Zubaz. Rollerblades. A guitar shaped like an AK-47. Karaoke. Bar Mitzvah videographers.
That's like a Murderers' Row of awesome right there, and yet, despite the fact that all of them are prominently featured in Cobra Starship's new video — for the song "Guilty Pleasure" — none of them is even the most awesome thing in the clip.
No, that honor belongs to Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump's cameo as Cobra's manager, "Rob McFlynn," a rather inspired bit of scene-stealing that out-awesomes anything else in the immediate vicinity.
And this is because — for those who aren't aware — Stump is doing a dead-on impression of real-life FOB (and Cobra Starship) manager Bob McLynn, right down to the deep voice, manic gesturing and revenue-sharing schemes (for a closer look at the origins of Stump's McLynn mimicry, check out this post in our Newsroom blog). It's an inside joke that anyone who's ever been in a room with McLynn — an ultra-gregarious mountain of a man — will instantly get, and one that pretty much every artist he manages (a list that also includes Panic at the Disco, Gym Class Heroes, Tyga and a host of others) has been dying to see in a video for a while now.
"Everyone on Crush [Management] does an impression of him, but Patrick's been working on his for a while, and he's the lord of it, so we had to include it in the video," Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta laughed. "Basically, Bob's this larger-than-life guy. ... He's hilarious and always hustling. He's a character. I mean, he only wears stuff he gets for free, like some band T-shirt and some JNCO jeans or something, and he looks like Mr. Clean, but he's always got business on his mind. He reminds me of, like, ['Aqua Teen Hunger Force' character] Frylock or something."
Still, impersonating McLynn is an art form, one that Stump — who's no stranger to character work after his guest appearance on "Law & Order" earlier this year — has been perfecting for some time. So in order to get some tips, we decided to go straight to the master himself. Aspiring thespians take note.
"Bob's a good friend, so more or less, I've just been ribbing him for years. The secret to the Bob is the pitch. He's got a deep voice, but it's not too deep. If I wake up and do a Bob right out of bed, it's actually deeper than his voice," Stump explained. "Another key with all impressions is a catchphrase. Understanding what someone would say in a given situation is 90 percent of it. Bob walks into the backstage area, looks around at the craft-service table and goes, 'What do we got here? Little turkey? Little ham?' 'Cause he loves free food. That's character study, man!
"And when he's mad, he goes, 'God sakes!' and probably grabs his head," Stump continued. "But the truest way to do a Bob — and the easiest — is simply to pound your fist and in a deep voice say someone's name a bunch of times. As in, 'James Montgomery, James Montgomery, what you got for me?' "
As for McLynn's take on the whole thing, well, he's a man of few words, and when MTV News e-mailed him for comment, he'd only offer quick props to Stump, before adding, "He freaks me out sometimes." And while the impression is by far the most prominent bit of insider-joking in the "Guilty Pleasure" clip, it's by no means the only. The entire video is a four-minute dig at the Crush universe, loaded with product-placement-gone-awry, bizarre (and unnecessary) cameos from labelmates and appearances at branded karaoke bars.
Even the fact that Cobra Starship made the video — after all, they had a perfectly good homemade one sitting on the shelf — is a nod to Crush's "do it big on a budget" business model.
"I mean, right off the bat, we already made a video for this song, but it was this homemade thing, and no one is gonna play it, so we decided to make the video about making a video," Saporta said. "So the joke is, we spent our entire budget on a DeLorean, so Bob tries to come up with some other funds by throwing in some crazy, wack product placement. And then there's the stuff about his 'other clients' making appearances in the video. I mean, the whole thing is kind of smart, in a way, but since it's Cobra Starship, we wanted to walk the fine line between doing something smart and doing something that made us look completely ridiculous. And I think we tread sort of close to the ridiculous zone on this one."
