I’ve been watching a lot of romantic comedies recently. By “a lot,” I mean “all of them.” Everything from “A” (Adam’s Rib) to “Z” (Zack and Miri Make a Porno). Technically, I started even before “A,” with 10 Things I Hate About You and 27 Dresses. And just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve edited together some of the most awww-inducing moments in Hollywood history.

In the 40 Inspirational Speeches montage, those speeches weren’t actually the climaxes of their films. They were what got the characters fired up to take on the opposing army/rival team/preppy frat house. But in a romantic comedy, the big speech is the main event. You have two people who clearly love each other (that much was obvious from the poster). But for some reason, one of them is taking that job in Hong Kong and/or getting back together with Chad (curse you, preppy frat house!). There’s only one thing to do: run across town, show up panting in the nick of time, and pour your heart out. I find it comforting that even in this age of 3D CGI madness, the denouement of a romantic comedy is almost always a big block of dialogue.

You might even say that these climactic speeches are the whole point of a romantic comedy. We want to see someone bridge that gap between “it will never work” and “happily ever after,” armed only with the power of words. And the way you cross that chasm is by not caring if you fall. You have to lose your cool, drop your guard, and swing for the fences. It’s interesting that there’s often an element of public humiliation to these declarations. In Keeping the Faith, Ben Stiller has to woo Jenna Elfman via speakerphone, with her whole office listening. In Hitch, Will Smith stops Eva Mendes from leaving town by jumping in front of her car. In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey actually interrupts the girl’s wedding to another man, and does his whole “I’ve loved you forever” monologue right there in the church (he is eventually punched). In Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise arrives home to find his living room full of strange women, but he barely hesitates. “If this is where it has to happen,” he says, “then this is where it has to happen.” And that is exactly the point. These men don’t give speeches like this because it comes naturally to them. They do it because love has left them no other choice.

These people are not just expressing love, they are putting themselves at risk. And it’s that combination of what they say and what it took to say it that lifts us up where we belong.

THE RULES: Characters must be speaking directly to their beloved (no talking to a third party), no actor can speak more than once (but some people did appear more than once), no TV shows (even though Spike had an amazing speech in the finale of Buffy).

NUMBER OF CLIPS I STARTED WITH: 285

CATEGORIES I ORGANIZED THEM INTO: Basic I Love You, Compliments, How I Feel, Forever, Random

CLIP MY GIRLFRIEND REALLY WANTED ME TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Singles. “You… belong… with… ME!”

CLIP I REALLY WANTED TO INCLUDE THAT I HAD TO CUT: Conan the Barbarian. “If I were dead and you were still fighting for life, I’d come back from the darkness, back from the pit of hell to fight at your side.”

EDIT I’M PROUDEST OF: In The Notebook, the two characters are standing right at the edges of the frame. The problem is that I had to cut out the edges of the frame to crop the clip to 16:9. So I used my After Effects kung fu to actually remove the MIDDLE of the frame. See?

Before.

After.

ORIGINAL FINAL CLIP: The Simpsons. Marge: “Best kiss of my life.” Homer: “Best kiss of your life so far!”

UPDATE, 11/13, 12 pm: After I pushed this live, someone pointed out a neat coincidence. The two final clips are the big Titanic kiss, followed by Sam, the little blond kid from Love Actually. This totally didn’t occur to me, but Sam is a huge romantic movie buff. At one point in Love Actually he actually watches and acts out that very scene from Titanic. Things like that happen when you edit.

And thank you Pasteur for reminding me that Patrick Dempsey and Patrick Duffy are two different people.

