I'm still coming to terms with the time that I saw Shaggy open for the Rolling Stones. He was the opening act for a portion of one of the legs of their endless tours, and sitting there in a half full arena in South Florida watching Shaggy play to an audience that had very little knowledge of who he was or what he wanted from them haunts me to this day. A 40 year old woman next to me had a flask.

But Shaggy shouldn't feel bad, because at the turn of the new century, Shaggy was not just making very popular songs, he was making really fun, bare comprehensible popular songs. So today we're watching his video for "It Wasn't Me" from 2000, featuring RikRok and directed by Stephen Scott.

The premise of this video mirrors the premise of the song: RikRok got caught cheating on his girlfriend, and he is asking Shaggy for advice. Shaggy has a simple solution - just say it wasn't you (brilliant). In the song, this defense seems a little far fetched because it is implied that his girlfriend saw them having sex, but in the video, RikRok goes to Shaggy's mansion and the story is told via an ostensible flashback earlier in the day, where RikRok's girlfriend observes him cheating via a video phone contraption (never in person). Also of note is the fact that Shaggy lives in a mansion and apparently is in charge of a network of CIA agent style people who are also beautiful women.

This is where it gets confusing. The first and last shots are the same thing: RikRok walking up to Shaggy's mansion and saying goodbye to someone. At the beginning of the video we don't know who that is, but as we learn by the end, he is saying goodbye to the truck driver that helped him escape his girlfriend finding out that he cheated. This is all possible because Shaggy texted RikRok to tell him to leave the place that he was cheating on his girlfriend in because his girlfriend was coming to confront him.

The issue with this is in the beginning of the video, Shaggy seems to have no idea what RikRok wants or what is going on, but we are supposed to believe that Shaggy has been actively monitoring RikRok enough to know when he is about to get discovered cheating, and then orchestrate an entire network of people to get him out of the situation. This, of course, makes no sense.

This is a bit of a magic xylophone problem, but unless I'm completely misinterpreting this video, this is kind of a weird problem to create for yourself. The issue is presumably that the actual track has dialogue in the beginning that is adapted for his video. The dialogue had to be used, but it didn't really fit into the concept. That apparently wasn't really an issue and they went for it, and I don't think anyone cares outside of IMVDb.

That being said, this video is a fun look back at the obsession that US movies and music videos had with gadgets and fake technology during the late 1990s, early 2000s. Plus its a song about infidelity that everyone can enjoy.

Adam Fairholm is the co-founder and lead developer of IMVDb. You can find him on twitter at @adamfairholm.