Posted by Michael Barthel on 03/16/2011 at 12:55 PM Videos

The Popdust Files: cee lo, cee lo green, fuck you

When something goes viral, it’s so easy to do a lazy take on it: make an animated gif, turn it into a blingee, cover it on piano. Yawn! What takes real skill is to take a hit pop song like Cee Lo’s “Fuck You” and not only make it about Jesus, but to also make it a salvo in an ongoing YouTube flame war between you and some Black Hebrew Israelites. This is what we have with GMDOCNICE’s “Bless You,” which delivers both a standard Christian tweak on a semi-current chart hit and a very pointed message from one online user to another. Sure, you’ve got his version of the video, in which GMDOCNICE plays all the parts. But this is all bookended by a skit where a dumb-looking guy (in what I think are the Red Hook projects?) badmouths Jesus in YouTube comments, and credits in which a guy with puffed-up lips is identified as “BHI BLACK Head Munister ‘Duh Boss Man’ Webbfingers.” It would all be kind of racist if… well, actually, it is kind of racist.

The whole thing is weird in a very Rebecca Black way—this video clearly wasn’t intended to go much further than a small group of people online, but because it’s connected to this shared pop-culture thing we all enjoy, here we all are, watching it. And you are watching it, right? Because it’s pretty impressive.