Related Posts

• Episode 151: Closing Be Always
• Episode 137: Re-Gagafication
• The Walking Extinct
• Episode 126: They’ll Get Past It
• Episode 107: A Dragonball Z Solution to an Inception Problem

While at New York Comic-Con, I took some time out from gawking at costumes, dancing Ghostbusters, and a Quidditch tournament to chat with Overthinking It reader and author Daniel Wallace. Daniel is the New York Times-bestselling writer of two dozen books including Star Wars: The Jedi Path, The Marvel Encyclopedia, and The Art of Superman Returns. In other words, he’s an Overthinker of the highest degree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpIsYHccWgo

We talked mostly about his two in-universe Star Wars Books, The Jedi Path and the The Book of Sith (coming soon, complete with super evil pyramid case). Dan also gives a hearty Vader “NOOOOOOO!” at the end of the interview, which, given that he wrote an entire book about Vader’s anatomy, is probably as accurate of a recreation you can get without a mechanical breathing apparatus.

You can get your own copy of The Jedi Path and pre-order The Book of Sith on Amazon.com. Check out the rest of Daniel’s books here.

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• New York Comic-Con 2011: #ZombifyWallStreet
• Episode 172: Johnny Appleseed’s Seed-Shooting Gatling Gun
• NY Comic-Con 2011: Costume Photo Gallery
• Overthinking It at New York Comic-Con 2011
• Episode 119: Negative Capability

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WNSO8N5Pe8

A few more final thoughts:

In Starcraft II, the in-game resources are minerals and gas. The game constrains how much of these you can get, so to exceed these limits, you have to use out-of-game resources, like time and attention. The game doesn’t put the same constraints on your out-of-game resources, so you can get a big advantage in the game by bringing out-of-game resources into the game.

The life lesson here is, when you’re pursuing a goal, identify what game you’re playing, what you’re trying to accomplish and what the constraints on your resources are in that game. Then, you can look to push the limits and do better in that game by applying your out-of-game resources, which often aren’t subject to the same limits.

This is often more productive than seeing all resources as interchangeable, because that way of thinking about spending resources doesn’t focus as much on your goals and what you are trying to accomplish.

Thanks again to Joe Wade for playing Starcraft II with me for this one! If you want to play a game with me for illustrative purposes, email me at fenzel@overthinkingit.com. And if you have any examples of this phenomenon in your own life, or if you have a better name for this series, let me know in the comments!

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• The North American Star League and eSports
• The Awful, Sexist Plot of Starcraft 2
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I was pretty happy with how the song turned out, but I’ve always thought it would have worked even better as a music video. Thankfully, our recent performance at ImprovBoston’s Geek Week provided me with the occasion to do so.

So, without further ado… Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Muddy Waters and his rendition of the “Tik Tok Blues”!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0-ochh0hM

→ Download Tik Tok (The Blues Version) [MP3, 2.6 MB]

Related Posts

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• Open Thread for December 23, 2011
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdi5d6R-3ds

Comic-Con: it’s weird, it’s wonderful, and if you’re reading this site, you owe it to yourself to go at least once in your life.

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• New York Comic-Con 2011: #ZombifyWallStreet

Determined to share this rag and bone shop of the target heart rate with our readership who are either too serious about running to watch treadmill television, or not nearly serious enough about running to watch treadmill television, I share with you here all the music videos (or all the ones I could find online) that I watched during a recent 40 minute stint on a Boston Sports Club treadmill, with accompanying analysis.

I went with the shadiest and grimiest of the Sports Club music channels – the Dance channel – because anything worth doing is worth doing to techno music. The collage of it takes on a life of its own. When you open your mind to the Dance channel and consider what it is actually showing, coexisting in the same artistic space, presenting an accidental grand narrative fueled by endorphins and dull ankle pain, it’s a sublime, glorious and terrifying experience. Especially when it starts with this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3ppTnOIc

That’s right, Australia and Austin, Texas EDM fans, that’s Jacinta with her hit, “Can’t Keep a Secret.” Jacinta doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but she does has a MySpace page, and her own website, www.chunkymusic.com.

More on Jacinta, and the rest of the rabbit hole, after the jump. Make sure to stretch first!

