Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 10/26/2011 at 11:52 AM Videos

The Popdust Files: black keys, el camino, new videos, viral videos

After a couple of videos for Brothers singles “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ for You” that likely took a lot of time, effort, and most pressingly, band involvement, the Black Keys have evidently decided to simplify, simplify for the video for El Camino lead single, the excellent lean rocker “Lonely Boy.” No more elaborate story arcs or fake film preview setups, just a dude outside of a ticket office boogeyin’ up a storm. And boogie he does, for the entirety of the song’s three-minute-plus duration, as he lip syncs along. (“Is that what happened to Carlton Banks?” quips the video’s top-rated YouTube comment, and not entirely without reason.)

We dig it, anyway. You can consider the “Lonely Boy” video kind of a cutting out of the YouTube middleman—you know that there were going to be weird YouTube users posting their dance routines to the song apropos of nothing, so why not make one of them the star of the official music video? Makes sense to us.