Long before 'Crank That,' there was Freddie
Matthew Ralph

As mainstream as YouTube has become these days, I knew it would only be a matter of time before my overly nostalgic father would discover the site's cache of video clips dating back to his childhood.

Like his almost immediate addiction following his discovery of eBay several years ago, I knew the minute he told me he wanted to show me "this video" on my computer during a recent holiday visit that it would be a while.

"Check this out," he said, referring to a grainy black and white video of a '60s Manchester beat group called Freddie and the Dreamers. "It's the Freddie."

This, of course, meant nothing to me. As a kid my dad more than once had taken out a puppet made from an old rubber ball he called Freddie and made it "do the Freddie." But I had all but blocked my dad's goofball routine from my memory.

That is, until I saw the horn-rimmed glasses-wearing singer on the video flapping his arms side to side as he sang and did the song and dance bearing his name. "Look at him go," my dad said as the song played on, its pop-laden hooks and simple melody proving once and for all that my dad hadn't written that silly "Freddie the puppet" theme song after all.

That was just the beginning. After the song ended, my dad clicked on another video showing Freddie years later as a senior citizen still jumping around on stage doing the Freddie. "Look at him, he's shot," my gray-haired, AARP card carrying father said. In reality, Freddie is dead, but the legacy of his stupid dance lives on, not only on YouTube but in all of the stupid dances—did someone say Crank That?-- that have come and gone in the decades of bad pop music since.

While I spared my dad the torture of sitting through the YouTube generation's version of Freddie (I can only imagine his disgust at a song using superman and hoe in the same sentence), I couldn't help but think of the Souljah Boy phenomenon as I watched for the twelfth time Freddie flapping his arms and legs from side to side. If my dad's generation had had YouTube, would there have been thousands of videos of kids, entire college football squads and professional athletes sporting horn-rimmed glasses "doing the Freddie"? And if there were, what would we, their children think of them now?

We'd probably think no different than I do of the rubber ball puppet my dad still has in his basement workshop—as an embarrassingly goofy footnote from the past.

Still, I'm pretty sure I'd rather listen to Freddie on repeat than the degrading snap-dancing gibberish of Souljah Boy's tired even before it ever cracked the 16 million hits plateau on YouTube routine. What's worse than seeing the cocky talent deprived rapper do it are the countless videos of ordinary kids imitating him in their living rooms.  

I for one would much rather see someone like my dad taking his recent discovery of YouTube one step further in the direction of the popular Web site's "broadcast yourself" slogan. A video of a 59-year-old man in horn-rim glasses doing the Freddie would be, at least in my mind, must-see YouTube TV.

posted [03.06.08]

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