Welcome to Twosday on Another Flavor! Today’s topic is nerds.

Revenge of the Nerds always gets me. NERDS!

Anyways, today we will be talking about two songs that feature nerds. One has a bunch of turntable scratching and the other one is a rap song. As we learned from Revenge of the Nerds, almost everyone feels like a nerd. That means nerds instantly get our sympathy. We feel like outsiders. But are we really? Look at just how cartoon-ish movie nerds really are.

I Wish by Skee-Lo:

This video is about a man who wishes things were different. Why? Because he can’t get a date and is short. Also he is only able to have sons as children and he wishes he had a girl. If he did, he would call her:

Gotta love the constant “calling” hand gestures.

Anyways, this video is very physical. Skee-Lo feels tiny in a world filled with tall, good looking men. This makes him insecure. He can’t play basketball with them, but he keeps trying. I mean, look at him!

He’s like a tiny baby. How can he be so small? He has small hands and feet. I imagine his features are small as well.

His clothes don’t even fit. Apparently they don’t make clothes that fit such tinily proportioned people.

And he is a little dandy who can’t even see over the top of a table.

So, the video spends a lot of time emphasizing his smallness. He is much smaller than practically anyone really is. So why does he try to play basketball at all? He doesn’t need to. He could get involved in other pursuits, but he wants to play basketball just like the cool guys. This makes him feel like a loser. I think that is what makes him a loser. Trying to fit in even when he really doesn’t. Just relax, dude! Don’t try so hard!

Our other nerd video is Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus:

This video is a movie tie-in for Loser, which was a non- American-Pie-based Jason Biggs vehicle. I have never seen it but it seems to be in the same vein as Revenge of the Nerds except it is beloved by no one and hopefully doesn’t feature a main character raping a woman and having no consequences.

Yikes, Revenge of the Nerds.

The opens with what we in the biz call a “framing device”.

These keep your paintings protected and allow you to hang them on your wall. In this case Jason Biggs falls asleep and finds himself… in high school!

He rides a bike because only losers ride bikes. Real adults always drive cars [right into a Dunkin Donuts](http://www.nj.com/jjournal- news/index.ssf/2012/08/5_injured_after_car_crashes_in.html).

So why is this character a loser? It is a little less clear. Random dudes just come up to him and make that L sign at him.

Do people actually do that? This seems very unrealistic.

He gets knocked down.

And, in case you haven’t gotten the gist, sits in front of a sign that says “Loser”.

I don’t care about this guy, though. I don’t care about movie tie-in shit. Just like the Skee-Lo video, I want to see what the singer is all about. The singer of Wheatus is this man, whose name is (as far as I can tell) Jose Feliciano Wheatus:

This man is far nerdier than Jason Biggs could ever be. Look at how hard he is trying! That hat! That hat was cool for about 2 days in 1999 due to the New Radicals and his combination hipster glasses/sunglasses don’t manage to hit either the right nerdy or cool notes. It’s sad really.

Later, he is dressed like this:

Is that a track suit? And still with that hat. This man is a super nerd. Just like with Skee-Lo, the thing that makes him a loser is trying to fit in with the cools.

I’ll go ahead and say that he was being a nerd on purpose for this video. I guess he would have to be a nerd to write this song. He listens to Iron Maiden! What a totally obscure band only loved by nerds! I’m sure Iron Maiden lost money on all of their 37 albums, mostly released on major labels, because no one except losers listen to them.

That is wrong (I was using a literary technique called sarcasm because I am a dick). While Iron Maiden is terrible, tons of people like them! I’d say about half of the people you meet like Iron Maiden. Does that mean that 50% of people are nerds? I guess. That’s sort of the whole point. Everyone is a nerd. That’s why Ogre joins the nerds in Revenge of the Nerds 2. It’s just that almost no one is a nerd like the guys in these videos. These guys are, like, super nerds. To the max.

Due to the holiday I will not be posting tomorrow, but I’ll be back for Sartorial Sursday!

-PTD

What is it about mental hospitals that holds such fascination for us? Is it because we all feel like outsiders? Is it because we love the idea of being able to spend our entire day in pajamas? Is it because mental hospitals ceased to exist in the 1980s? All of these are excellent reasons.

I think it is clear, though, that we all have our own, individual reasons for being drawn to them. You can see this in these two radically different music videos that take place in a mental hospital.

First we have Melissa Etheridge’s video for Come to My Window:

First off, I just noticed while watching this video that this song has the smarmiest bass playing in the world. Seriously, listen to this song and imagine the bass player smirking and winking at you while playing. I guarantee that it will fit perfectly.

The video is all in black and white and centers on this woman in a room with a window to which you should come.

