Another riveting Mark Romanek video. Yawn. (Before the year of our Lord 2004, what were the odds of Vincent Gallo and Rick freaking Rubin appearing on-screen together?) No, really, it's pretty great. As usual, the song comes to life in the video's editing, with drop-dead gorgeous imagery appearing on screen for a split-second as a matter of course. I know that Romanek gravitates toward Kubrickian character thrillers like One Hour Photo, but right now I'm wishing someone would give him about $120 million to make the ultimate hip-hop gangster musical. Or anything, really. Just make sure he has the money for all those camera set-ups.

Here's the thing: I caught "99 Problems" on MTV a few nights ago, where many of the song's expletives and epithets — notably including the repeated bitch — were dropped out of the vocals and the chorus sounded something like this: "I got 99 problems/But a b____ ain't one." OK, fine. But then a little later on the same channel, there was the new Jet video, "Cold Hard Bitch," resplendent in full B-word glory.

So what's the deal? My guess is that MTV has some policy whereby you can't use bitch as a generic term to refer to women. But it's OK if you use it as a specific term to detail your gripes about one particular woman. (Complaining about a group of bitches at your high school, or the bitches who run the office where you work, woud apparently fall into some kind of grey zone.) I suppose splitting hairs makes ideological sense, although it puts MTV in the notable position of censoring the one (black) artist while handing a pass to the other (white) one.

Never mind that it's just one shade this side of meaningless to blank out a single word as long as the song's or artist's allegedly misogynist sentiment remains. And never mind that the term is only offensive in the generic sense because it's offensive in the specific sense; in other words, the borderline sexual hostility of the Jet song is no less troublesome than the offhand street talk that characterizes the Jay-Z rap. I'm not really in favor of anyone's song being edited for airplay — the simple fact of Jay-Z's multiplatinum album sales should be enough to short-circuit any argument that he really violates "community standards" (whose community are we talking about, anyway?) — but I like the message that's being sent here even less than I like the edits. What a mess.

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