In what can only be called a crime against hip hop, three new videos -- Notorious B.I.G.: Bigga Than Life, Tupac: Words Never Die and Rap: Soul of The Streets -- have been released with only LA's Baka Boyz left holding the bag for these hardly planned celluloid catastrophes that could be used by the Red Cross to induce vomiting in lieu of the Heimlich maneuver.

Whatever verve and spirit Nick V and Eric V may bring to their morning radio show, broadcast on LA's KPWR 105.9 (which is heavily advertised in all three videos) has dissipated into a cloud of foul smelling indo smoke. Each video opens with the Baka Boyz in the same location, wearing the same clothes, and from the looks of it at very close to within seconds of each other, seemingly having a private conversation that the viewer happens upon. If this was supposed to create intimacy and atmosphere, the director (who, somehow, omitted his name from the video's packaging) probably attended the ITT Technical Institute's Film School. LA's near-eternal sunshine forever marks the mid afternoon, as though the brothers V were grabbed from their normal lives to shoot this on the fly.

Don't expect any, "Hi, we're yadda yadda and this is yadda yadda," nuh uh. Heavily relying on information only insiders could know (when defining several terms that are idiosyncratic to hip hop, Prince Whipper Whip states, "You know what that means"), but presenting information so elementary and banal that only someone living under a snake in Borneo might not know it ("B.I.G. was from Brooklyn ... rap music comes from the streets", etc.), these videos insult those in the know to hip hop culture and those completely ignorant to it with equal zest and cluelessness.

The least irritating of the three (and possibly the funniest) is Rap: Soul of the Streets, which spent lots of time with Young MC (remember "Bust A Move?" Few people do, clearly) in the studio, possibly threatening yet another tonal goulash on the level of his sophomore Brainstorm. The headliners of this tape are Tracey Lee and Big Mike, but Mike is never actually spoken to (some corny white guy who directed a video of his is) and Tracey Lee has perhaps six minutes of the tape's fifty to himself.

It is a video about nothing, with no narrative structure nor agenda to push. A group of people -- some who may be important to you, most who probably aren't -- babble on about what they "think" or they "feel" about this or that aspect of rap for a brain-cell-killing, narcolepsy-causing fifty one minutes. The videos early attempts to discuss the different aspects of hip hop -- music, DJing, graf, and dancing -- degenerate into mindless opinionated babble that would even have Ricki Lake falling asleep on Maury Povich's shoulder within the first quarter of the piece.

The Tupac and B.I.G. tributes both feature some unnamed brother doing a great young Bryant Gumbel impersonation, gravely voicing over stock photos and shots from Shakur and Wallace's lives that we've all seen in the pages of magazines as well as on BET, etc. What is perhaps most insulting about them was the large number of people (notably Ikkor the Wolf, D-Roq and Simply Cookie, all claiming -- ewww -- Detroit as their bailiwick) who spent loads of time on camera, no one has ever heard of them or cares (Ikkor and D-Roq were spotted wandering around LA's annual African Marketplace in what appeared to be the exact same clothes) and rhyming ad nauseum ("Mommy, why are those no-name, no-talent, no-job havin' people on screen rapping on a tribute about people they don't know about any subject but the tribute's target?" "Because the rap game has taken over rap music, sweetie.") about their own insipid, retrograde styles, and crowding up the video with all the smarmy charm of a badly shot home video Bob Saget would consider déclassé.

The exact same "freestyle" sequence from a "roof in Hollywood" (according to Prince Whipper Whip, dressed up like Morris Day's ugly cousin) is used in both the B.I.G. and Tupac films, and both feature more than ten minutes of poorly done, repetitive and un-innovative freestyle sessions that have absolutely nothing to do with the subjects the videos are supposed to be about. Hey, if you're gonna get your goony mug in front of a camera, may as well blow twenty percent of the runtime on showcasing people who will only have a shot at a career after Pat Buchanan and C. Dolores Tucker finish their "Love Supreme" tour with Nubian M.O.B. and Kid & Play, right?

After several emergency meetings of Soul Review Boards from coast to coast (as well as several on other continents and a call in vote from the Mir space station), the Baka Boyz have been found guilty of the most heinous villainy of all -- getting pimped into using tawdry and fleeting local fame in collusion with shoddily pimping hip hop itself. Their sentence -- twelve years trapped on an island with Emmanuel Lewis, Ol' Dirty Bastard and motivational tapes by Fran Drescher -- is considered harsh but fair, and hopefully will serve as a deterrent from this sort of thing, ever, ever happening again. The audience of these videos is not made clear, but the verdict of the assembled heads is that hopefully, there'll be enough .45 caliber lobotomies to finish them and the people from Beast Video (which should be a huge tip off) before they reproduce.