Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin called her shot. Well… every shot, really. Back in March, she tweeted, “I’m gonna recreate the video for popular by Nada Surf but I’m gonna play every character.” But it seems as though at the time, she was unaware that Pom Pom Squad and Nada Surf are both signed to City Slang Records (City Slang handles Nada Surf’s European releases), so this pipe dream was well within reach.
https://twitter.com/pompomsquad/status/1374944954250891279?lang=en
Considering that Berrin dubs Pom Pom Squad’s stage style “High School Americana,” a remake of Nada Surf’s “Popular” video just made too much sense. So today, we’ve been graced with the new cover version from Pom Pom Squad with a mostly shot-for-shot remake of the clip, that was even filmed at the same high school as the original Nada Surf clip. True to her word, Berrin plays the head cheerleader, the quarterback, the teacher, and of course, the rock star shredding away at the 50-yard line.
For added authenticity, Nada Surf leader Matthew Caws appears on the track as a backing vocalist. Caws voiced his approval for the Pom Pom Squad version in a statement:
“I love how it feels like a shot-for-shot recreation at the start but quickly takes on its own totally new character. The original was shot in 1996, looking back at previous decades, while this one feels set in the present day, looking inwards and towards the future… another really cool aspect of the video is that the cheerleader character feels more and more sincere and human as the story develops. By the end, she’s much more than a player in a high school creation, she’s a person in the world and the singer of the song.”
The new characteristics of the video definitely modernize Nada Surf’s original concept. For instance, instead of the naked shower scene, we get Berrin in shoulder pads in the locker room. There’s also no more corny make-out scene in the bleachers of a nefarious cheerleader acting like a femme fatale of sorts. Berrin is simply a star in this one. And to think that it all started with an innocuous tweet.
https://twitter.com/pompomsquad/status/1375116392094126082
Watch the video for Pom Pom Squad’s “Popular” above and check out Nada Surf’s original below.
