The music video for “Crazy,” a single from Aerosmith’s 1993 cheese-rock classic Get a Grip, begins with Alicia Silverstone in a Catholic school girls outfit fixing her wedgie, and only gets better from there. It’s hard to put into words just how much “Crazy” meant to every straight teen boy (and a fair amount of women) in the 1990s, mostly because those words are too disgusting even for the Internet.
So we’ll use pictures instead! But first, please refresh your memory.
Yeah, it’s all coming back, isn’t it? There’s a lot to get into, right from the start:
That’s like the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” of first shots of music videos. (Get a Grip was released five months before In Utero, and almost exactly a year before Kurt Cobain killed himself. More importantly, it shares a release date with both a Shania Twain AND a Jerky Boys album.) Alicia’s character, who’s referred to as Teenage Girl on IMDb, wedgies herself into the girls bathroom, where she escapes out the window for a fun-filled day of scheming, stealing, and skinny-dipping. But we’ll get to that.
At this point in the video, Teenage Girl’s defining character traits are “skips school” and “gets her skirt stuck on a window.” She never really develops beyond that…
…unlike Liv Tyler’s Faye (again, no real name, so she’s her That Thing You Do! character now). She’s as well-defined as a music video babe from the 1990s can be, mostly because she’s the daughter of the lead singer of the band she was instructed to act super-sexual for. Normal people would need therapy after being put through what Liv had to do for “Crazy,” but luckily, famous people are better and much more well adjusted than us townies, and she turned out normal-ish. Or at least as normal-ish as someone who says “YES PLEASE” to Dr. T & the Women can be. Anyway, Teenage Girl and Faye steal (?) a car, and they’re off. We are less than :50 seconds into the video.
Now here’s the part of the video where they litter.
And Teenage Girl takes her hands off the steering wheel.
And doesn’t look at the road.
And neither of them are wearing their seat belts. They are unsafe monsters. Also, I know they’re characters in a music video, but if Teenage Girl and Faye were real people, they’d totally be the kind of people who cruise around town at 11 in the morning blasting mediocre Aerosmith songs with the top down. It was really good casting on Aerosmith’s part.
Things are about to get dark. Literally. It’s dark outside. How long have they been driving? Where are they? Were they listening to “Crazy” the entire time? I demand answers, Joey Kramer.
That man is us, we are that man. Usually it’s old guys who tell hot young co-eds to not venture up to the Ol’ Johnson Place, it’s 30 years to the day since his misses was killed in that freak accident, who hang out outside gas stations. It’s a refreshing change of pace to see a middle-aged pervert instead.
Steven Tyler agreed to this shot, pt. 1.
I’m fairly certain that the moral of the music video is: women can get away with anything, especially stealing, so long as they’re being supervised by horndogs. I’m not sure if that’s the most or least feminist thing ever, but you gotta give Teenage Girl credit for basically saying, “I’m going to steal these sunglasses and you’re not going to stop me, because boobs. Also because you’re making $1.21 an hour.”
“These bunny glasses, too.” (What kind of backwoods gas station is this?)
Faye could have taken anything she wants in the store…and she decides on a loaf of bread. That’s practical? Let’s leave this horrible place, with its pervert bread bunny men, and never come back.
Though not before Faye changes into a napkin of a shirt.
The action switches over to a strip club in the middle of nowhere that offers a $500 PRIZE to the amateur who can best take off her clothes in front of guys like our friend from before. Let’s go back to him.
MVPervert. Anyway, the music video’s director, Marty Callner (who also worked on Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time”), claims that he didn’t know Liv Tyler was Steven Tyler’s teenage daughter. He was introduced to her in a Pantene commercial, and liked what he saw. I’m not sure if I buy that, but either way, the entire strip club sequence is still very disturbing.
Steven Tyler agreed to this shot, pt. 2.
Alicia Silverstone, rocking the Don Draper look 14 years before Don Draper.
Faye twirling around on a stripper pole and seductively crawling on the stage floor is intercut with footage of Steven Tyler dancing with his scarf-covered microphone stand while wearing even less clothing than his daughter. For something so sexy, it’s remarkably unsexy.
And now she starts singing, “I need your love,” like her dad, while spitting something out of her mouth, like her dad, and high-kicking, like the Rockettes. And also her dad. Even the Lannisters seem more well-adjusted than the Tylers.
Despite being the Pearl Harbor of strippers, Faye apparently wins some money, and spends it on a bed so she and Teenage Girl can roll around on it…as one does. Later that evening, they have a pillow fight while a couple of no-good college boys watch the action through a peephole.
My favorite part of the video. OK, so, the two ladies drive past a tractor being driven by a shirtless future-Hollister model, then they think better of it and gun the car in reverse to say hello to the hunkiest hunk who ever hunk’d. They use their femininity to coax him into the car, but that farm boy rascal, he forgets to turn the tractor off and it runs over and kills seven cows, four chickens, two pigs, and one child.
The tragedy is later dubbed the Red Weeding.
Also, OF COURSE there’s a Steven Tyler scarf in the car. I bet there’s a Joe Perry bumper sticker, too.
He looks like if Matthew McConaughey had a baby with floppy-haired Jon Hamm.
You’d think Faye would have worn her I’m Going to Seduce a Farmer Today panties, and not her It’s Tuesday and I Haven’t Done Laundry In Weeks So I’m Going to Wear This Oversized Picnic Blanket underwear, but whatever floats her boat (you could actually those as a boat sail).
HEY GET OUT OF THE SHOT JAMES MARSDEN.
That is a very inappropriate facial reaction to a naked man jumping into your car, Faye.
FIN(ally we saw what happened to the tractor. It spelled out “CRAZY” in the barren field. Some might say it’s is a dead technique, but so long as there’s a demand for women causing mischief in their underwear, at least teenage boys will know how to write the letter “z” in cursive.)
