Every now and then, I will use my TiVo to download a bunch of music videos. I download a bit of everything and then watch them briskly and efficiently. No reality programming in between. No commercials. If I don’t like the beginning of a music video, I fast forward to the mid-point to see if it gets better once it gets going. If not, I’m on to the next one.

I never heard of Justin Moore before, but I just got through playing his “Back That Thing Up” video about five gajillion times. “Back That Thing Up” has what Tapeheads fans would know to call serious production values. For those of you who must shamefacedly admit to never having seen Tapeheads, allow me to illustrate:

Mo Fuzz: All this video is missing is production values.
Ivan Alexeev, Josh Tager: Production values?
Mo Fuzz: Yeah. Tits and ass.

If muscles on video vixens and tight faded jeans on singer boys are coming back in style, I think I owe some deity a sacrificial goat now! Maybe two goats for the drummer still having tattoos and a mohawk. If “Back That Thing Up” is representative of Justin Moore’s body of work, he falls somewhere between Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks on one side and Motley Crue and AC/DC on the other. There are at least as many appalling sexual double entendres in “Back That Thing Up” as there are in “Big Balls”. I loathe puns. Unless they are sex puns. Then I love them.

Justin Moore has a mischievous smile, an easy charismatic stance and delivery style, and a smooth Southern voice both speaking and singing. Justin Moore has enormous star quality and looks really good in tight faded jeans and a cowboy hat. I usually don’t like cowboy hats (even though my foot was once photographed with one for Playboy.) He has an uncomplicated comfortable way of moving in his country duds which just works very very well. According to The Valory Music website, Justin Moore’s parents were deeded a fifteen-acre farm from his grandfather in a 272 person town called Poyen in Arkansas. His bio includes such American small town pastimes as high school baseball and gospel choir. I know country performers tend to talk about their mad farming skillz the same way rappers represent their drug-dealing resumes. Justin Moore is kind of being pitched as both flawlessly country and kind of indie, although it sort of looks like he is a Universal recording artist and he did get an awesome music video directed by Wes Edwards and produced by Brittany Hailes.

I have lived in both Georgia and North Carolina and, when I was thirteen, there were a lot of accent fetishist New Yorkers who wanted to date me for the five minutes I really had that Southern twang, until the moment passed. There is still the occasional word I say with a Southern accent, but I do not now identify as Southern nor have I ever identified as Southern. I have never thought of country as my community or culture. So I don’t care if Justin Moore’s comically country music-ready resume is over-spun or not. Apparently Country Music Television is a little wound up about the content in the video, so too racy for CMT is certainly a selling point in my book.

I know, I know, I get all excited about some media thing. I research it. Then I have to ponder whether it is real or not. In my defense, the YouTube comments on the cowboy singer’s videos tend to be mostly girls saying they are super “cuntry” and way better than those “Playboy whores” in the “Back That Thing Up” video. Except for the one gay guy who wanted Justin to back his nice thing up into some dick. This was apparently very offensive to some country fans. Some “cuntry” girls also complained that the video was degrading to women, but they were un-eloquently debated by other posters who apparently ran the lyrics through a rap filter and felt that it was good that “at least” it was not what they had come up with. Yeah, ’cause Justin Moore is more talented than they are.

This all brings me back to what was really my only point:

There is this kinda new singer Justin Moore and his catchy and nicely performed song “Back That Thing Up” has an incredibly cool video out directed by Wes Edwards. The end.

I’m not generally a fan of anything which uses the expression “white trash” because I’ve lived in the American South. Pig ignorant people there will generally excuse racist nonsense by explaining that they also have issues with “white trash” like being bigoted on the basis of class, as well as race, is somehow more reasonable than being merely racist alone.

Due to the humorous intent of the occasion, I made an exception, however, for Miss Kitty’s White Trash Ball at Dragonfly this past weekend and, damn, but I had a good time. My homeboy Lange and I hit the Cat and Fiddle beforehand. Having been a fisherman in Alaska after art school (yes, like the TV show), Lange is not such a big fan of crab and raw fish, so I felt it was high time I chose a restaurant with cooked non-seafood items on the menu. The Cat and Fiddle is a music industry hang which bills itself as an English pub in Hollywood, although I am personally partial to the New Orleans fare like their uber-buttery crab fingers. In fact, I ate brussel sprouts and crab fingers and I was thinking that this would be a kinda healthy meal without the butter and Stella Artois. Kind of representative of Los Angeles really, something which looks healthy on the surface, but something just underneath which could probably kill you. Fun fact to know and share: Parts of Casablanca were filmed at the Cat and Fiddle location. When I first saw Casablanca as a teenager, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick was not pretty enough for my taste, but, these days, I have enough pretty in my world that I’m more impressed by force of personality and strength of character.

Major Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick: I’m a drunkard.
Captain Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

Despite my best efforts to alternate with water, the Stella theme continued at the Dragonfly where my friends kept plying me with high quality beer and low quality water. Given a choice between sparkling Voss and Stella, I will generally choose the water over the beer. Given a choice between Stella Artois and flat Arrowhead, the beer is going to win most of the time. I would like to particularly point the finger at Lange and Blue Blood hottie Joel Awesome for enabling my wayward ways. When Scar called Lange an enabler, totally independent of having heard me call him one, he claimed not to know the meaning of the word. I am skeptical on this point, but was happy to give him the benefit of my otherwise useless over-education.