1. Jacinta: “Can’t Keep a Secret”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3ppTnOIc

“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” by Wallace Stevens, is a metapoem that sets down goals, values and aspirations for the poetical project — what creative artists are trying to accomplish, but never really will, at least ever for very long. The “Notes” are built around three declarations about this Supreme Fiction — not particularly in this order — “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure.” The second declaration means that nothing can be the Supreme Fiction for very long — just as human life is fleeting and the human race and all of nature are fleeting, art is also fleeing, and art that counterfeits toward permanence cannot be the greatest artistic expression of humanity. “Nothing gold can stay,” as Robert Frost said, as he is wont to say — just as smartly but in a lot fewer words.

Why do I bring this up? Because I think, for one glorious moment and not a second longer, “Can’t Keep a Secret” was the greatest music video ever made. I don’t think I have ever seen anything go “YOU GO GIRL” harder in my life.

And then, for every other moment of human existence, it looked like somebody’s mom accidentally blundered into the “Make a Music Video!” booth at Busch Gardens after having one too many at Das Festhaus.

Messagewise, “Can’t Keep a Secret” is very similar to “Shout” by Tears for Fears, joining the rather small but notable subset of synth-backed pop tracks about the therapeutic value of sharing rather than repressing your emotions. Except Jacinta is really really enjoying it. Maybe it’s jus the runner’s high.

2. Mint Royale: “Singing in the Rain”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcYa9b7mMmA

Immediately you see the scope of the Dance channel – we go from something that you could make in your basement with a bedsheet, chromakey and some poorly fitting outfits to a fairly sophisticated bunch of motion-capture-driven computer animation played by a member of the Fatboy Slim set. The collage is incidential, but if I might apply meaning to it where no existence precedes its essence, it demonstrates how dance, specifically techno dance, is democratizing. The goal of booty-shaking is so all-encompassing that it really doesn’t matter how you get it done or with what tools, as long as you get it done. This is something Hall & Oates wish were true of their music, so they would have stayed on top through the ascendancy of music videos while sounding awesome despite looking ridiculous.

Mint Royale primarily does remixes (and is famous enough to have a Wikipedia page), and the premise of the Singing in the Rain video seems really far removed from the premise of the remix, although I guess he’s stuck in a dirty subway underpass while having an adventure going B-Boy style with a bunch of garbage animated by his imagination or some related presentational phenomenon, showing that he is finding the art and joy in an undesirable situation — Singing in the Rain, as it were.

3. Brian Anthony: “WhatsitgonnaB”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54i3q6jmQg4

Each of these videos finds a new way of blowing my mind, and this one does it by waiting until it is almost half over before revealing that it is in fact from an extremely bizarre source. Watch it up to about 1:04, with the big reveal at 1:15. It’s okay, I didn’t believe it either.

Before about 1:04, this is a normal dance video, but after 1:15 it is revealed this is actually from a “Music Inspired by the Film” remix project for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. This movie was notable of course for:

1. Being an unapologetic, profitable piece of crap that was a sequel to an unapologetic, profitable piece of crap
2. Starring Lawrence Fischburne without anybody knowing it starred Lawrence Fischburne
3. Writing a case study in cowardice. They were too scared to take the chance of putting Galactus in a giant purple helmet because some people might not like it, so instead they made him a generic, nondescript sci fi villain, which nobody really liked.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video of a song from a movie that included clips from that movie be so totally unconcerned with letting you know it is from a movie. But apparently, this whole Silver Surfer Techno Remix thing actually worked; supposedly it was quite popular overseas (where, interestingly enough, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer made more than half of its box office take).

Apparently, this is sort of what Brian Anthony does; in this research, I found he also did a remixed dance track for the sountrack to Dragonball: Abomination, the live-action Dragon Ball Z movie. So, good on him for haivng no qualms about totally disregarding the movies he is making songs for. He’ll live longer.

The Silver Surfer definitely works as a techno icon, I have to say. Despite the video not fitting in with the Fantastic Four sequel at all, the Silver Surfer fits pretty perfectly into the video. The song is about a guy propositioning somebody for sexual relations (“about” is used loosely). This guy is surrounded by women and doesn’t let on that he’s into dudes or anything, but he seems quite gay, and everyting moves really fast in a way that is kinetic but doesn’t carry narrative force. Brian Anthony is a lot like the Silver Surfer — if you stop and think about him too much, he doesn’t make any sense at all except as a gay icon, which he sort of isn’t for reasons that aren’t entirely clear except that maybe he isn’t quite famous enough. So, whatever, he does his thing for a few minutes and you move on to the next thing.

