Tomorrow’s news today: recapping FNMTV’s upcoming T.I., No Age and Day 26 premieres

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

First, we get Rihanna opening the show with "Take a Bow," which is a workable cheating-man dressing-down, even if I prefer her icy robot disco. The line about the sprinklers coming on while he's pleading from her lawn is always a hoot. She's also about a foot taller than host Pete Wentz (even more so in stilettos) and he pretty much had to talk to her clavicles the whole time.

Wentz, the de facto frontman of Fall Out Boy, is still obviously getting used to talking to an audience singlehandedly, but it's kind of rad to see him treat T.I. and No Age with the same bro-down affability. Kid Sister is even better as the show's critical peanut gallery. Wentz catches a lot of flak for doing things like proposing to Ashlee Simpson, but at the end of the day he's an earnest fan and good at being famous (and, little known fact, a distant relative of Colin Powell!).

Speaking of T.I., he's at that crucial point in a rap career where, after pulling a supremely dumb stunt, he needs a radio hit like, yesterday. "T.I. vs T.I.P." had a few slinky, snarly moments but didn't do nearly as well as "King" for a reason. His new single, "No Matter What," sadly, probably won't correct that. It's his obligatory I'm-still-in-the-game anthem, and while the shot of him in rubber-band handcuffs was pretty harrowing, the song is loping and misses those triumphant DJ Toomp synths. For a song about reclaiming his throne, T.I. doesn't sound too excited by the prospect. He needed something with snap and sass to get back all over the radio, which is where he belongs, but this track just isn't it.

No Age, on the other hand, were practically punching themselves in the face with giddiness. And, by golly, I don't think they were kidding. Randy Randall and Dean Spunt falling to their knees to hi-five the kids a few minutes after T.I. left the stage was one of those throwback MTV moments of weirdness that FNMTV is trying to resurrect. I saw Randy playing doofus thrash metal with the New No Age tribute band at Pehrspace a few weeks ago, and he approached his conversation with Pete Wentz on a billion-dollar sound stage with the same level of enthusiasm. "Eraser," the first single off the fantastic LP "Nouns," is an awfully weird song for this audience -- it's about 75% intro, with a jagged little guitar riff and atmospherics taking their sweet time to build into anything like an actual song, but the audience seemed to appreciate that they were being toyed with and were rowdier than they were for T.I.'s video. And there's really no way T.I. can compete with a car-sized paper mache skull and Randy being (apropos of nothing) hit in the face with a bag of flour. Everyone in the room seemed to get behind the artful D.I.Y.-ness of it all -- "Public aid, holla!" remarked Kid Sister -- and that bodes really well for these guys making the transition into a screwy but influential band outside the basement-show circuit. Wentz asked Dean about Phil Collins' influence on him as a singing drummer. "I call him Big Phil, he's my sugar daddy," Spunt gushed. I fully expect Timbaland to be championing these guys within a year.

Day 26, Diddy's latest "Making the Band" band, is a pretty straightforward New Jack Swing nod to the mid '90s. They run a pretty tight ship on harmonies and the dude who looks exactly like Sean Kingston wrote what looked like "Hate War" in electrical tape on the back of his jacket, which is a pretty rad gesture for a Diddy-manufactured All 4 One throwback. That said, their debut video was for a song called "Since You've Been Gone," which is like calling your novel "For Who the Bell Tolls."

Maroon 5 is turning out to be one of the great cad-rock bands of our time, and the more frat-funk songs they write about how many hearts they break (and how little they give a care), the better. I'm not sure what Rihanna's doing on the single remix -- the sex-war duet idea needs a female voice that packs some knives, which is Beyonce's forte, but they ably pulled it off live as one of those pop worlds-collide moments. It wasn't cameras following Lil Wayne onto his bonkers tour bus, but it bodes well for MTV's ability to thread the needle of the celebrity-industrial complex with a bit of pretty decent new music. I'll keep watching.

--August Brown

Photo by Chris Polk / Getty Images