B.o.B.'s 'Magic': The Anti-Party Anthem

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Earlier in the summer, I expressed some reservations about B.o.B.'s music video trajectory. It's always so nice when artists do precisely what I wish they would do, especially when the result is the video for "Magic," a clip that among its other virtues, manages to make Weezer's Rivers Cuomo relevant again:



But the video, for all its joyful house-party vibe on the chorus, is a lot darker on the verses. It's not actually that great to have a gang of girls invade your house in hard-core party mode, particularly when you're worrying that you might be dead and failing to rouse your own corpse.

It's the second video this summer that's inverted the idea that partying is a lot of fun. Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" turned a club into a subtle nightmare, made being the wallflower hiding in the closet seem like a safer, more fun place to be. Party videos will never die. But sometimes, you just want a quiet morning in bed, and to be left entirely alone.
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Alyssa Rosenberg is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. She is the pop culture blogger for ThinkProgress, where she writes about the intersection of politics and culture at thinkprogress.org/alyssa. More

Alyssa Rosenberg is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. She is the pop culture blogger for ThinkProgress, where she writes about the intersection of politics and culture at http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa.

Alyssa is also a columnist for the Washington Monthly and The Loop 21. Her career as a critic began at 8, when she began a children's book review column for her local paper, taking payments in gift certificates to the neighborhood bookstore. Since then, her interests have expanded to include Atlanta hip-hop, procedural television shows, and action movies she watches without any sense of irony whatsoever. Her writing on culture has appearedin Esquire.com, The Daily, The Daily Beast and the American Prospect, and she has written about politics and the executive branch for Government Executive, The New Republic and National Journal.
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