Owl City, Carly Rae Jepsen – “Good Time”

  We start out with Carly Rae leaning on the front of one of those really tiny “economical” cars which means the damn thing is not much bigger than a breadbox with wheels. (This will probably play well in crowded European cities, where everything is tiny and everyone drinks too much coffee.) She’s looking slightly bored, so it’s good that suddenly some of her female friends come running up from somewhere, acting all excited and wearing youthful fashion elements that I don’t really understand. (WHY do you need to wear knee-high yellow rubber boots in the city? Are you expecting to deal with plumbing issues in the near future? Are you even trained for that?)

  Anyway, they all hop in the miniscule motoring device, looking incredibly cute in the way that fresh-faced people in their early twenties look before they have to deal with credit card payments and actually going to work every day, and Carly maneuvers the car out into the street and down the road. Interestingly enough, there’s another car leaving from somewhere else at the same time, this one a classy vintage car that I certainly couldn’t afford in my early twenties, so I’m thinking a trust fund must be involved in some way.

  This vintage car contains what I presume to be the members of Owl City. I’m not really sure, since I haven’t met them and they refuse to follow me on Twitter. The guy driving the car does seem to be the same one who had the crazy-ass bedroom in the “Fireflies” video, so I think it’s all good. He starts belting out the song, which further confirms him as someone of importance, or at least someone who is both musical and can operate a stick shift. They drive along in the countryside, with the other occupants obeying commands like “hands up in the air” and “be sure to smile for the camera like this is the best time you will ever have in your life”.

  We briefly check back in with Carly and Plumber Girls, and they seem fine, with Carly warming up her vocals with a few runs, do we head back to the vintage car, where lead singer Adam is continuing to warble and the passenger to his right is very happy about her modified fishing hat. Since none of this is really important in the overall scheme of things, we roll into a montage of the two cars traveling the highways of America, because freedom’s just another word for being able to drive away from some mess you might have created in the place you just left.

  Eventually we pull up to… I’m not sure what it is. Based on my youth in Oklahoma, the place appears to be some type of rustic camp with crude cabins and a severe lack of five-star amenities. The occupants pile out of the two cars and don’t seem to be the least bit disturbed that a concierge is not standing nearby. In fact, Carly finally launches into some actually vocals, instead of the cooing she has done on the soundtrack up to this point. Everybody hugs each other and no one seems to have a tragic story to tell about an unexpected pregnancy or a sudden devaluation of their stock portfolios.

  While the song leaps into the happy-ass chorus, Carly manages to find a frozen-drink dispenser hanging out of one of the cabins. There are no visible labels indicating alcohol content, but with the way everybody races to get them some slushy goodness, I’m guessing that spontaneous clothing-removal and blackout periods are in the near future. But as we all know, as long as you keep singing while obtaining refreshments, nothing seriously bad can happen.

  Then everybody is stomping away down some forest trail, with lots of people carrying things that they didn’t put a lot of thought into before shoving said mess into a designer overnight bag. (What do you need a Frisbee for? There are trees everywhere. That bitch is not going more than a few feet and there is going to be disappointment.) No matter, folks are still very happy (thank you, mystical frozen-drink contraption) and they march along, paying absolutely no attention to all those low-budget slasher movies where people who go camping in an unprepared manner  soon get attacked by angry masked-men with Mommy issues.

  There’s a brief bit where Carly seems to be singing to a small branch that she managed to find somewhere along the way. It’s really sweet, but you can’t help but wonder why she feels the need to impress campfire kindling. But her little girlfriends don’t care, trudging along and nodding their heads like her Twig Whispering is a fine thing, indeed.

  Cut to Adam, because it’s his part of the song to sing, and although I’m sure he has something really important to share, we can’t really concentrate on him because suddenly some nymph goes running by waving a protest sign in the shape of a butterfly. What the hell? (The nymph is also sporting one of those beaded headbands that instantly disqualify you from being taken seriously in any way, so girl has some really serious issues.) Then Nymphie runs off into the forest, presumably to practice magic spells or rethink her wardrobe.

  Then we get a nice collage of completely unrelated events, like some girls discovering a lake and deciding that they can’t live unless they rip off their clothes, join hands, and then go racing into the water like they haven’t seen a million horror movies strongly advising against such activity. There’s also something about making jewelry out of flowers, Carly happily twirling around in what might be a batch of mist or the results of a biochemical mishap, and Adam wandering down a special path that might have inspired a bit of horniness, based on the brief shot of nipple poppage.

  Next thing you know, it’s night time, which means that everybody has to set up tents and wonder about the various sleeping arrangements that might ensue, depending on energy levels and the continued availability of slushy drinks that make you happy to have a body. (Interestingly enough, there are still people splashing around in the moon-drenched lake despite our warnings, so we’ll just have to quit worrying about them and let them deal with possible serial killers in a wetsuit.)

