Fruit Bats - You're Too Weird

What this video is

Released in July 2011 as the lead single from Fruit Bats' fifth album Tripper (Sub Pop Records, August 2, 2011), 'You're Too Weird' arrived during a broader early-2010s indie rock moment of reflexive nostalgia, in which acts across the Sub Pop and Merge Records ecosystem engaged in knowing aesthetic excavation of 1980s pop and rock visual culture. The video deploys every hallmark of the early MTV era — stiff…

Why it matters

A textbook example of early-2010s indie rock's ironic 1980s pastiche mode, 'You're Too Weird' demonstrates how Sub Pop-aligned artists leveraged music video aesthetics as a site of genre commentary. The video's deliberate deployment of early-MTV visual grammar — performed with straight-faced…

The director

The General Assembly were a Los Angeles-based music video and commercial directing duo comprised of Adam Littke and Adam Willis. Active circa 2009–2014, they directed videos for artists including Fruit Bats, A.C. Newman, Grum, The Wombats, Totally Enormous…