Oh, and except that Brian Anthony doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, while the Silver Surfer has a disambiguation page with at least five solid hits.

Disambiguation? Ha, yeah right.

4. Cascada: Miracle

 httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCzz4_FPbug

Finally, a song we sort of recognize. Sort of. This song is from the album “Every Time We Touch,” by Cascada, which is fitting, because it is pretty much the same song as “Every Time We Touch,” by Cascada (except for being strictly worse). Here, for comparison:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G6QDNC4jPs

Now, “Miracle” is a bad song. I knew it from the first few lines.

Boy meets girl
You were my dream, my world
But I was blind
You cheated on me from behind.

I’m starting to get bored of people saying “Really? Really?” as a joke, but “Really? Really?” I don’t know exactly how you cheat on somebody from behind. I know how you cheat on somebody behind their back, but that’s mostly redundant anyway, because it’s pretty damn rare to cheat on someone to their face. But yeah, I guess if you get behind somebody back, and then you get ready to cheat on that person, but wait … no, move your knee it’s in the way. Ouch! Dammit! Sorry, sorry.

Seriously, “You cheated from me from behind” is the worst line I’ve heard in a song in a long time. And of course, after this woman has not only been humiliated by her boyfriend, but has humiliated herself in front of everybody by choosing a really awkward way to describe it, what is the song about? Why, getting him back of course! What did you think it was about?

Sigh.

Why do so many songs give such terrible, terrible relationship advice? Somebody should sue these people.

This song reminds me a lot of one of the worst relationship songs of all time, because it not only gives women terrible ideas about how to conduct relationships, but it encourages the absolute worst in men by promoting a dangerous counterfactual fantasy — the best “stalker-/ephebophiliac-encouragement” song not made by the Police (who made several), “Sometimes” by Britney Spears:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0bPrt69rag&ob=av2e

Sometimes I run
Sometimes I hide
Sometimes I’m scared of you
But all I really want is to hold you tight
Treat you right
Be with you day and night.
Baby all I need is time.

Okay, maybe I heard this song as more sinister than it was intended, but I posit that all Britney Spears music is by design more sinister than it lets on – it’s part of the aesthetic. I mean, have you listened to Slave 4 U lately? No? Just me then. Okay. Back to Cascada.

Cascada’s song is full of codependent nonsense. It’s addressed to the guy who cheated on her, asking him for a miracle, which, um, puts him on a bit of a pedestal, to say the least. Then it rhymes “miracle” with “be your girl” which is just embarrassing. Then it tries to entice the guy by saying he should give her a chance to see if he was made for her. This of course is not information that the guy would generally be interested in knowing – he’d be far more interested if she was made for him. Her beliefs about what he is destined to do are not something he cares very much about, because he just cheated on her.

Also, this whole exercise is going toward confirming a fundamentally misled idea of how this relationship works – she is using her love, her adoration for this guy as proof that the relationship must continue. She is with him day and night, she really really loves him, all this other stuff – but the reason the relationship has to stop is because the guy cheated on her, “from behind,” no less! She then says “One day you’ll see, it can happen to me” — using her own desperation and envy of other women in an attempt to persuade her cheating boyfriend to take her back. None of the supporting arguments Cascada is providing are relevant to the question at hand.

Plus, whenever it gets back to the chorus, I’m almost certain it’s going to jump into “But every time we touch, I get this feeling …” and then it’s disappointing because this is the inferior Cascada song, and life is too short for inferior Cascada songs.

5. Frederick Ford: “Turn My World Around”

Okay guys, prepare yourselves. We’re going back to Jacinta country. And I don’t mean Austin or Australia. Here be dragons.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJi-mN1KSdM

This video leaves me kind of speechless. It may be one of the worst music videos ever made.

