What. It's 2009.

September 1, 2021 1:25 PM

Community's Spanish 101 rap is interpreted by the annotators at Genius. That's all.
posted by mosst (10 comments total)

I'm currently 302 days into Spanish on Duolingo and Season 2 of rewatching all of Community, so this post is for me. I loved actually following some of the Spanish this time around.

FYI there is another version of this rap in the outro to S2E1, including none other than Betty White.
posted by hypnogogue at 4:45 PM on September 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is very funny. Dónde está la biblioteca is an earworm which I think about on a monthly basis.
posted by Braeburn at 12:11 AM on September 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Word.
posted by chavenet at 4:10 AM on September 2, 2021

There are so many hilarious songs in Community. The white-dude reggae of "Pierce You Are a B" always cracks me up. "Getting Rid of Britta" might be funny if it wasn't so mean-spirited and an early step toward the show's shitty diminishing of Britta. "Baby Boomer Santa" is solid gold. Ex chetera.*


*My Latin class is fake, Jeff. Like all my classes.
posted by heteronym at 6:14 AM on September 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

"Glee! It's a feeling you get, when your brain finally lets your heart get in its pants!
Glee! It's like a drug that you use, that turns your pain into shoes and your shoes into dance!"

The best Troy & Abed rap is from that episode, too.


*My Latin class is fake, Jeff. Like all my classes.
*Would that this desk were a time desk!
posted by LooseFilter at 7:09 AM on September 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Getting Rid of Britta" might be funny if it wasn't so mean-spirited and an early step toward the show's shitty diminishing of Britta.

I've come to think of the way Britta was portrayed as a fairly on-the-nose take down of performative woke-ness. It just didn't track quite as clearly in 2010 as it does now. Community was ahead of the curve on a lot of American cultural discourse during the Obama presidency that would come to the fore in the Trump years.
posted by dry white toast at 1:33 PM on September 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

I believe that Harmon talked back in the day about Britta being the most "author-insert" character on the show, and I think that any character degradation you see is as a result of that author being pretty self-hating.

Britta might be my single favorite character on TV, though.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:26 PM on September 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

That's a good point about Britta's performative wokeness. Even back then she felt like a parody of an activist, which I didn't mind; what struck me as shitty was that she was written as increasingly dumb and incapable.

Navelgazer's remark about her being a Harmon stand-in makes sense, at least up to a point.

Britta's Christmas song is streets ahead. "Me so Christmas, me so merry!"
posted by heteronym at 3:03 PM on September 2, 2021

I believe that Harmon talked back in the day about Britta being the most "author-insert" character on the show, and I think that any character degradation you see is as a result of that author being pretty self-hating.

I am skeptical of the Britta-as-author-insert theory because Harmon said this:

So one of the things that I did to send the message that I didn’t want to force anything down their throat was that I really started beating up on Britta, which was really easy to do because that character is an amalgam of a lot of ex-girlfriends of mine.

Getting back on topic, I think the Spanish 101 rap was the moment where I really started to love Community. Danny Pudi and Donald Glover had such natural rapport together, right from the beginning. And the Genius comments are perfect.
posted by creepygirl at 3:38 PM on September 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

I hate when Genius goes to the trouble of annotating a song who’s meaning is so manifestly obvious.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 11:16 AM on September 5, 2021