VIDEO REVIEW : Prince, Lee Get Political in ‘Money’

“Mr. President, I don’t think you understand what’s goin’ on here,” says the angry unemployed-father protagonist of a new Spike Lee-directed music video, reciting an open letter to the Commander-in-Chief. “I can’t feed my family. . . . What am I supposed to do?”

Perhaps that transcription should read “I don’t think U understand” and “what am I supposed 2 do,” since the video in question is for the latest single from renegade grammarian Prince, caught here in a rare example of emphasizing the political over the prurient.

And the economy-themed love ballad provides the always-politicizing Lee a chance to get jabs in at his favorite Republican targets in the five-minute “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” (premiering Tuesday at 5 and 10 p.m. on MTV).

Lee’s framing link is a portrait of a family eating plain-label peanut butter and jelly for dinner. He also incorporates Depression-era footage, outtakes from the “Malcolm X” Third World shoot and plenty of mockingly ironic shots of the GOP privileged.

Most severe salvo: The director matches Prince’s line “All he finds is snakes in every color” with a glimpse of Gen. Colin L. Powell, whom Lee likes to vilify as a traitor to the black race.

For all the potency of the subject, and despite Lee’s original footage, the video feels like so much slapped-together archival material, and hardly indicative of his real talent. It’s not as slap-hazard, though, as a second “2 Night” video that edits some of Lee’s material together with a Prince lip-sync performance--and which will probably get the vast bulk of the MTV airplay after both clips premiere together Tuesday.