If “Frederick Ford” sounds like a porn name, it’s because, judging from the YouTube comments, he used to do porn, or still does it. And I can’t/don’t want to do any research on him, because the sites you get when you google him are blocked on this computer for being pornography. So, you know what, I’m going to not do any research on this rat-lookin’ dude.

I mean, I want him to succeed and everything, because who doesn’t love parachutes or whatever, but, to quote one of the YouTube comments:

“worst thing ive ever seen in my life. someone needs to burn that rotating box”

You may wonder why I kept watching these videos. Well, for one thing, they were bizarre and hilarious — always unexpected. Some of them were even pretty good. For another, I was running pretty hard, and the uptempo music was good to keep the pace up. For a third, well, I did it for you guys. And for a fourth, the likelihood of finding something worse if I changed the channel was pretty high. Watching commercials while running on a treadmill sucks. So, Excelsior!

6. Lasgo: “Out of My Mind”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08yLol56ODg

The fonts in this video are what convinced me to actually follow through and write this thing, because they are awesome. If they gave an award for best use of fonts in a music video, this should win all of them. Maybe putting the fonts next to postmodern interpretations of classic sex symbols also got my Overthinking going. You’ve got the cool bubbly sanserif retro-even-for-the-80s font for the pink microphone costume, the Blade Runner / Star Trek TNG font for the road race costume, the broader, more elegant but still sci-fi white font for the elegantly overwrought robo-costume, the breezy cursive-inspired sanserif for the angel costume, the blocky serif outline font for the boxer costume (which doesn’t show up until late in the video), and the most obliquely referenced font, which is the actual “Lasgo” font on the packaging for the doll.

There are three angles at play in this video – there’s the fonts, the costumes (or themes) and the colors. They all come in sets – the racecar girl is always red and always has the Blade Runner / TNG font, but there are parts of the video where the text really jumps out, or the costumes really jump out, or the colors are oscillated quickly enough that the rest recedes.

This plays off the dance aesthetic that informs a lot of these videos – this is music that speaks to an altered state of consciousness where people respond to really blown-out symbols – where things are iconic, motivations are boiled down, and subtletly is lost in the bass and the lights. Everything strives for the iconic. Lasgo uses this as a platform for discussing modes of femininity – not in a particularly original way, but with cool design and nice execution. Of course, all the women are the same person in different costumes. This speaks to the idea that notions of “woman” are reductive, reflecting rather than a signification of a single person a mere facet or aspect of what that person might project when viewed from a particular vantage point. Same woman, different clothes. Same words, different fonts. Form and function are linked, though — race car girl is a different character than angel girl, and ”love” means different things in the different fonts.

As I mentioned in my past articles on dance music, one of the things I really like about dance music is how it hammers home the connection of form and function. Dance music is form with purpose – it is made to make you dance. This video illustrates how the changing forms in the colors, fonts and costumes changes the function of the woman in the video, without it changing the “actual” woman, which in turn teaches us something about ourselves and our depth and complexity as human beings.

7. Samim: “Heater”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKZw15DXFiI&ob=av2e

Or you can do it the easy way and just show a bunch of people dancing. I like how the accordion is a symbol of multiculturalism at the same time it is a mockery of multiculturalism. Exclusion principle be damned!

This is as good a time as any to note that most of this music comes from outside the United States, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all unpopular or obscure. A lot of these artists have charted, particular in Britain, particularly on Dance charts. So, it’s not like BSC raided somebody’s external hard drive for freelance video projects. But with the international scope comes, well, diversity. A music video means different things to different people, and serves different purposes to different artists.

I bring this up now because our next video is one of my favorites, for a lot of reasons.