The really cool thing about the evening was that people dressed really tongue-in-cheek. Instead of being all doing their little turn on the catwalk (on the catwalk, yeah, on the catwalk), everyone was dressed silly and laughing and having a good time. The only difficulty was recognising everyone I know under tooth black or without makeup. Perish, who I once shared a house with for a month, generally dresses like the demon prince of elfland (or at least a fetish-y goth boi) so I didn’t recognize him at all in his faux beard and flannel and jeans. Embarrassingly enough, not even when he hugged me and said hello. I was all faking like how’s it going and he totally knew and told me who was under that hair. I was very entertained. The winners of the costume contest were a gentleman dressed as a farmer with a date dressed like a sheep. Ya gotta love any event which involves sheep-fucking. My costume was blue eyeshadow and a limited edition Alabama stagehand T-shirt I got for working for the band about a million years ago, in a land far far from here. Although I know the band has had a couple dozen #1 hit songs, Alabama fans who are impressed by my collectible T-shirt will be less impressed when they find out that my best guess at what a song by Alabama might be was “Sweet Home Alabama” which, according to the interwebs, is actually a Lynard Skynard ditty. (I also kind of think Alabama has done a song for Sesame Street.) That’ll learn me not to guess.

My knowledge of things a person could put in her cunt is far more extensive than my knowledge of Southern fried rock and country music. Thus, I was pleased to impress my friends when a gentleman named Craig wandered in wearing little besides a towel and a gigantic fake cock. “Ask him if that is the Dick Rambone,” I told Scar. “What?” she said. “Ask him if that is the Dick Rambone.” “Is that, uhm, the Dick Rambone?” Indeed it was the dildo modeled on legendary 80’s pornstar Dick Rambone. Dick Rambone has one of the largest cocks ever to appear in porn, so the Dick Rambone plastic cock has little real world application. I used to manage an adult boutique where I often fantasized about beating shoplifters (and a prudish wife who came in to complain about her husband’s female-orgasm-inducing-oriented purchases) with our larger plastic appliances. Apparently the knowledge from that particular weird job has stuck with me better than the knowledge from my gig as a stagehand for Alabama.

Other Blue Blood hotties in attendance included Kitty Von Klau, Damon Knight, Tassy Pink, and Nikki 666, who told me that her outfit, like mine, was just kinda what she would normally wear to kick around work, as opposed to go out on the town. I’m only posting a small gallery of pictures from the festivities because, for some reason, most of my photos appear to just be of people’s asses. Also of people’s asses being spanked. One of the great truths of life is that sometimes what looks hot as fuck in photos is sorta off in person and sometimes a really hot live sex show watched while tipsy doesn’t totally translate to snapshots. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, people with appealing and frequently visible asses tend to walk into whichever one I’m at.

Congrats to Superna for her rockin’ appearance in the Brooks and Dunn video for the title track off of their Hillbilly Deluxe album. Superna is playing guitar because Blue Blood hotties do more than just look amazing. Naturally, she looks amazing too. The vid will be premiering on, of course, CMT real soon.

I’m really psyched about this for two excellent reasons. First of all, I adore Superna and anything good that happens to her is a good thing. Secondly, I’ve been watching a bit of CMT lately anyway and this gives me one more reason to enjoy it.

For those of you who would like some footnotes round about now, here you are. CMT stands for Country Music Television and the channel is a division of MTV, which is a subsidiary of Viacom. Brooks and Dunn are one of the biggest acts in country music. They first hit fifteen years ago with their debut album Brand New Man, which went more than six times platinum. Brooks and Dunn have had a string of hit singles and successful albums since. Dunn and Brooks are in first and second place respectively for most CMAs or Country Music Awards ever received by anyone. The duo also hosted the awards show for the last three years in a row. So, what I’m getting at here is, they are a big deal. Enjoyable too.

Props to my girl Superna! Here is what she had to say about the experience:

Amelia G: How did you end up being in the Hillbilly Deluxe video?

Superna: I guess I get around [laughs] Seriously though, an industry associate of mine called me one day out of the blue. He said, “Hey can you play bass? Do you want to be in a Brooks and Dunn video today?” Of course, I wanted to be in a Brooks and Dunn video. I sent my info to the casting director and he called me almost immediately. It seems I was perfect, but when they discovered a little more of my ability, they actually asked me to play guitar and sing in the band for the video. I was so excited because Brooks and Dunn are my Moma’s fav’s!

Amelia G: Who were the other people who made up the Hillbilly Deluxe band?

Superna: We rocked! Of course, the band consisted of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, a rockin’ hottie Loa Allebach on bass, Elijah Trotsky seriously rockin the banjo, Benjamin Hughes on lead guitar, Drew Taylor on drums, and I played rythm guitar and sang background vocals.

Amelia G: Do you know exactly when the video is premiering?

Superna: I will have the exact day and time soon, last I heard they were pushing for a 2 week release because the single charted so high when it was released recently. B&D also won 4 awards at the CMA’s (one for best video) so the race is definately on!

Amelia G: How long did it take to shoot?

Superna: The entire production has been under way for months. We shot at Disney’s ranch which was beautiful. The actual shoot time was about ten hours, including a monster lunch break at 8pm Thanksgiving style.

Amelia G: Your snapshots look fun. Was the shoot as much fun as it looks like?

Superna: It was more fun than you can imagine. Everyone in the band clicked so wonderfully, we felt like we had been touring forever. We had a lot of down time where we got to rock out with each other in the parking lot for the star trailers. I think we’ve got plans in the works for about five hypothetical side projects from this video.

Amelia G: Any special stories or anything you would like to say about the video shoot?

Superna: It was amazing. The entire production crew and cast were professional and everything flowed so perfectly. Between the incredible pyrotechnics, and the monster trucks, and the huge crowd of sexy ravers, and the talent of everyone involved … my mind was blown. I made some great friends too! Needless to say, I am now a hardcore Brooks and Dunn fan!