a scrub is a guy who thinks he’s fly
April 23, 2021 8:42 AM   Subscribe

It’s Friday. Take a break with an excellent vid for Pygmalion (1938) set to a cover of “No Scrubs” by Bastille ft. Ella Eyre. (SLYT)
posted by Quasirandom (24 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is one of those things that I feel like has a very niche audience. But I am part of that. God bless and save the public domain.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:57 AM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure what's going on here. The movie Pygmalion is brilliant and entertaining and everyone should see it. But why is it being linked to this song here? If you've never seen the movie, the clips don't make any sense. If you have seen the movie, you're impatient with the song, and offended by the chopped up narrative. Could it have the benign intention of possibly seducing the sort of person who doesn't watch black-and-white films into actually watching the movie itself? Or is it simply appropriating the art of another age to add luster and gloss to a song that doesn't bear listening to for its own virtues.
posted by Modest House at 9:09 AM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]


I would argue the song is worth something on its own virtues, but it is an odd pairing.

Thematically, No Scrubs is about holding to your standards, while Pygmalion is how maybe your standards are bullshit?
posted by RobotHero at 9:18 AM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


I was unfamiliar with the song, but I liked it. Prof. Higgins is pretty much a scrub, right? I mean, the whole movie is him leaning out of a car (well, wealth and privilege) and yelling at Ms. Doolittle....
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:21 AM on April 23, 2021 [9 favorites]


The original is a great song but I must confess to being surprised how often it gets covered.
posted by gwint at 9:32 AM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


Sorry to rain a bit on this parade, but I will take a moment to express my absolute hatred for "No Scrubs", despite my appreciation for the artists in TLC who performed it and despite apparent universal love for the thing: I can only hear the lyric as an endorsement of the greed and selfishness that exemplifies capitalism. It always strikes me as tragic that love should be withheld from someone because they chose not to own a car, or otherwise fail to engage in the rat race.

I'd like to believe, however that there is a critique of the song inherent in the linked cover version: so thanks for that!
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 9:43 AM on April 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


GenjiandProust, that's my read of the vid, too.
posted by Quasirandom at 9:48 AM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]




Yeah, I think it works if we read a 'scrub' (aka, a busta) as an ambitionless hack who's mainly coasting on their parents good graces, rather than as a person who just doesn't own a car.

I also like that 'scrub' is a slang word, which, of course, makes the song line up naturally with doolittle's perspective... It also echos Shaw's resistance to various attempts to give the play a 'happy' ending in which Pygmalion and Galatea get married. 'No Scrubs' is Galatea telling the sculptor to fsck off and let her lead her own life.

Which leads us to respond to this comment:

Or is it simply appropriating the art of another age to add luster and gloss to a song that doesn't bear listening to for its own virtues.

Thank you for your contributions to the discussion, Prof. Higgins. :)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:02 AM on April 23, 2021 [9 favorites]


tl;dr As long as there have been people, there have been scrubs; here's an example.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:17 AM on April 23, 2021 [4 favorites]


Growing up in the generation I did, my first encounter with "edited clips of a fictional characters' pairing to a thematically related song" was in the form of AMVs. When I later realized that people could do it with things that weren't anime, it was a real surprise (despite how obvious that should have been in retrospect).

Now, though, I've got to wonder. Did the trend start with AMVs and move outward to live-action stuff? Were people doing this live-action stuff all the time and I never knew because YouTube wasn't a thing back then? When did editing software become simple enough that people could cut and edit footage from media and easily make these sort of things?
posted by KChasm at 10:48 AM on April 23, 2021


Not really feeling the choice to go big tragic sound for No Scrubs, a song I liked a good bit back in the day. The "broke ass" "live at home with your mama" "get me with no money" thing is a little yay capitalism, sure, but I'm content to take it more as being about the attitude of the guy who puts out like he's a big shot, but has nothing to offer as much as the money itself.