The black and white video along with her angry and intense matter suggests a gritty reality. I’m a little worried that this video plays into the mentally- ill-women-are-sexy-and-vulnerable stereotype, but it doesn’t seem too exploitative in that direction.

We also get shots of Melissa Etheridge playing a 12-string acoustic guitar and singing.

I love how husky her voice is on this song! It’s like she smoked two packs of cigarettes, spent an hour imitating Rod Stewart imitating Louis Armstrong, and then recorded this song. It’s a little unclear what that amp is doing there since she is playing acoustic guitar and it doesn’t look like it is a P.A., but whatever. Gives her someplace to sit.

The worrying thing about this video is the infantilization of the woman in the mental hospital.

I understand that she can’t take care of herself and might say things that don’t strictly make sense, but she isn’t a child. She is an adult woman. What is with this drawing? It looks like the scribbles of a pre-school child with a crazy sun. I don’t understand this sun especially since the song refers to the light of the moon. I’ve never seen the moon drawn like that. Is that the norm? Just draw a sun and then scribble inside of it? Not to mention that the moon doesn’t actually have light, it is all reflected sunlight. Astronomy, people. It’s important.

Green Day has the opposite approach in their video for Basket Case. Rather than suggesting true reality with black and white, Green Day uses colors brighter than reality to indicate the false world of a person on drugs.

The video opens in a colorful world with the singer alone. It’s not entirely clear where he is, but the man in all white standing next to him with his arms crossed gives a hint.

Once the other band members arrive it becomes clear that they are in a mental hospital. They act confused and need prodding to perform their normal societal roles.

The drugs they take give a semblance of reality and normalcy, but everything is not quite right. The singer’s eyes are too green and the floor is too turquoise. The video seems to make light of being in a mental hospital a little bit, but I think the song is about feeling numb to the world. The question, “Am I just stoned?” appears throughout the song because they can’t separate their feelings from how the drugs make them feel. That seems scary.

I think these videos show two different serious views of the mentally ill. And that’s a little surprising. Is this a public service announcement to hug a mentally ill person? Are we the insane ones and they the only truly sane? Is it time to eat lunch yet? Not quite. It is too early.

-PTD

Welcome to Twosday on Another Flavor! Twosday is when we compare two music videos with something in common.

Today we’ll be glancing at two videos about mechanization. As machines become part of our lives, how does that affect us as people?

First, Cars by Gary Numan:

In cars, Numan states that the only way to live is in cars. His appearance is cold and unemotional.

You imagine he would look the same waiting in line to buy milk, having sex, or killing someone. If you said, “Nice day,” to him he would look at the sky to ascertain whether the day was nice or not. The dude has no mercy.

When you see his band it is a bunch of identical dudes playing identical synthesizers.

I love the one guy who plays the hand clap noise. He occasionally just slams on the synth.

Gary Numan becomes the machine. That is his response to mechanization. What about Yello? Check out the video for Bostitch:

Okay, so first off this video is probably one of the best ever made. The guy in the video? He is actually an eccentric German millionaire. If I love anything, it is art made by eccentric German millionaires. If I love two things it is art made by eccentric German millionaires and my wife.

Yello do not become the machine, although they love machines. The words at the beginning are, “Standing at the machine everyday for all my life. I’m used to do it and I need it. It’s the only thing I want. It’s just a rush, push, cash.” The awkwardness of “I’m used to do it,” makes me happy. German millionaires don’t need to speak English well.

Rather than cold and unemotional, the man in the video is decidedly un- machine-like.

That hat indicates that he is “just folks”, not an elitist engineer or a machine. No machine would combine that hat with a shirt, tie, and suspenders. Few people would, either, but that is beside the point.

Rather than being accompanied by a band, the music we hear in the video remains a mystery. We have no idea how it is made, on what instruments or by how many people. The only other person who appears is this woman who is clearly also a mystery:

Her question mark hair is amazing, though.

Eventually the man rebels against the machination of his life. “Everybody needs somebody sometimes,” he shouts.

“N’est-ce pas?” he then asks, slyly.

The sheer insanity that went in to the making of this song and video is unbelievable. Yello was on Ralph Records which is the record label owned by The Residents. They are the weirdos pictured here:

That explains some of it, but I don’t think the video is weirdness for weirdness’s sake. Yello envisions a man who needs to work at a machine, but he also needs somebody. His time with a machine has left him socially inept, not even aware of what clothing normal humans wear. He still needs someone, though. Is it a woman? He no longer knows. It’s haunting, really.

I know I’ll be thinking of this man always.

I think there is something wrong with me, though, because I want to be just like him. Man, eccentric German millionaires.

I hope you enjoyed this Twosday. I’ll see you tomorrow with a post about a single video from the early 1990s.

-PTD