MTV2’s The Andy Milonakis Show has not aired a new episode since 2007, but its eternally youthful-looking host has not disappeared from public view, thanks to both social media and appearances on things like Kroll Show. Comedian and musician Andy Milonakis, now 39, still tweets all the damned time and regularly updates his YouTube channel, too. Occasionally, he also releases fully-produced, green screen-heavy music videos, complete with the hip-hop-informed humor which has typified his career. Case in point: the Sean Barrett-directed “My Music Video Is Trending,” a nonstop series of outrageous boasts about Milonakis’ material wealth and far-reaching fame. Perhaps echoing the celebrity-based fantasies of many Americans, Milonakis raps, “Look how slick I am in my video / Look how pimp I am in my video.” Among the names casually dropped in the video are Rick Ross, Drake, Tony Danza, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. The last two, Milonakis claims, “taught me how to make a girl squirt like crazy.” Touche.
For some, the relentlessly narcissistic “My Music Video Is Trending” will play as a cogent, knowing satire of materialism. For others, the song merely embodies the most obnoxious attitudes of its era. Either way, the video will make a fine time capsule item, as it efficiently expresses everything that is terrible and/or awesome about popular culture in 2015. When historians of the future look back upon this troubled year, they will do well to study Milonakis’ performance, which perfectly captures a time when success is measured in view counts and retweets. Ridiculous as it is, the song actually does make a salient point about the neediness and insecurity lurking behind swaggering narcissism: “Oh my god, Drake just tweeted it / Oh my god, Pitchfork just featured it / People talkin’ ‘bout me, and I really needed it.”