you'd think the arena had spontaneously popped a collective cherry, and for four hours, hundreds of exclamation point-riddled messages pledged love to one Brother or another, though usually more along the lines of a chaste hug than fellatio. And taken against the rest of the evening's performances, America's squealing affection towards Disney's latest attempt to bail out the industry (for at least another 12 months) wasn't necessarily misplaced.

Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is the most-watched music video on YouTube (63 million plays of the unembeddable official version alone! Seriously!), and peoples' desire to see a nerdy version of her get constantly foiled has apparently spilled over into the on-demand cable world. It's been crowned as the most-watched video of 2007 by the cable service Music Choice, which has launched its lengthy "favorite videos of the year" package, supposedly determined by the number of on-demand streams each video received. The lists after the jump, but first a few scattered reactions.

THE GOOD: Well, it did introduce me to a new social-networking-related novelty song, C-Side's "MySpace Freak." And "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Trapped In The Drive-Thru" won the Funniest Video prize, although I do wish that the clip was live-action and not animated.
THE BAD: There are so many classifications that these lists don't count down the "best" videos as much as they semi-haphazardly list "videos that were available on Music Choice during 2007 in handy list format." Example: the Best Hip-Hop/R&B Video went to T-Pain's "Buy U A Drank." The Best Rap Video award was won by Huey's "Pop, Lock & Drop It"... but No. 1 on the Top Five Hip-Hop Videos list was the Jim Jones ultramegaremix of "We Fly High." Mixed messages much?
THE WHAAAA? The top 20 Pop/Rock videos were broken down into four segments, and one was hosted by will.i.am. (Whose videos, it will probably not shock you to learn, were not on the countdown.) Anyway, he said "y'alls" a lot, and tried really really hard to extend his 15 minutes by giving extended treatises on the number nine (it's apparently "divine," just like Fergie) and letting the world know that the Black Eyed Peas are not breaking up. I guess it could have been worse—he could have brought out Nicole Scherzinger. But it was still public access-level cringeworthy.