Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Do Not Miss Your Chance to Blow
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 06.20.2011
Johnny: Some mess about how superheroes aren't cool, but video games are.
HOOKTIME
Melissa: Singing "In An Hour," about the power to make a man love you instantly.
Jackie: Kind of worried until it turns out that Melissa is not actually rapping, just being a weird mom like usual.
Everybody, even the judges: Can't help but laugh.
Amber: Her song is about controlling the elements, which leads to metaphors about "quiet storms" and the like.
Nick: "I like watching Amber but not listening to her. She is like Baywatch."
Jes: It's the worst. "Rapture" amounts of bad.
Johnny: "This is the best!"
Jackie: Goes meta with a song about wishing she was a super-good rapper.
Nick: Once again, literally he talks through her performance about how much he hates her. This personal thing he's got going for her, it is not normal. It has an unconscious component. If they worked together in an office or something, it would get one of them fired.
Scotty: "She kept talking about how she was a cracker."
Jewel: "I loved the lyrics."
Nick: "I take that personally! For no reason!"
My Ridiculous: I can't even.
Nick: Commercial and contemporary as usual.
Scotty: Awesome. Really beautiful.
Sonyae: Duh, her song is about hurting boys and having no feelings. You could see that coming from super space.
Johnny: Bleep-bloop. Can't do it. Simply cannot do it. Caught a glimpse of him folding his arms at the end, as is the custom. Almost kept fast-forwarding to the end of the episode, like a stock-car ride into the sun, just to get away from this entire bloody-bones horror concept. I would rather watch them strip down and raw-dog each other for an hour than go through what we are currently witnessing.
Nick: "It was like John Mayer's cousin, rapping."
The Reality: It was John Mayer's cousin. Rapping.
Everybody feels all weird and group-therapy about it, because that was a fucking killing floor. If this were summer camp they'd be like, "Do the silliest thing you can think of!" and this is precisely how everybody would feel afterwards: Hollowed out, ashamed, but also less ashamed than previously. And I would be dead. A dead corpse.
NEXT TOP HOOKERS
Jackie comes in third for shooting the moon, as it turns out. I hope Nick cries. I really feel like it could make him cry this time. They compare her to Missy Elliott and you can actually see Nick's heart breaking inside him.
Second place is Sonyae, because her lyrics are getting better every week. The man with the round teeth explains that her lyrics are relatable, because being a woman can be weird.
The first-place winner was, once again, Johnny. I will take that on faith. I hope he informs us in a flesh-crawlingly awkward way about how important it is that he keep winning... Yep.
Johnny: "I'm really growing in this competition."
And so on. Bonus Ugh Points for saying not only "not gonna lie" but following that up with "NGL," so we know he's hip to the tweets or whatever. I think what Johnny is, now that I'm zeroing in, I think that what he is, is a borderline-neurotypical expert programmer who consciously decided to become normal one day -- ending up at John Mayer by mirroring the masculinity of the relatively small crowd of young men around him -- which is probably my favorite kind of person on earth, but then also you have the effect of this troubling journey getting further interrupted by becoming blazing hot in a very short amount of time.
So that necessary bullying element, that turns the boys into men, gets cut off at just the wrong time because now he is surrounded by people who get confused about who's cool and who's not, and they are willing to indulge and laugh at the jokes, whatever they are, so he has no way of applying his algorithm to decide which jokes are funny, because now all the jokes are funny. Success assured, without regard to the variables.
This is where hipsters come from -- the generational stresses of being caught between '90s irony and millennial earnestness until you barely even have permission to like exist without feeling nervous about it -- but it's also why the thing with Jes: Absent the pushback of his formative years, he really has no way of determining what is actual, so he's going off some very faulty instincts and whatever he remembers from films he loved as a youth, such as Joe Vs. The Volcano, for how people interact with each other. That's my theory this week.
Back on the show, congratulations to Johnny for his walking-through-walls superhero rap, and the grim knowledge that we will now be watching him perform it for the rest of the hour, which just got mighty long.
THE GOOD NEWS
Is that we're not actually rapping this week, but blurring the lines just like Run DMC and Aerosmith did, if you are from olden times and remember that. Against Jes's wishes, Johnny chooses "Scotaaaaay" for his first teammate, while Sonyae cutely invites Nick because he's a good collaborator and brings the rap-rock thing. Jackie picks Brian, correctly, because they are a great team. Johnny picks Jes, of course, so let's talk about that for a million years and their "feelings" for each other some more. Sonyae's second pick is Melissa, because nobody has figured out that Amber's aiming for urban when she works, because you wouldn't know that from her music. So poor Amber ends up with Jackie and Brian, which boo-hoo, that's going to be awesome.
Johnny: "Can you think of any famous walls?"
Jes: "You know, like, emotional walls..."
Johnny: "-- Emotional walls! Jinx, we're so in sync."
Scotty: "Barf. Let's sing opera in our song."
He sings this totally beautiful take on the hook and it sounds like a superhero taking flight.
Scotty: Explains that same thing. This is going to be great, actually.
Brian: "Jackie, what is this song about?"
Jackie: "Being white and wishing you are black."
Amber: "This is within my wheelhouse."
Brian: "Yeah, I think we're all on the same page here."
They decide on doo-wop for the other element; Brian has decided that this is Amber's genre. Amber's like Sure, whatever.
Sonyae: "Sonyae's song is mostly about Sonyae. Sonyae would like Nick to write it."
Nick: "What about like rap-rock?"
Sonyae: "What a great idea you just had."
Melissa: Wanders around being a weird old bitch like usual.
Nick & Sonyae: Fight about something, who knows what.
Melissa: "Who gives a shit about any of this, really."
Scotty stresses about their timeframe and starts putting together this beautiful track; Johnny keeps coming up with "brilliant" lyrics that Jes just so totally loves, and Scotty is just grossed out. This is because it is gross, but the show seems to feel like he's feeling third-wheeled when honestly they're just ignoring the task so they can be annoying.
Brian: "I'm not interested in doing novelty music, obviously, because that's embarrassing. So what if it was beautiful?"
Jackie & Amber: Coming up with pretty creative ideas that play the music off the lyrics, like talking about having off timing and then the music goes off, or talking about bad rhymes and then spitting a bad one. This song is going to be so annoying.