The difficulty for the movie is that Higgins has the money and prestige to go with the attitude, he's just kinda a self involved dick who isn't all that concerned about the interests of others one way or the other, beyond his niche specialty group. While Doolittle is broke ass and has an attitude that would as much say "scrub" as Higgins. It makes sense if you take the two parts in this odd version of the song as each saying "No scrubs!" about the other as a protest against their growing involvement of sorts.

(Of course Alfred Doolittle proves why no scrubs is such a fraught concept in the first place.)
posted by gusottertrout at 10:52 AM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


Did the trend start with AMVs and move outward to live-action stuff?

Heck nah. As with a lot of fan remix culture, you can blame Star Trek for that. I grew up on the slasher side, so my recollection is it was the Kirk/Spock shippers and enterprising ppl with multiple video decks.
posted by cendawanita at 11:00 AM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


It's an interesting juxtaposition but most of the time it just seems out of sync. Once in a while it almost comes together then, oh well. I haven't seen this film but it looks worth watching.

Good cover version of this song.

Capn Jack Aubrey would probably define the word "scrub" as a crappy guy. Of course, I always think of TLC when he says that.
posted by ovvl at 11:03 AM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


To build on my last comment, you can trace fanvid trends/conventions with tech advances as well, like in this one. Layering multiple audio tracks being a feature available for the home user for example, was my personal observation how post-2010s fanvids (like this one in the FPP) began to start layering in the original dialogue tracks because they could control the levels that wasn't distracting from their song of choice. It used to be seen a bad stylistic choice but really it's because of the clipping issues and if you're just editing manually or with early home user software you definitely didn't have a video source that's got it's audio tracks separated out in the editor view.
posted by cendawanita at 11:07 AM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


Heck nah. As with a lot of fan remix culture, you can blame Star Trek for that. I grew up on the slasher side, so my recollection is it was the Kirk/Spock shippers and enterprising ppl with multiple video decks.

Correct. The first "fanvid" we can accurately date was from 1975. Kirk/Spock vid. The first "moving" fanvid was likely a Starsky & Hutch slash vid, made in the mid- to late-70s. Basically, as soon as someone realized they could buy a second VCR and record clips from one to the other, as well as audio from another input source, the fanvid was born.

History of fannish vidding.
posted by tzikeh at 12:35 PM on April 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


"No Scrubs" is pretty definitely not referring to, say, guys who prefer biking over cars because of the environment or guys who don't have a job because they're caring for their elderly parents full-time or guys who don't have money because they're working as a social worker in a high cost-of-living city. If you can't figure that out from the lyrics and the literary and social context of the song I don't know what to tell you.
posted by Anonymous at 12:38 PM on April 23, 2021


Higgins is not a scrub. Freddy, otoh, is literally a broke ass that lives at home with his mama and tries to holla at Eliza.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:42 PM on April 23, 2021 [7 favorites]


Aubrey would use 'scrub' to describe horses as well as people, and in either case I think it means unreliability- someone who looks all right but will fail dangerously under stress.
posted by clew at 12:50 PM on April 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


In a fannish register
WELCOME TO VIDELICET: A VIDDING ZINE
https://vidders.github.io/articles/vidding/history.html
posted by Jesse the K at 4:12 PM on April 23, 2021


I enjoyed hearing the cover, I enjoyed seeing the clips, I did not find any particular interest or synergy in their juxtaposition.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:13 PM on April 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm getting quite old in my fannish habits, but i also think fanvids vs fancams is something i know i don't have the literacy to quite get the distinction about. I do enjoy fancams whenever i see a stray one, but the impression i get is that the audio track has even less connection to the visual text? Or there is but shallower. Like this one has a point of view it wants to say but so do fancams though i get the impression those are more like a scrapbook of moments than any particular thesis.
posted by cendawanita at 7:56 PM on April 23, 2021


I never knew there was such a huge backlash to the song. It reminds me of the Margaret Atwood quote, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
posted by AlSweigart at 9:21 AM on April 24, 2021


I just wanted to chime in and say that the Pygmalion featured here is a vastly superior product to the musical My Fair Lady.

I base it purely on the depiction of Alfred Doolittle in the movie; and Wendy Hiller's accent.
posted by indianbadger1 at 3:25 PM on April 26, 2021


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