Fender Bender, Weirdness based on Actual Events, MTV World Premiere Videos!

At the time of recording this album, I was living alone in an apartment on St. Denis Street in Montreal. In that neighborhood, you would find a few of the best second hand record stores in the city... so it was no coincidence that I signed a rental lease there. Most of my days were spent walking and digging through record shops, stopping for some groceries, practicing scratching, recording, digging through record shops... repeat.

St. Denis was a busy four lane shopping street... Always buzzing with a lot of energy and full of bistros, bars, boutiques and theatres. At night the street was crawling with club and theatre goers and in the day the sidewalks were packed with diners and shoppers... especially during the weekends.  

This one Saturday morning, I was awakened by the sound of some strange altercation outside.  My windows were closed so the sound was muffled... but it was loud enough to wake me from my slumber. 

I heard a light metallic bump

followed by a series of slamming car doors

followed by a 3 minute heated exchange of high pitched and low pitched yelling.

I lived on the second floor, I couldn't really hear the actual words through the closed windows, but I could tell these two people were super pissed off.  Road rage, or should I say Parking Rage was a real thing in this neighborhood. Only the swiftest parallel parkers would survive and catch that holy grail of an actual Saturday morning parking spot.  

I walked to the window and sure enough this was definitely a Parking Rage situation. Two cars at a standstill, one half backed into a space.  Luckily no one was hurt. Maybe a little paint got chipped off one of the cars. 

Later that day, when I was practicing on the turntables in the studio, one of the scratches reminded me of this parking argument through the window.  And Tah-dah that was the genesis of the concept for "Fender Bender".  

Many people have asked where these ideas come from, I'll usually say... "real life."  This is a perfect example of that in action. Holds true even when real life is actually situated somewhere between the realm of the silly and the very silly. In the end, the record label decided that this would be the "single" for the album and that we should make a video for it. Go figure!

But what's this got to do with babies??

This was an MTV World Premiere Video. Here remastered for the first time in uncompressed Video and Audio on Vimeo. You've never seen it THIS UNCOMPRESSED!  

It was directed by my cousin Kenneth, professionally directing/animating under the moniker Monkmus. 

Clocking in at 1:55. Here it is in all it's short attention span glory. Later, I was told by someone at the record label, as well as a few MTV video show hosts that they would use it as a bumper when they had to fill in programming time at the end of a session. So this video got more airplay than it should have considering how weird it was. After the premiere, it would be played on their animation shows, their hip hop shows, but also act as a bumper on their other shows when they had to fill that 2 minute gap in their broadcast schedule. So I'm imagining they would put this video at the end of Headbangers Ball, Or the Country Music hour, or Power Ballads hour, continually being slotted in and confusing viewers the world over in the year 2000. 

The world premiere was a big moment for me (high school me couldn't believe it was actually going to be an MTV World Premiere Video!), it played one night after this classic MTV world premiere intro. The phone rang right after the broadcast. It was my mom.

"Hi Eric, I just watched your music video premiere on MTV.  We taped it for you."

"Thanks mom!"

"So I have a question. That thing that crawls out of his back at the end and climbs up the tree...  That's a koala right?"

"No, I think that's just a baby."

"Okay ask Kenneth if it's a koala.  Otherwise this music video doesn't make any sense. "

"Okay mom, I'll ask him if that's supposed to be koala... but I'm pretty sure it's a baby."

** editor's note

I never remembered to ask Kenneth what it was.  (clearly a baby)  I got busy, and it didn't come up in conversation the next time I saw him. Plus, I don't think it would have made more sense to all the MTV viewers if it was indeed a koala rather than a baby. But maybe someday we'll do a Q&A with Monkmus here on Patreon and get to the bottom of this 20 year mystery.

Enjoy! 

E

PSA!: Go see more of Monkmus' amazing animation at his website: www.monkmus.com