Emo blows. You know that. But what are you doing about it? The scourge of floppy-haired milquetoasts in pseudo-retro T-shirts, yowling unintelligibly over polished mall-punk riffage about the girlfriends that left them and the friends they don’t have — they must be stopped. Or at least mocked. And Andrew Mathas is taking a stand.
People are paying attention. His crappy homemade stick-figure videos, mercilessly taking the piss out of emo standard-bearers like Fall Out Boy and Brand New, are being watched by millions. They’ve spawned a host of cut-rate imitators and have gotten the attention of the suits at MTV. It’s a watershed moment for DIY media and the power of viral video.
It all started late one night in December when Mathas, a 20-year-old sophomore computer gamer/literature major at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, was hanging out with a friend, dissing on another dude’s taste in music. One offending tune was the abysmal “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” by Fall Out Boy. On a lark, they downloaded it and played it. Mathas was struck by the song’s unique blend of self-pity and unintelligibility. “I was like, I have to make fun of this!”
So he did. Bravely wading through the song over and over again, he wrote down each line phonetically. “We’re always sleeping in, and sleeping for the wrong team” becomes “We sniffing ink the seeping for the roll tear.” The chorus (“We’re going down, down in an earlier round”) is rendered in jabberwocky reminiscent of an Irish ballad: “We’re going down tuuu in a luleelurah.” Then, scribbling primitively in Microsoft Paint, Mathas set about illustrating the thing. “I’m just a notch in your bedpost” (“... the nuts in your bedpost”) is decorated with tiny, hairy testicles nailed to a bed. “A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it” gets a purple, thrusting phallus (“... lonely dark cock that’s going and pulling”). When we come to the sad-sack lyric “Isn’t it messed up how I’m just dying to be him?” we see a weepy-eyed stick-figure emo kid keening to a photo of Bono.
All told, “Interpretation of Fall Out Boy” took about two hours to create. It took barely longer than that for it to become a worldwide phenomenon. Mathas showed the video to his buddy. “He says, ‘I gotta post that on Google Video!’ This was when Google Video had just come out, so I had never really heard of it. I was like, Google what?”
He gets the picture now. Since December, his little goof has been watched on Youtube and Google Video hundreds of thousands of times. So have subsequent “interpretations” of Brand New’s “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” and AFI’s “Girl’s Not Grey.” Each is similarly spangled with mangled lyrics and childlike pictures of stick figures and tiny little penises. And the stark epigraph in the final frame of each, underlined emphatically, is the same: emo sucks.
“I just can’t stand the voices,” Mathas says. “The guy’s whining. Actually complaining in the song about how his girlfriend dumped him. It’s like, dude, there are some important things out there — lot more important than when your girlfriend dumps you. You don’t need to write entire songs or albums about that!”
Although the videos have surged in popularity and spawned many lesser imitators, they have also drawn the wrath of emo’s pubescent fans. On Mathas’s Web site, he posts the best of the hate mail he has received. “[H]aving looked at ur videos, i have come to the conclusion that u are a sad deluded person with nothing better to do with urself,” writes one dissenter. “You sir, are a twat.” Writes another — simply, elegantly: “you suck not emo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
It might be some comfort to Mathas that MTV does not think he sucks. He signed a contract last week to do videos for the station and its Web site. It took just a while for him to get the message. “I got an e-mail about three days after I launched my Web site from this guy,” Mathas says. “The e-mail basically [said], ‘I work for MTV Productions, I’d like to talk to you about your videos.’ I didn’t take it seriously. I thought it was some guy messing around with me. Some kid or something. The e-mail was from MTVstaff.com, but I didn’t know who it was. I sent an e-mail back that said, ‘Thanks man, but I don’t know who you are, and I’m not gonna buy into that.’ He sent me another e-mail back saying, ‘No, I’m real. What can I do to possibly convince you?’ I said, ‘You can’t. This isn’t real. No thanks.’ ”
Mathas eventually called the dude. He was real, and ready to hand over a check that should help defray the rest of college. So now Mathas has a batch of new videos to do. With one wrinkle. “I’m not gonna be doing just emo. The last one I did was Pearl Jam [for the song ‘Lukin’]. And I love Pearl Jam. But it’s funnier when it’s emo. You just can’t take it seriously. And the fact that you can’t understand the words, on top of not being able to take it seriously, makes it even worse.”
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On the Web:
Andrew Mathas: //mathas.manburger.net/
The Phoenix's Slop Culture blog: //www.thephoenix.com/slopculture/