FNMTV: Danity Kane, Bow Wow, Chromeo and Tokyo Police Club debut

I'm personally astonished that, until Bow Wow's forthcoming video for "Marco Polo," which debuts tonight on FNMTV, no one's made a hit song out of the chant from the ubiquitous but tedious swimming pool game. But I'm not at all surprised that Soulja Boy shows up on this version we caught at Wednesday night's taping, as it seems right up his alley: Take a nonsensical phrase (but this time, a historical reference!), repeat it ad infinitum over doofus synth loops, speed your way through the verses and hope no one notices that your rhymes break new ground in wackness ("This is not the Matrix, but I am the Oracle / Want to get with me? The question is rhetorical").

The "Marco Polo" video was supposed to be Bow Wow's big coming-out party as a grown-man (well, 21-year-old) rapper, so I'm sort of surprised he picked such a deeply obnoxious song with a Soulja Boy verse and hugely generic pool-party and video-vixen montage to accompany him. ("It's like an infomercial" said one of the talking heads, to great boos from the crowd and bored agreement from guest host Pink.) There was also some gratuitous line from either Mr. Wow or Mr. Boy about someone's girlfriend's forehead being on his abs.

But the big coming-out of this week's FNMTV will probably be Chromeo, whose new single "Momma's Boy" is probably the single funniest thing I've heard in 2008, and surely the first song glorifying the Oedipus complex to appear on MTV. The video is a riff on A-Ha's "Take on Me," and finds Pee Thug dreamily playing a grand piano while Dave One waxes ruefully about "You know you've got it bad / When you look into her eyes and all you really see is your mom." It's kind of sweet in a neurotic Larry David way, and of course the duo just murders the reverbed roto-tom, '80s ballad cheese they built their career on. I really hope this is a sleeper hit.

Which brings us to Danity Kane's new video for "Bad Girl," the night's third debut from the Diddy-assembled quintet. The song's actually not terrible -- it's built off a squiggly noise hook and has a bit of jungle-inflected drum loops veering all over the place. And they were able to buy a boilerplate Missy Elliott guest verse, which always helps everything.

The video, however, is a pretty catastrophic bit of "Batman" hype-jacking. I think one of the girls in the band mentioned that they had a comic book in the works that was to be " 'Sex & the City' meets 'Sin City,' " and while I would personally love to see Frank Miller draw a shadowy knife fight between Miranda and her doormat husband, this video only underscores how deeply Danity Kane fails at stripper-chic. They ride motorcycles through skyscrapers and halfheartedly kick some dudes in the head while accompanied by "Boff!" and "Wham!" title cards, and that's hard to do convincingly when you look like a goth version of Selma Blair in "A Dirty Shame."

The indie-punk quartet Tokyo Police Club closed the show with two songs off "Elephant Shell," their Saddle Creek debut, and while it was pretty weird to see such a little band with a gigantic cutout-block backdrop of their band name, I can see why they'll be a band-of-the-moment among MTV's last indie-kid holdouts. They're all cute as buttons in that over-bitten, college-bound white-boy way, and even though their tunes don't quite have the Top-40-quality hooks of their peers, the Shins or Death Cab for Cutie, they've got enough spunk to win some hearts, even if they totally botched their first run-through of the taping.

Also noted: a very pregnant (courtesy of the show's host Pete Wentz) and now redheaded Ashlee Simpson sat a couple of rows behind me, and I have to say, she looked pretty fantastic.

FNMTV airs tonight at 8 PST and EST.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Danity Kane; Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times