Music Video Hell #1: Owl City

Now that MTV has about as much to do with music as KFC has to do with Kentucky, the Internet has become our primary source for music videos. With the Internet, though, there is no filter. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Well here, dear friends, is the chaff. It’s your penance for a lifetime of sins: Music Video Hell.

Owl City is the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. Famine? Plague? Pestilence? These things pale in comparison to the second-rate Postal Service rip-off created by one Adam Young. Although he has cribbed heavily from The Postal Service, he stripped out everything that made their music good and replaced it with banal instrumentation, insipid lyrics, and a vaguely homoerotic love for Jesus. Naturally, there are plenty of kiddies in the Justin Bieber demographic eating it up. One of those kiddies, apparently, is NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal.

Let’s get straight to Exhibit A, though. The video for Owl City’s “Vanilla Twilight” perfectly encapsulates everything that is awful about Young’s music. First off, there’s the title of the song. A quick check of Urban Dictionary shows the definition of “vanilla twilight” to be this: “The substance that comes out of a male reproductive organ. Usually shot on and around a girl’s face.” Kudos to WhiskerBiscuit3691 for clarifying that one. The ridiculousness does not end there, though, dear reader. Not by a long shot.

The video itself starts with an establishing shot of a lighthouse. The light from this lighthouse is apparently shining directly on Adam Young, creating the most wicked lens flare you’re likely to see this side of a GeoCities webpage from the mid-‘90s. If you’re not blinded by the lens flare, you’re treated to the sight of Young himself looking like the American Idol idea of emo, with carefully sculpted hair and the slumped-over posture of someone who’s trying really hard to look hip.

You don’t have to gaze upon Young’s visage for long, though, before the video cuts away to other random, assorted people who all just sort of walk about in their winter coats and stare at the sky for reasons unknown. Oh, and one of those people is Shaquille O’Neal. Yes, that Shaquille O’Neal. There’s roughly two minutes of people staring at the sky before the music starts to swell triumphantly and Shaquille O’Neil raises his arms to the sky as if to say, “I have just been directed to raise my arms to the sky!”

Shortly thereafter, Shaquille says something to the magical light in the sky that everyone in the video has been staring at. I’ve been watching these few seconds of the video over and over again to try to decipher what he’s saying, and my best guess is, “I wish I hadn’t left the Lakers.” So do most Lakers fans, I’m sure. They could use some solid defense, am I right?

OK, so what he’s actually saying is “Take me with you.” I just wanted to make a Lakers joke to look like I know something about sports. Who does he want to be taken by, though? Oh yeah: Jesus! He wants to be taken by Jesus. And who wouldn’t, with those rugged good looks? That is ultimately what this video is about: a bunch of people see some pretty lights in the sky and, having no meteorological knowledge whatsoever, confuse them for a sign from their lord and savior. It’s not surprising that Shaquille O’Neal doesn’t know what the northern lights are, but he still looks like a big, goofy dumb-ass asking them to take him with them.

So there you have it: clearly one of the worst music videos ever made by one of the most ridiculously untalented hacks to ever decide that he could become popular by taking a dump all over Ben Gibbard. Avoid this video at all costs. Or, alternately, watch the copy of it embedded below. Just make sure to have a receptacle nearby in which to vomit.

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About the Author

Jeremy Clymer lives in Michigan with his wife and kid. He shoots his writings out into the ethers of the Internet in the hopes that someone will pick up on his transmissions and shower him with money and/or praise.

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One comment “awaiting immediate, obnoxious rebuttal”

1. /fantasti.cc Downloader says:

   June 11, 2010 at 2:26 am

   The video clips that you discover on YouTube each possess a particular Internet address. This is regarded as the URL. Therefore as soon as you locate your video on Youtube and clone the URL of the exact song that you want, you afterward have to insert in the box that is offered followed by pressing the “download” button. The song will at once be converted to the equipment that you possess. After you have transferred the files onto your device, you are able to do whatever you need with them. Customize the songs by adding them into a file and designing your private customized playlist.