Sunday, March 20, 2011

Backup Dancers From Hell: Josh Kelley - “Georgia Clay”



  We start off with Josh strolling through one of those half-moon-shaped buildings that look sort of industrial but mostly cheap and style-devoid. We can see rigs and tractors of various kinds lining the sides of the building, but we seem to have an awful lot of wasted space in the middle. Oh wait, now I get it. The cleared area has been created so that Josh can mosey in wearing his cowboy boots and we have plenty of clearance to confirm that, yep, Josh be wearin’ some boots.

  He’s also wearing a fairly tight t-shirt, which I’m sure is critical to the story. Josh wanders over to something under a dusty tarp, and he yanks this tarp off in slo-mo so that the most common denominator in the country world is slowly revealed: a pickup truck. This experience is so moving that it causes Josh to grab a guitar from who knows where and start crooning and stroking. We get some artistic jump-shots of Josh still wearing the t-shirt and the truck still being revealed. (Dang, that’s one big-ass truck. Hoo boy.)

  Flash back to Josh supposedly driving that truck when he was 17, tooling along some country road that is actually pavement, so I’m not sure where all the dust is coming from. (Close-up of Current Josh’s boots. Thank you for that. I was worried that he might have somehow lost them during the epic struggle with the tarp, which is still going on and we’re starting to get a little bit annoyed with that.)

  Another shot of Josh (or maybe some stand-in) kicking one of the tires of the truck. I have never understood this thing with the tire-kicking. What are we supposed to learn when doing such a thing? Are you checking to make sure the tires can stand up to the pressure? I would think the mere fact that said tires are holding up a two-ton pickup is all the evidence you need. If the tires are still doing their duty with all THAT weight, your lame-ass big toe isn’t going to change things much.

  Anyway, back to current Josh banging on his guitar and vocalizing. (Come to think of it, we never actually saw 17-year-old Josh. Just who the hell was driving that truck? Is this something we need to report to Adam Walsh?) I guess current Josh heard me, because we then see him climbing into the truck and diddling with the rearview mirror, intent on proving that he did SO drive this truck back in the day. There’s a necklace hanging from this mirror, which is apparently the same one (courtesy of another flashback) that was worn by unseen 17-Josh’s girlfriend during a time when he couldn’t legally drink alcohol.

  Okay, current Josh also heard my quip about alcohol, because he launches into the part of the song where one of his high school buddy’s having a fake ID made Josh a celebrity. Really? Josh was famous for this? Why wasn’t the buddy famous? It was his ID. High school kids are SO unfocused. Especially when dust and pickup trucks are involved.

  To confirm the questionable mentality of youngsters with too much time on their hands, we have several shots of teenagers running across a parking lot with what appears to be a keg of beer. See what I mean? They don’t understand anything. You do NOT shake up a keg like that. Somebody could lose an eye when they finally tap it.

  Back to Current Josh in the UFO hangar where somebody has decided to store tractors, fertilizer and access to sound recording equipment. Josh likes this place, because he’s really smiling a lot and kicking at the ground with his cowboy boots in a burst of enthusiasm. Cut over to another flashback, where 17-Josh and his little friends are all jumping into a muddy river, because that’s a totally safe thing to do in a southern state where many politicians believe that “toxic pollution of the environment” is something Obama dreamed up while attending grade school in that Muslim military camp where everyone is pretending to be Hawaiian.

  Oh, look at that. 17-Josh’s girlfriend decides that it’s really important that she wave her questionable high heels in the air before plunging her recent puberty-achieving body into that muddy water. Poor thing is going to learn some hard lessons later in life. Like don’t ever wear those ugly shoes again.

  Okay, now Current Josh is in a field somewhere, so I guess the aliens came back to town, reclaiming their storage facility and throwing Josh out the back door. He doesn’t mind the new location, once again kicking at the dusty clay and wearing faded jeans that favorably package his nether region. (I’m not quite as supportive of that shirt he’s wearing, but we’ll let it go.)

  And now we have somebody driving that dang truck down a real country road, where there’s actual dirt and muddy bits and everything. The person at the wheel has been instructed to drive really slow, so that the mud and water splatters almost look pretty in the sunshine. Almost. It’s still mostly a crappy road that probably goes nowhere.

  Now it’s nighttime, and Current Josh is still wearing that shirt I don’t care for, but some production assistant has helpfully lit a campfire, and we all know that things look better by firelight, especially if Jack Daniels has been introduced at some point. Josh is really invested in playing his guitar during this bit, but I’m more invested in noticing that some fool has parked the signature pickup about two inches from the suddenly-raging campfire and that things could blow at any second.

  Josh doesn’t care, because he’s cool that way, and he continues to energetically strum while we get some more flashbacks of country folk enjoying the finer things in life like floating in dirty rivers and the potential for unsupervised teenage sex.

  Another shot of whoever it is driving in slo-mo down that muddy road, followed by a shot of Lindsay Lohan hanging her head out of a pickup window. Okay, maybe it’s not Lindsay, because she’s not holding a beer bottle, waving a prescription for controlled substances, or spinning the wheel on her sexuality. Whoever this girl is, she doesn’t mind driving through a shower of mud. Or Georgia.

  And we wind the song down with more flashbacks, with most everyone very pleased with their lot in life, even if mud gets in crevices it shouldn’t. Final image is of Current Josh finishing out the song on his guitar, and then, you guessed it, kicking at that famous Georgia clay so that dust billows about and probably acts as an incinerate for the out-of-control, sparks-flying campfire that is greedily working its way toward the pickup and its tasty gas tank. If I’m not mistaken, one of the leading flames reaches out and kicks at the tires…


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