Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 09/23/2011 at 3:24 PM Videos

The Popdust Files: b.o.b, lil wayne, spoiler alert, strange clouds

With increasing frequency, artists are taking to social networks and premiering frustratingly brief teaser clips from their upcoming videos. These are usually between zero and 45 seconds in length and tend to do two things: leave you wanting more video, and leave you wanting fewer teasers. We can’t address the latter. What we can do, however, is help with the former, so, based solely on the preview, Popdust will miraculously predict what transpires in the unseen full-length video.

Today’s video teaser: B.o.B and Lil Wayne’s collaboration, “Strange Clouds.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhOxmKys17I

Run-length: 40 seconds

Summary: B.o.B and his extreme-close-up hand twiddle with some production knobs. On screen appears one of those green cotton-candy visualizations, which turns out to be a miniature of the STRANGE CLOUDS! visible from the observation deck because B.o.B was at an observation deck all this time. First he turns the volume up into the red. Then he turns it up into the purple, which means bass and vocals and B.o.B moving around a bit. Then everything fades away into smoke and mystery. There is no Lil Wayne. Also, “strange clouds” probably means marijuana smoke.

What could come next: More fiddling with more vaguely producer-y gadgetry, some of which might even match up to what’s going on in the music. The visualizer doodle goes on the fritz, mirroring how the clouds start to swirl and coalesce and eventually take the form of Lil Wayne, finally. He does his verse–he’ll probably only get one verse–as the clouds also turn into the strange, wonderful things that brought B.o.B from mixtapes to music-video spaceships: endless song and mix titles, Bruno Mars and his excellent hair, airplanes, Rivers Cuomo, various awards. As the track goes on, they’ll get bigger and crowd the room more and more, and it’ll all be sort of menacing. Then, because this is the end of a music video, B.o.B’ll come to right outside a building owing about $1,060.