Music / Nick Lutsko

"I wanna be like Dan Bongino."

"I promise to be normal, I swear I'm not deranged."

Nick Lutsko is a songwriter, producer, and performer out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He routinely changes hats between performing high-energy, theatrical shows with his "$100K Band" and creating songs and music videos for the likes of Netflix, Super Deluxe and CollegeHumor / Dropout.

In 2020, Nick started a loose cinematic universe of comedy songs posted to Twitter, involving his Grandma's basement, Jeff Bezos, and an unlicensed Gremlins 3. This would later include "Saturday Nick Lutsko", a musical YouTube variety show with the $100K Band.

Nick Lutsko's work contains the following tropes:

• Affectionate Pickpocket: In Gremlins 3: Dawn of Desmond, Big Pizza undergoes an apparent Heel–Face Turn and hugs Nick in reconciliation ... allowing him to steal the Gremlins 3 disk.
• Alien Abduction: "Alien Life Form" features the terrifying abduction scene from Fire in the Sky ... carried out by Gordon Shumway.
• Alternate Reality Game: The "Songs on the Computer" storyline has elements of this, especially with Nick's in-character Twitter.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Gremlins 3 features Desmond growing to a giant size after surviving a nuclear explosion.
• Audience Participation Song: Live performances of "Boat Parade" will split the audience into three sections to chant the titular phrase.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In "Unleash Your Spirit" Nick gets the Spirit Halloween advertising deal he wanted, only for the animatronics to come to life and attack him.
  I had a dream, but I didn't think it through.
• Belly Mouth: "Belly Teeth".
• Boom, Headshot!: The fate of Pumpkin Man.
• Brass Balls: It takes huge balls to admit that Dracula can get wet.
• Broken Record: The $100K Band's cover of Alan Jackson's "Gone Country" repeats "We've gone country, look at these boots" over and over.
• Celebrity Resemblance: The man in the stairs is said to look like Fox News' Dan Bongino.
• Chick Magnet: Gremlin Man "can't keep the ladies away".
• Circus of Fear: "Sideshow", complete with Monster Clowns in the video.
• Clark Kenting: Gremlin Man looks exactly like Desmond, but doesn't need glasses as he has "perfect sight".
• Cool Shades: Ceviche Man wears tiny ones shaped like flames.
• Creepy Doll: Jeff Bezos appears as a living, malicious Spirit Halloween dummy.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Nick says this is the source of the sink splattered with blood in "Give Me a Show on Nick Jr."
• Dance Sensation: Desmond has the Desmond Dip, and Cowboy Jon has the Do-si-do.
• Dark Reprise: "RNC Reprise" is a slower, despairing version of "I Wanna Be at the RNC".
  • Gremlins 3 has "Des in Heaven", a melancholy instrumental reprise of "Where Did the Gremlins Go" played after Desmond's Disney Death.
• Digital Abomination: Greezy is possessed by one in "Celebration of Tech".
• Dodgy Toupee: The protagonist of "Crickets" wears one, and believes he can't be recognized on video without it.
• Evil Laugh: Can be heard in "Shakedown", "Pumpkin Man", and "Living Dead in Washington D.C."
• Feathered Fiend: Mel once owned a dozen mean, loud hyacinth macaws.
• Freudian Excuse: We learn Nick's in "School Board Meeting Fun":
  I was a kid when Grandpa died
  Grandma banned me from the funeral
  Cause my hair was white like Eminem
  And I've been mad since then
• Gold Digger: Mel is dating Nick's grandma despite being not much older than him, and is interested in extorting money from the family.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: According to "Ceviche Man's Greatest Hits", Ceviche Man can't forgive his mother for covering him in ceviche and letting iguanas bite his skin.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • The Man in the Stairs is a bald, humanoid figure that lives underneath the stairs in Nick's house that resembles Dan Bongino and is extremely hostile towards anyone in its general vicinity.
  • The Men in the Tunnels are a race of vaguely humanoid monsters that live in the tunnels beneath Nick's grandmother's house. They need to be constantly fed meat, or else they will rise from the tunnels to feed elsewhere, which is stated to be something disastrous to apocalyptic proportions.
  • The People of the Forest are sharp-toothed, tree-dwelling humanoids who lay their eggs in humans' beards and eat children and pets. Every autumn in Tennessee, they climb down from the trees and must be warded off with incantations and sacrificial swine.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Most of Nick's POV characters are depicted as latching onto weird fringe movements or parasocial relationships — befriending Dan Bongino, getting Chrissy Teigen to follow them on Twitter, endlessly defending Johnny Depp, going to school board meetings to scream about unrelated political issues when they don't even have kids — because they're desperately lonely and unfulfilled, and need to do something, anything, that makes them feel important.