Hey, how do you know a guy isn’t betting on ever becoming successful in the United States? Because he calls himself:

8. Basshunter: “Angel in the Night”

Looks like there’s a Swedish guy who didn’t go to www.basshunter.com before picking his techno name! (and no, that website is not blocked as pornography — it’s quite harmless, unless you’re a fish,)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYO9VgoRWzY&ob=av2e

At first I was a bit disappointed when this came up, because it’s got by far the highest production values of any of the videos we’ve watched so far. Except for maybe the garbage dancing one and maybe Cascada if somebody took that damned light out of her face, it’s the only one that gives the impression that “the music industry and/or a professional filmmaker made this.” But it quickly won me over, not in small part because it heavily and smartly references the greatest Scandinavian music video ever made:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXxMlIExpo

Similar to the A Ha video, Basshunter’s bassterpiece goes from a diner for lonely hearts to a fantasy racetrack, with lots of fun, bouncy music to carry you along the way and an earnest, warmhearted appeal for affection from a singer who almost wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing were possible, except that he is compelled by intense emotion to make the attempt. Compare it to “WhatsitgonnaB” from back when I wasn’t sweating so much. Leave it to Basshunter to show a little humility.

At this point, I’d suffered quite a bit of inhumanly arrogant posturing, even by people who should know better (Get back in your rotating box! Nobody said you could leave!), so this was really touching, and the “jam” in the middle was pretty cool — it was like Gran Turismo on Playstation with music supplied by a particularly enthusiastic Super Nintendo. Also, leave it to Basshunter to be the only person on the Dance station who knows how to Tokyo Drift.

Of course, it’s possible to see Basshunter as also dispensing horrible relationship advice, more in the Richard Marx mode of “If you just love them enough and pity yourself enough and humiliate yourself enough, the woman you have specially chosen for the task will eventually love you back,” but just as that’s not really fair to Richard Marx, since we’ve all felt that way from time to time, especially when we were young and didn’t know anything about anything, it’s probably not fair to Basshunter. Basshunter seems to be unreasonably hard on himself in this song, to the point where maybe we don’t have to entirely believe that he’s really totally obsessed with this girl he can’t have — more like he protests too much, and he’s probably goign to get this girl with this song, because it’s a sweet, fun song that showcases both whimsy and masculine vigor — as well as car racing. And he does mention she smiles at him and stuff, and he says “let me hold you now” in a way that indicates such a thing is about to happen, so she’s at least nibbling at the ‘Hunter’s bait.

He also has the guts to straight-up state that it isn’t enough for the girl to be his light in the dark, he also needs to actually be with her. This is an important insight that is to often skipped over. There are a lot of people out there who could have been saved a lot of trouble around freshman year of college (give or take, say, three years) if they’d known how that all works ahead of time.

Also note that, at the beginning of the video, the girl dumps her boyfriend via text message for cheating on her and you never see him again and she never wants him back. No word on whether it was from behind or not.

9. Rae and Christian: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iItm3f6MGEY

This is a remix of the Dinah Washington version of the old country/jazz standard. I find it a bit tedious and the video to be way too on the nose. We all like cartoons, sure, but after this blizzard of deconstructed archetypes, hypothetical imperatives, flashing lights, pounding bass, and rotating boxes a cartoon that sort of does and sort of doesn’t (boo again, Exclusion principle!) depict the events in a 60 year old song is kind of meh.

It also was kind of crappy running music — I was up to 9 mph duing Basshunter; I had to scale it way back for this one. It was about where I started losing energy and realized the gym was going to close soon.

The trombone or tuba or whichever muddy thing is rattling along down there is awful. It’s too sloppy to be looped; they should have just played it for a while and let it feel more organic.

The straight up jazz versions of this song are just better than this remix, which takes away a fair measure of the song’s elegance and makes it too ponderous. This version in particular is a lot of fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR-Ckj5M-jU

The whole thing smacks heavily enough of minstrelsy for me to not like it all that much in any form. The phrase “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby” comes from Octavus Roy Cohen, a Jewish writer from South Carolina who wrote HILARIOUS dialect fiction about those HILARIOUS “Southern Negroes” for the HILARIOUS Saturday Evening Post. Quoth his Wikipedia page: “If his people seemed to possess the usual mythical Negro qualities of drollery and miscomprehensions, his tales at any rate were spirited.”

