Lately, two figures completely dominate the Rocks Off blog. One is Allyson Townsend, whose battle to bring pop music to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community has her scheduled to make an appearance as Diane Sawyer's "Person of the Week" on ABC's World News Tonight.
The other towering figure is Trinidadian rap sensation Nicki Minaj. So when Rocks Off saw a new music video called "Dinosaur Sweater" that claimed to feature her, we couldn't click "play" fast enough.
Waiting for Nicki Minaj is something of a Rocks Off rite of passage, so we didn't mind meditating a bit while the video loaded. The artist was listed as Dudely Jones. The name failed to ring any bells. No matter; the music was starting.
In a crappy apartment, a man we now know is Evan Cassidy places an emergency call to a buddy in order to retrieve his full-proof booty bait, his magic armor, his dinosaur sweater. That last one isn't a metaphor. A garish sweater knitted by the artist's mother when he was a junior in high school and emblazoned with primary color tyrannosaurs and stegosauruses is his "Funky Cold Medina" when worn over a fishnet shirt.
Now, at this point, we began to doubt the legitimacy of the video's claim to include arguably one of the brightest new rap stars in the country. This seemed like a put-on. That thought didn't really have time to stay for more than a quick drink in our heads though as we were now being beaten over the head with the awesomeness of a giant green bipedal dinosaur chilling with our hero in a hot tub with a number of fly honeys.
Whether she shows up or not, we reckoned, we're gonna have to count this experience as a positive if we're going to see such fine prehistoric mack daddying. But we were wrong. "Nicki Minaj" does in fact drop in to drop some rhymes, and it happens about 1:29 into the video.
Well, after that we had to have a few words with Dudely Jones. Turns out Dudely Jones is a Southern California comedy tribe founded by Evan Cassidy earlier this year that specializes in sketch comedy and music videos. They claim to be an actual tribe, living by hunting and gathering.
That's fine. We used to tell people we were one-third Cherokee. Apparently the tribe gets WiFi in their teepees, because Cassidy had no problem answering a querying email.
