Recession stories: Many people have 'em, and some are worse than others. Here's one from local funnymen Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits about the sad, shitty things one must do to make rent. Shitty, like, literally: "Blues Turn Brown" finds Mr. Ebola rather depressed by the piles of mutt feces whose removal has now become his occupation. The video finds the bandmembers working in a grocery store, contemplating theft, and impersonating elderly ladies in order to poach a bottle of wine. It's pretty funny. And it's catchy enough that you might find yourself humming about "scooping up dog shit from my uncle's lawn" for a good portion of the day. Also, it has dogs -- lots of dogs:

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As settings for music videos go, this is one of the more interesting ideas we've seen: S.F. MC A-1 (aka Adam Traore) filmed this video for "Double Dose" in the streets of San Francisco right after the Giants won the World Series. Amid the toilet-paper-throwing and sign-waving and Henny-passing, there are fires, vandalized buses, and some seriously grouchy members of the San Francisco Police Department. Things get dicey a few times, especially toward the end, but A-1 keeps his cool, rhyming pretty much on-lyric throughout the whole thing despite many, many distractions. It makes for a good rap video, but "Double Dose" is almost more interesting as a street-level document of what really happened the night in 2012 that the Giants won it all:

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Robots on Ocean Beach!

What would happen if District 9 happened in the City the by the Bay? It'd look something like this new clip for "My Revenge," from local rockers King Loses Crown. The super high-quality clip shows a San Francisco ruled by robots -- they're in the Japanese Tea Garden, on the streets of the Mission, in the dirty bathroom of your favorite bar. And they're, well, kinda scary. The clip was directed by Jim Mitchell, who did the visual effects for films like the Harry Potter series, Sleepy Hollow, and Jurassic Park III, so the robot street people and robots making out are unsettlingly vivid. King Loses Crown provides the driving, industrial-rock soundtrack to one of the best local music videos we've seen all year. Check it out:

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New genre: Pug Metal?

Well this is pretty funny: It turns out pugs -- those wrinkly little dogs you see everywhere in San Francisco -- have a metal streak. These little canine buggers can howl and scream louder than Dave Mustaine at a party of Metallica-loving liberals.

Don't believe us? Just check out this video, which features pugs screaming their little hearts out over the kinds of death metal fury we thought only humans could handle. We never knew the little dogs had so much angst -- or lung capacity.

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What happens when you decide to shoot an entire rap video inside a moving tour van filled with people and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire? This fun new clip for "Speaker," by local MC A-1 and featuring Roach Gigz, will give you some idea: Lots of bouncing, sleeping, masked men passing bottles, and, for the viewer, some rather stomach-churning camera movement.

But screw the nausea, because "Speaker" is worth it just for A-1's syrupy flow and Roach Gigz's irrepressible silliness. (Note the part where lip-synching breaks down.) And director WooStaar's on-screen verbiage and busted-VHS aesthetic give this tour van vid a fresh look. Next time you see a big van full of rappers passing you on the freeway, just hope they're having this much fun:

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Brian Firenzi in "Why Doesn't MTV Play Music Videos Anymore?"

Maybe you remember the hilarious video we (and lots of others) posted earlier this week, in which a (fake) MTV executive answered a question that bugs many of us: Why doesn't MTV play music videos anymore?

Brutally, cruelly funny -- and probably way too accurate -- the clip made by Brian Firenzi and Maria Del Carmen has officially gone viral. It's been posted on Gawker, made the front page of Reddit, and got responses from both Tommy Lee and MTV itself. While Firenzi's sketch comedy videos typically get 10,000 to 20,00 views, this one has so far been seen more than 1.2 million times.

To find out what inspired the video, how it came together, and what he really thinks of MTV, we fired off a few questions to Firenzi via email. Turns out he really does wish the channel would still play music videos.

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Not a nice "MTV exec"

Remember when MTV's name was a straightforward summary of what the network showed, and not a cruel joke? Remember how long you've been bitching about that?

Well, prepare to get skewered. In this YouTube satire, a fan asks a fake MTV exec why the network doesn't play music videos anymore, and instead fills its airwaves with embarrassing reality TV. And the assholific "MTV Exec" (not really) who answers her has more than few stinging replies, especially for you '80s babies. Our favorite line: "Do you have such a lady-boner for Mumford and Sons that you need to see them tumbling out of one more screen in your house?"

So, yeah, it's like that. The sad part is, most of the reasons in here are probably correct.

See also:
* MTV at 30: The Top 10 Most Controversial Music Videos (NSFW)

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It's hard to say what's better about this new video for Ramon and Jessica's "The Beginning of the End of the Empire": the song itself, which is a gorgeous a capella tune carried through lovely verses by only the words and sounds of their singer's voices, or the video, which might be brilliant. Dina Maccabee and Jesse Olsen Bay (the real names of the artists) play an anchor and reporter during a fake newscast covering what seems to be the beginning of the end of the world: war, protest, missile strikes, presidential speeches. The video smartly incorporates the lyrics to the song, even placing the "bum" and "khe" sounds that serve as percussion into the news ticker at the bottom of the screen.

Shot by Jim Granato, it's a brilliant send-up of our media-saturated, breaking-news-alert-addicted culture. And the fact that this clever video carries a pretty song makes it only better. Check out the video, and below that find a stripped-down clip of Ramon and Jessica performing the song sans effects or characters of any kind.

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Days after San Francisco's own DaVinci dropped a brand-new album for free -- the dense and delightful The MOEna Lisa -- here's a new video for the bumpin' track "In My City," which might be the best bit of Sucka Free City eye-candy we've seen all year. Shot in gorgeous black and white, the Tim Jieh-directed video has this Fillmore rapper reppin' his home hood along with other lovely S.F. locales like North Beach and Twin Peaks. He even ventures out of town to Oakland and Vallejo, grabbing cameos from the likes of Main Attrakionz and others along the way.

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Your guess is as good as ours.

Okay so maybe our brains are ruined from imbibing too much cablehead punditry and other toxic substances during election fever last night. But this new song/video from Kreayshawn affiliate/White Girl Mobber Lil Debbie, punctually entitled "Michelle Obama" and featuring the tattooed hashtag windbag known as Riff Raff, is just not making any sense at all. Hopefully (for our and their sake) that's the point -- that a refrain like "Presidential tint/ Michelle Obama/ Frozen femurs in your freezer/ Jeffrey Dahmer" is so comically absurd on its face that anyone with a better grasp on reality than us right now wouldn't even bother trying to extract any literal meaning out of it.

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