What do Wiz Khalifa and I Have in Common?

I kinda figured that Outkast’s “Hey Ya” (you know, “shake it like a Polaroid picture”) would be the swan song for Pola-pop. I wasn’t even close, though. A few weeks ago I posted about Allo Darlin’s “The Polaroid Song,” and not one but two more videos have lately celebrated everyone’s favorite snapshot medium. Both songs, by odd coincidence, are just called “Polaroid.”

One’s by a mononymic singer named Vali, freshly signed to Rostrum Records (home to the hip-hop star Wiz Khalifa). She spends part of the video wielding a pink-and-gray 600-series camera, probably from the early 1990s, that just may be older than she is.

The other is much poppier and more whimsical, and is by Skyler Stonestreet. She’s one of those artists who’s become adept at working around the collapsed hulk of the music industry, gaining some national traction on her own (mostly via social networking) without a record label. She bats her eyelashes a lot.

Stonestreet’s video is built around one of the new Grey Label cameras from the current Polaroid, which do not use traditional film, and the little white-bordered photos it produces are all over this clip. Between that and the slickness of the video, I am guessing (based entirely on circumstantial evidence) that she got a little money from Polaroid toward the filming. I don’t begrudge her a bit: If Old Polaroid gave tons of film and cameras to artists and kids, no reason New Polaroid shouldn’t be in the same game. Besides, how can you argue with a cheery pop song?