So yeah, of all the Jazz songs to pick up on and remix, this one is just kind of ugly, and it was made uglier by a slow and joyless remix. I did not like this song.

10. Tim Deluxe: “Let the Beats Roll”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpgaX6R4iww&ob=av2e

This is Tim Deluxe’s answer to “Mama Said Knock You Out” and “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” where he informs us he has come back from somewhere. Great. Welcome back, Tim Deluxe, from wherever it is you went to wherever it is you are now and were before you left. I guess it’s the U.K. on all counts.

– By the way, it occurred to me today that, while Jay-Z claims to be the “best rapper alive,” if you want to talk about overall versatility, appeal, viability, enduring influence on hip hop and long-term success (neither of them are in even the top ten of lyrical virtuosity), LLCoolJ from the aforementioned “Mama Said Knock You Out” has at least some claim to the title — as he exercised with his dubiously named latter-day album, G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) It’s a bit of a nonsequitur, but it’s useful sometimes to remember which rappers are still alive so that when Jay-Z goes bragging you can check his facts. Dispute this? Leave a comment! Leave a comment regardless! –

The beats in this Tim Deluxe song rolled. The video was about breakdancing. Competent, polished, but it lacked the desperation and joy of the poorer contributions and the fun of the richer ones. Maybe tough-guy white-guy techno is an easier sell in the U.K. than it is in the states. Well, at any rate, my run was coming to a close, so I could ponder these things later.

Cooldown: Armand Van Helden: “U Don’t Know Me”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNSpLqmY6K0

Minus points for the “U.” Get with the program, Armand.

This song was a #1 hit in the U.K. in 1999. Top of the charts #1 hit, not just a dance track hit. That doesn’t seem justifiable at all, because this song just seems awful. Then, I read that it knocked “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” by the Offspring off the throne, and I guess that makes more sense. I also guess the U.K. likes disco samples.

Afterword

And with that, the treadmill ground to a halt and I was informed the gym was closed and I had to leave. All in all, a solid workout, and a tour de force through the brilliant and terrible of a style music I really don’t know a great deal about it.

Pop culture is so pervasive now, and we interact with it in so many ways, that it’s worthwhile to consider experiences like treadmill television – if not alongside big tentpole motion pictures, at least with some of the same words.

And it sure does pass the time when you’re hamster-wheeling it to nowhere.

(N.B.- If you do the math, you’ll realize this isn’t quite 40 minutes. Other than the few seconds of downtime between each song, which adds up over 40 minutes, there was one song I didn’t bother writing down because it pissed me off so much, and then after the fact I couldn’t remember what it was. The song was okay, but it was a live performance by a techno band, which meant it was really poorly mixed and just didn’t make sense — lots of random shots of these guys smiling and muffled techno along with crowd cheers. Waste of time. Long track too. So yeah, that’s why it doesn’t quite add up.)

What do you listen to or watch on the treadmill? How is the artistic experience altered? Sound off in the comments!

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The voices you hear are (in order) those of Fenzel, Sheely, and Shechner, who also came up with the concept and content of this presentation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hECh4JDzPA

I like to think of this presentation as the philosophical bedrock upon which the Mr. T Party movement is built. It’s analogous to conservatism’s 24, liberalism’s West Wing, and the Tea Party’s Disjointed Paranoid Ramblings of Glenn Beck.

Lastly, I’d like to call out one of the many outstanding Photoshopped images from this presentation, for it so well encapsulates both the Mr. T Party and Overthinking It. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the T-Viathan:

Without Mr. T, truly our lives would be nasty, brutish, solitary, and short. We need his Hobbesian python biceps to hold the social order together.

Readers: what do you think? Is Mr. T Fenzel’s meta-rebel or Sheely’s T-Viathan? How awesome is Shechner’s photoshop-fu? How does Mr. T fit into the hegemonic discourse? Is this all a bunch of jibba jabba?

Let us know in the comments!

And join the Mr. T Party on Facebook if you haven’t already, suckas!

