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Poykpac's "Doo-Wop Bee-Jay"
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The creators of Hipster Olympics travel back in time to bring modern-day America this one surviving single from The Poykettes, the best 1950s doo-wop band to expound upon the fine art of fellatio. For, whether you live in the 1950s or today, life is complicated for a woman -- thankfully, there's one little maneuver that can get a girl out of nearly any jam.
Originally written by Nadia Wahhab and Jenn Lyon in late 2004, live performances of "Bee-Jay" were a staple of their comedy folk music group Summer's Eve, but when Wahhab and Lyon split up to pursue other projects, the song went unrecorded. Until 2007, that is, when Lyon (now one of the six members of Poykpac) and Wahhab (now a solo act performing under the name Summer and Eve) reunited to help Poykpac produce this video, a tribute to the 1950s doo-wop era.
To recreate the big 50s sound, Poykpac's Taige Jensen used a combination of reverb, as well as stripping out the low end to make it sound like an older recording. "The rest was the style of the songwriting and singing -- the Ronettes were a clear inspiration," he says. "We also tried to get the girls to simplify their approach to singing the song -- it's a somewhat modern trend to overstylize vocal performance, so we attempted to prevent the singing from becoming in any way 'Aguilera-esque,' if you will. No big runs, et-cetera."
This same attitude was a key part of production as well. "Unfortunately, music videos didn't really exist during that era. The closest were the filmed live studio performances they did on shows like The Ed Sullivan Show. So in the end, we tried to make a hybrid, sort of imagining what a music video might have been like had they made one back then," says Jensen. "We kept the cinematography very traditional. Everything was locked down. No handheld. No steadicam. Lots of dollies. A TV studio style. And we kept everything pretty old school in editing as well, sticking to traditional wipes and long dissolves."
In the future, Poykpac will continue looking to the past -- their next online video will be "an aggressively homoerotic 1980s wrestling commercial parody." They also have a few pieces in the works for CollegeHumor.com, and aspire to become the #15 Most Viewed Comedian of all time (they currently come in at #16). What happens in that rosy future? "We'll probably move into an apartment with running water and a bathroom. Or at least a kitchen."
-Liz Miller
POYKPAC
Comedy, Music Video
Poykette #1 : Jenn Lyon
Poykette #2 : Nadia Wahhab
Poykette #3 : Maggie Ross
Hot Guy : Taige Jensen
Boyfriend : Jack Carskaddon
Sister's Husband : Ryan Hunter
Gas Man : Ryan Hall
Cop : Jesse Patch
Lyrics By Jenn Lyon, Nadia Wahhab, Patrick Blindauer
Audio Engineer : Taige Jensen
Vocals : Nadia Wahhab, Jenn Lyon
