We don't even know this guy and we hate him. Today we eviscerate UConn's horrid promo, brought to us by the discerning eye of reader Kevin from New Brunswick. Warning: this note contains language.
School: University of Connecticut
Ad title: Great Pick"
EDSBS title: Your asshole dormmate with the guitar pitches a university.
Setup: A guy sits on a stool and picks out a Dave Johnson Mayer-ey white blues tune. As he plays, factoids about UConn flash beneath it, like "Number One Public University in New England," and "Record high applications." As each one flashes into the screen, the guitar guy looks suitably impressed, wrinkling his eyebrows and flashing his obviously whitened teeth with approval accordingly. Immediately prior to the end of the commercial a flash of images rushes at the viewer, and as the guitarist finishes up with a flourish he announces "UConn...(blows on pick)...great pick."
Subtext: We're UConn, and golly, we're improving. We're also making you listen to this shitbag pound out John Mayer/Matchbox 20/other music of diarrheal blandness in his endless quest for pussy while you hurl up Jagermeister in the bushes. Oh, and you can go to school, too.
Wanna hear me play guitar mmphhh AAAGGGH...(sounds of unimaginable violence follow...)
Production values:
Low. A/V club low. The nicest thing we can say is that the lighting and cake makeup makes Guitar Gabe and his wondrous flannel shirt look slightly better than Betamax. The graphics and Ludovico treatment-fast montage of images at the end of the ad, though, are reprehensible work.
Hits: Informed us that UConn has "RECORD--HIGH VALEDICTORIANS." This may be UConn's way of cornering the market in drug-abusing overachievers; if so, we're definitely making a campus visit.
Misses: Everything. Everything, Everything, Everything. Everything. It's hard to overstate how much we hated this ad.
We hate it like anthrax. We hate it like we hate injustice. We hate it like we hate the noise of someone slurping their food. We hate it like we hate hate...and we're feeling a lot of that at the moment, so we know exactly what we're talking about.
UConn found the Kinda Long Haired guy to do their ad--the execrable frat house soundtrack fuckwit who, in the sixties, would have been the guy whose guitar was reduced to shards and strings by Bluto Blutowski in Animal House. (Really, watch the Homestar link. It nails this better than anything you'll see here.) His strategy is simple: lacking brains, or obvious alpha-male appearance, or ability to earn peer esteem through heroic, Russian novel-style superdrinking, or even the entry-level vocal misogyny that would qualify him as beta male in the frat system, he goes "artsy" with it and learns to play guitar.
The ad shows you just how shitty this approach is for the listener/university habitue. First, he plays an acoustic guitar on a stool. Guitar players, as a rule, should never sit, unless they're preparing to sing a song about one of the following:
1. Coal miners
2. Death row inmates
3. Death row inmates in a coal mine
4. Killing someone just to watch them die.
The schmuck commits additional fouls by launching directly into a noodling, faux-bluesy "white blues" straight from the milquetoasty pages of the Dave Matthews/Jack Johnson/John Mayer/Sister Hazel songbook for Pussies looking For Pussy. An affinity for this kind of music is to women what a broken leg and loud whimpering is to an antelope on the open Serengeti: a sign of galling distress sure to be exploited by even the weakest of predators. It's a means to an end, and an annoying one at that, especially when all you really want to do is have a little peace and quiet to drink and throw death-defying post patterns against a cover 2 D in Madden.
Looking for prey? Buy a guitar and become the hyena of the party.
(The other option is actually liking this form of music, which indicates a.) a complete lack of the gland excreting good taste, or b.) an intro-level marijuana smoker who hasn't got enough THC in his system to graft the Widespread Panic/Blues Traveler/Grateful Dead complex onto his identity--yet. This would also be evident in the not-yet-abominable hygiene of said person.)
The faults continue with the shirt: flannel, like he just waltzed out of an episode of "My So Called Life," proving that the good marketeers at UConn have all of the qualifications to work in the casting department at the Trinity Broadcasting Network's Youth Division. His teeth have obviously had some hardcore whitening, and overall he looks like the kind of disposable person designed for the sole person of appearing in pictures you will view years later while your wife says: "Who is that?"
All of this made us practically Orgeronnically mad, but then came...the expressions. The mugging, smug, self-satisified array of looks Six-Stringy Fucktardo gives the camera is enough to make us want to drive to UConn and beat anyone bearing the slightest resemblance to a quivering, blood-sopped pile of mush and flannel. He flashes them with the shoddy confidence of a man whose equation for every evening went something like this:
("Hey") + ("That's so deep") - (wingwoman)/ (patented smile) X (laugh) + (one rendition of "Your Body is a Wonderland")+ (four beers) = skinny sub-smart blond education major down for the night.
We hate this guy, we hate him, we don't even know him and we hate him. We hope all the bad things in life happen to him and only him. And associatively, we hate UConn and all its flannelly, shitty acoustic guitar playing kinda long haired self stands for.
The commercial ends with a spew of quick cut shots of something resembling a university campus and the Choadster making a putrescent pun. A Kodiak bear's paw then swats him to the ground and begins to pull his skin off on camera; horrific shrieks and the sound of a guitar flailing on the ground repeatedly follow. That doesn't actually happen, but what is a man without dreams?
Summary grade: F. F. F. The worst ad we've seen. An abomination of craptitude. Shit, on tape.