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Shawwwty!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIvodV2cvK0

Lyrics after the jump. Shawwwty!

I’ve done some Overthinking of Auto-Tune before

when comparing its inventor to Les Paul

And though Dr. Hildebrand and T-Pain might not be remembered as musical innovators like Les Paul,

There is no doubt that Auto-Tune is hugely influential today.

And so it’s big news when an iPhone app

comes out that promises to make you T-Pain

by integrating the auto-tune effect with some backing tracks

it allows even amateur musicians to sing like T-Pain.

But it’s very important to note that this app requires

a basic ability to sing a melody.

With the notable exception of Auto-tune the news,

Auto-tune can’t make something out of nothing.

Haters of Auto-tune may claim that this sort of app

only proves their point that Auto-tune is killing music

But I beg to differ. It can only do good

if it gets people to sing more than they normally would.

By removing barriers to making music,

Things like I Am T-Pain and Guitar Hero make music more accessible,

And that is something your violin teacher was unable to do.

So to all the haters and all the players,

I suggest you put aside your cynicism and give this a shot.

You’ll be making music, and that’s a good thing.

This has been Mark Lee for Overthinking It.

Shawwwty!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_fM_TBn_Do

Notice the armband he’s wearing?

This song, to me, is a prime example of “earony,” a word I coined to describe my feelings towards inspirational speeches. The word is a combination of “earnest” and “ironic.” With this song, Mark is clearly mocking monster ballads. At the same time, he clearly loves monster ballads to death. Thus, it’s an earonic song.

I like to imagine this whole backstory about lovers separated by nuclear disaster, searching for each other as they dodge exoskeletons. “How far would you go to find the one you love?” No wait, maybe we play it a little lighter. Poster shows an endless line of gleaming robots walking down Santa Monica Boulevard. Tagline: “The commute is killer today.”

But here’s something to Overthink: is the end credits monster ballad a thing of the past? Robin Hood was ’91, Armageddon was ’98. Nowadays, they end action movies with upbeat rock songs, not cigarette lighter-waving declarations of undying affection. Of course, maybe the monster ballad itself is an endangered species. The genre definitely peaked in the 80′s and early 90′s. I might argue that the high water mark for monster ballads was 1992, which gave us “November Rain” and “Bed of Roses.” But ’92 was also the breakout year for Nirvana. After Nevermind, rock became less glam, for better and for worse.

Anyway: Mark, you’re a rock star, plain and simple.

Lyrics after the jump.

LYRICS:

I’m sleeping alone on this cold concrete floor
Another sad night in this sad robot war
On Judgment Day man and machine did collide
But even though billions of people have died

Somewhere out there tonight
You’re hugging your rifle so tight
I’ll find you, somehow, someway
In the rubble that once was L.A.

I’ll be back, no man no machine
Can keep me from you, I’ll always be true
I’ll be back, to finish the fight
And say “hasta la vista” to this lonely night
This vow I must take:
No fate but what we make
I’ll be back

Dogs they are barking, I know something’s wrong
He barely speaks English, his accent’s so strong
The cyborg attack took us by surprise
All the silvery skulls with their glowing red eyes

Skynet has torn us apart
And Judgement Day’s broken my heart
But I’ve got so much to give
Come with me if you want to live

(CHORUS)

I’d travel through time just to hold you again.
I’d take on a world of mechanical men.
Tonight Hunter-Killers keep watch from above
But nothing can Terminate our love.

(CHORUS)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooq5KHgOnNo

…the knights from Bedknobs and Broomsticks?

Could this be James Cameron’s inspiration for The Terminator? Not likely. Cameron himself cites two episodes of  The Outer Limits, “The Demon with the Glass Hand” and “Soldier,” as inspirations for the franchise, but it’s still fun to think…what if? And besides, pretty much any movie scene is made better by laying the Terminator theme music underneath it.

[Readers who are as excited as Lee is about the upcoming Terminator: Salvation should make sure to read all of Overthinking It's prior Terminator coverage.]

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