  I need to scream / I need to fight
  I need to see the movie Fight Club / every single night
  Or I can't go to sleep
  I need to scream / I need to fight
  I need to find a lady that'll kiss me / before I die'
• Inside a Computer System: In "Celebration of Country Music", Greezy Rick is sucked into a computer and trapped in cyberspace.
• The Insomniac: The singer of "Shadows" avoids sleep due to paranoia that shadows will get him in his dreams.
• Life Drinker: The Conspiracy Theorist singer of "Baby Blood" believes that celebrities are hot because they all drink baby blood.
• Loony Fan: "Deputy of Depp", complete with Nick trying to carve Johnny Depp's name into his chest.
• Madness Mantra: "Boat Parade".
• The Mafia: Big Pizza is a mafia thug hired by Mel to threaten Nick's life over his debts.
• Malicious Misnaming: "Let Me Host S&L": Besides the title, Nick repeatedly pronounces Elon Musk's name as "Ellen".
• Murder Ballad: In the bridge of "#1 Hit on Country Radio", Nick explains his plan to get rid of Mel:
  I'm gonna wake up the men in the tunnels under Grandma's house
  I'll tell Mel that I heard a bird down there and he should probably go check it out
  I'll use my country music money and buy a truck full of cement
  And if I never see Mel again, I guess that's country music money well spent
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Gremlin Man's nemesis Spielberg Scorsese, a Hollywood snob who hates superheroes and creates a movie to bore them to death.
• Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: Nick puts Vaseline on his face to enhance this. The album cover for "Songs on the Computer" even depicts characters swimming in an ocean of Nick's sweat.
• Perverse Puppet: Grandma's basement is full of them.
• Playing the Victim Card: Nick considers himself "America's most persecuted president and singer".
• Puppet King: Beetlejuice is president of Spirit Halloween Planet "in name only".
• Scary Skeleton: "Doctor (Don't Scare Me)" features Nick's horrifying discovery of a skeleton inside him.
• Sequel Song: "Unleash Your Spirit" to "Spirit Halloween Theme Song".
  • Becomes a trilogy with "Spirit Halloween Planet".
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: "All Shook Up".
• Shout-Out: Several to Elvis Presley in "All Shook Up".
• Slasher Smile: "Grinning Like A Barracuda".
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: "Too Hot for Hollywood" suggests this as the reason Nick's film career hasn't gotten off the ground.
• Social Media Before Reason: From "Straitjacket":
  I dreamed my family took a trip on a boat
  Treacherous creatures began stirring below
  And as the ship went down
  I began to shout, “But what about my phone?”
• Start My Own: Nick's approach to Gremlins 3 and Saturday Night Live.
• Stuffed into a Locker: In "The Ballad of Don Jr.", Nick dreams of inflicting this on Hunter Biden.
• Subverted Kids' Show:
  • "Familiar Song" features a demonic Elmo with sharp, bloody teeth, who attacks Nick and turns him into a puppet.
    Elmo told me there's a distant land
    Where monsters walk the streets of man
    Where children sing their A B Cs and you will be eternally damned
  • In "A Ghost Story", a Victorian ghost is terrified when the Uncanny Valley Cocomelon family moves into his house.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • "I don't hate caterpillars, that was just a rumor."
  • "Let me host SNL, my brain works really well."
• The Swarm: The vengeful protagonist of "Crickets" inflicts this after being banished from the county fair.
• Take That!:
  • From "Where Did the Gremlins Go?":
    We could have had Gremlins 4 and Gremlins 5
    Instead we got fourteen Land Before Times
  • From "Pay Me $100K to Play at Biden's Inauguration":
    It's cheaper than Sting, it's cheaper than Simon
    It's comparable to Garfunkel
• Tulpa: "Celebration of Summertime" reveals that Nick created Desmond and Greezy this way.
• Unreliable Narrator: Nick is an unstable Conspiracy Theorist and according to Mel, lying about Big Pizza and the men in the tunnels.
• Voice of the Legion: The Digital Abomination possessing Greezy in "Celebration of Tech" speaks in a variety of overlapping AI-generated voices.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: "The Ballad of Don Jr." depicts then President Trump's oldest son as this.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Directed at Nick's various enemies in "Persecuted Man", because he has a Webby award and they don't.
• YouTuber Apology Parody: In "Dracula Can Get Wet", Nick apologizes for mistakenly tweeting that he would defeat Dracula by splashing him with water.

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