  Oh wait, we just jumped back to daylight hours for another round of Carly and Adam romping through the woodlands and looking cute, so there might have been some misunderstanding in the editing room. No matter, with a song this perky, things like continuity and storyline are really not all that important. Then we’re back to the nighttime campfire, where a low-key rave is going on, an event that has inspired Adam to change into a shirt that reminds me of Soviet military for some reason, and inspires everyone else to try and raise the roof with their hands even though there isn’t one.

  As everyone bounces and sings and tries to avoid falling into the fire pit, we wrap things up with another montage of just how happy people can be in the great outdoors when there is perky music and an endless supply of people with perfectly-straight teeth and designer clothing. (Somebody apparently passed out some animal masks at some point, but based on the way that people are wearing them on top of their heads instead of on their faces indicates that the mask idea was only fun for about two seconds, then it became necessary to breathe and stuff.)

  The final shots are of Carly and Adam looking tired but happy as they revel in the joys of writing songs that allow you to invite hundreds of your friends on camping trips, jump up and down repeatedly near an open fire, wear whimsical clothing and footwear that really won’t be of much use if you truly had to survive in the wild, and gorge yourself on roasted marshmallows because you’re still young and you can eat anything without any biological impact. Life is good, yes?

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Carly Rae Jepsen - “Call Me Maybe”

  We start out with Carly Rae standing at the back window of her house, gazing in wanton lust at the sexy lawnboy who is tending to her greenery. Naturally, he’s all super-sweaty with perfect hair, which causes Carly to fan herself with one of the apparently thousands of trashy romance novels that she’s been sitting around reading while she waits for this song to hit the top of the charts and make her world-famous.

  Carly decides that it’s very important that she start singing, so she does, which prompts Hot Boy to stop pushing around the lawnmower and proceed to slowly take off his shirt so we can study his sculpted chest and an interesting tattoo that may or may not be the Declaration of Independence. All this exposed flesh makes Carly fan herself even harder, until Hot Boy glances her way and she drops to the floor like she’s been shot. (Does she live in South Central L.A.?)

  Cut to somebody’s open garage, where Carly and her band-friends are making music while Carly sings to a car in the driveway that clearly is not interested in her warbling and Stevie Nicks wardrobe. As Carly continues with her mini-concert, we get more shots of Hot Boy still flexing and sweating and sucking down a bottle of water like it’s the best sex he’s ever had since reaching puberty about three days ago.

  While we study Carly’s extra-long bangs and wonder how she can see where the cameras might be, Hot Boy manages to finish up with the lawn and then moseys over to stare under the hood of his sports car. He’s put his shirt back on, which is really disappointing, but I‘m sure he’ll be taking it off again shortly. After all, we didn’t have time to finish reading all of his tattoo the first time around, what with his nipples and whatnot breaking our concentration.

  Next up is two of Carly’s little band-friends handing her a bucket of soapy water and then shoving her toward her own car. It’s not immediately clear why Carly needs to scrub her ride right at the moment, then we realize that Hot Boy is in the next driveway over, fiddling with his motor and stretching a lot. Carly smirks saucily at this opportunity to get his attention, and she proceeds to get her car and herself as wet as possible.

  So now we have a montage of Carly soaping up everything in a twenty-foot radius, more of her band performing for an audience that doesn’t exist, and Hot Boy continuing to not pay any attention to the bubbly and dripping Carly. But Carly’s a trooper and isn’t about to let things like disinterest and automotive duties get in her way, so she keeps singing and scrubbing with enough perkiness and energy that if you hitched a power cable to her belly button she could light up the Eastern seaboard.

  Side note to the band-member who seems so invested in doing the moonwalk while playing his guitar: You might want to practice that move just a smidge more before you whip it out again in public, mmmkay?

  But even perpetually perky people can get a little frustrated, so when Hot Boy continues to not pay any attention to the charms of Carly, she ups the ante by assuming a variety of increasingly-provocative poses on the hood of her dripping car. (Holy cow, did you catch the size of the chunky heels on her shoes? She could seriously hurt somebody with those things.) Just as she’s surely reaching the point of exhaustion, Hot Boy finally looks her way, and Carly is so excited by the attention that she mis-scrubs and tumbles off the side of the car.

  I guess Carly hits her head on the concrete (although you’d think all of that hair would cushion the blow) because suddenly she’s having a lusty dream where she and Hot Boy (who now has his own abundance of hair) appear to be posing for the cover of a romance book that might be entitled “The Bubbling Passions of a Pirate Wench”. They clumsily paw at each other, even though Hot Boy seems to be more invested in gazing at something over Carly’s shoulder, like a burger drive-thru or a better agent.

  Then Carly recovers from her concussion, her eyes popping open back in the real world to find that Hot Boy and his paragraph of a tattoo are leaning over her prone body. Carly has a small orgasm of delight, then Hot helps her to her feet so she can run change back into her Stevie Nicks outfit and give Hot another one of her endless garage concerts. At the end of the performance, Carly rushes up to write down her phone number for Hot Boy, only to watch him basically shove her aside and hand his own phone number to one of the guys in the band.

  Didn’t see that coming. But I’m glad it did…


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