Dru Hill, "Love M.D." (And The Mastery Of R&B Ridiculousness)

The millions-selling Baltimore R&B; quartet Dru Hill are set to return in April with their first new album in eight years. Original members Sisqo, Nokio and Jazz are joined by a new member, Tao, who replaces Skola, who replaced original member Woody in 2000. The album is called InDRUpendance Day, a title that would probably be worth a post of its own. (If only to serve as a reminder that the folks who brought the world Sisqo’s monumental solo smash “The Thong Song” haven’t lost their sense of the ridiculous.) But even better, they’ve made a video for a new single, “Love M.D.”

A Dru Hill video is always worth repeated viewings. Dru Hill videos are bananas. State-of-the-art when it comes to the kind of over-the-top, they-can’t-be-serious, deep-schlock cheese that R. Kelly would lift to operatic new heights with the Trapped In the Closet series. So let’s take it from the top. Here’s what happens:

1) We learn in the intro, which is set to a different song, that a friend of the group has been at some sort of party where a stripper sat on his lap and fed him ice-cream. A video of the incident exists and the woman this man shares his mansion with watches it on his lap top while he’s sleeping on the couch. So she assaults him with a golf club. Having somehow survived the attack, the man runs out of the house.

2) Dru Hill dance and sing in the foyer. Jazz summarizes the song’s meaning, though with words that seem to understate the seriousness of the situation: “Need an opinion, unbiased, someone to talk to/An outsider, someone who understands what we’re going through/Lack of communication’s breeding this separation/And I don’t wanna lose you!”

3) The man creeps back into the house while his woman is sleeping. She wakes up and throws a wine glass at him. He ducks. They argue and grapple and she falls down. (He has maybe pushed her down?)

4) Tao takes a bath in a tub surrounded by candles and rose petals, and gets a back massage from a different woman.

5) The man and his girlfriend both cry.

6) Sisqo does a crazy sort of Matrix-bullet-dodging-sequence version of the moonwalk. He is a good dancer.

7) The woman’s make-up is smeared. The man has a split lip and a sore jaw and is missing a tooth. Presumably the results of the bludgeoning with the golf club.

8) The woman looks at the man. Her eye twitches, her lip curls. The man looks at the woman. He mouths the words, “I love you,” and begins to crawl across the floor, on his fists, to where she’s lying on the couch. Stopping about halfway there, he reaches out to her. She reaches her hand back to him. They have to really stretch, though, because they are at least four or five feet away from each other. And moving in slow motion. Finally, their fingers touch. And I don’t know whether it’s more like the Sistine Chapel or E.T. or the end of that wonderful new Erykah Badu video. But, wow, bananas!

Despite that, and despite the lyrics, I like the song. I like the big organ chords that drive the melody and the guys’ voices sound gritty and strong. I like it much more than I like most Dru Hill songs. To be honest, though, there is really only one other Dru Hill song that I like. But I don’t just like it. I love it. As remixed by Jermaine Dupri, and featuring him and Da Brat, the So So Def remix of 1996’s “In My Bed” is one the great jams of R&B;’s bling era. I think of it like Ginuwine’s “Pony” or Blackstreet’s “No Diggity”-songs that rise above a genre that has too often seemed wilted beneath the dominant shadow cast by Kelly.

On the same album, their epynonomous debut, another song, “I Never Make a Promise,” fell far too far into Boyz II Men territory. The video, though, supplied the edge. Maybe too much edge. Borrowing notes from “Janie’s Got a Gun” and The Cider House Rules or Eve’s Bayou, the milquetoast love song is depicted as a horrific story about alcoholism and incest. And Sisqo brings a pet tiger to a backyard family picnic.

Similarly, “5 Steps” takes a pretty standard gospel tune and turns it into a very dramatic, very confusing tragedy-this one seemingly about coming of age, loyalty, love and martyrdom. Sisqo forgets his gym bag at a basketball court and it somehow leads to his friend being killed in a Backdraft-style explosion after saving two children from a burning building. A white dove symbolizes the fallen hero’s soul ascending to heaven.

Lastly, and best and worst of all, in what plays as both an ill-conceived homage to and a genius-level spoof of the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle based on Alexandre Dumas’ 150-year-old classic The Man In the Iron Mask, the video for 1998’s “These Are the Times” finds Nokio, Jazz and Woody dressed up the like the three musketeers, helping a bodice-ripping damsel save the blonde-haired good Sisqo, who has been unjustly imprisoned, and masked, by the evil, brown-haired Sisqo, who is his twin brother, and Louis XIV, the king of France. There is lots of hammy acting, choreographed sword fighting and hats that push right past any notion of fashion or taste and into the purple-feathered sublime.