The Priestner brothers, and Lubo.
Rare Americans is a Punk Rock band from Canada. The lineup currently consists of the Canadian Priestner brothers and the Slovakian Lubo. They're particularly notable for how their songs are promoted. They chose to promote their songs as ads on YouTube as full music videos. Their website can be found here,
and their YouTube account can be found here.
Discography
- Rare Americans (2018)
- Rare Americans 2 (2021)
- Rare Americans 3: Jamesy Boy & The Screw Loose Zoo (2021)
- You're Not a Bad Person, It's Just a Bad World (2022)
- Searching for Strawberries: The Story of Jongo Bongo (2023)
Tropes
- Amazing Technicolor Population: In Searching for Strawberries, Jongo, his family, and the Corrupt Corporate Executive have yellow skin (making them look rather like The Simpsons characters), his main rival at work has purple skin in "Money!" (blue in "Milk and Honey", if it's the same guy), while most other characters have more normal human skin tones.
- Animated Music Video: A lot of their music has an animated music video to go with it. Searching for Strawberries is an entire rock opera where every song has one, making it an animated musical.
- Anthropomorphic Vice: Anthropomorphic alcoholic drinks and cigarettes show up quite a few times in the video for "Money!". Jongo dances with a living whisky bottle at the yacht party (representing the dream of luxury used to motivate the employees) early in the video, and is cheered on by cigarettes and bottles the second time he tries to run up the hill. He's also seen walking home for the night with an anthropomorphic fleshlight at one point.
- Broken Bird: Nicky from "Brittle Bones Nicky", wearing a bitter expression and having suffered abuse from his father. He fights back and throughout the video, continues to fight until he dies of old age.
- Byronic Hero: Crosses into this because Nicky does show a soft side to his girlfriend and his prison buddy. Later on in Gas Mask, Nicky can be seen helping the boxer through his drug addiction, having gone through similar struggles himself.
- Claiming Via Flag: Elon Musk does this to Mars in the video for "Money!", after he and the other billionaires leave Earth. The flag simply says "MINE".
- Corrupt Corporate Executive:
- Uncle Graham from "Hullabaloo." He overworks, guilts, and drugs his employees into being subservient to him, and then morphs into some sort of eldritch creature and eats his own employees. It's gotten to the point where his own security is afraid of him.
- The blond CEO in the first act of Searching for Strawberries berates and overworks his employees while he lies in the lap of luxury, and shows blatant favoritism. It turns out he also gives his favorites wolf masks that turn them into actual wolves in order to make them into more aggressive competitors.
- The Dead Can Dance: Brittle Bones Nicky, after death, is not only a Sharp-Dressed Man (well, skeleton), but also pulls off some funky moves during the instrumental interludes.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The music video for Moss Park.
- Dem Bones: Brittle Bones Nicky.
- Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Nicky when he is human.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Subverted in that Brittle Bones Nicky isn't a bad person, but he's aggressive, crafty, and tricky. That said, even though she died when he was very young, he still loved his mom very much and a large reason why he sold his soul to Satan is to protect his mother.
- Fictional Counterpart: The doll Lola in "The Moneyz", being a blonde fashion doll that goes through a bewildering range of fashions, occupations and ideological messages, is clearly intended as a stand-in for Barbie.
- God and Satan Are Both Jerks: Of a sort, in "Brittle Bones Nicky 2". At first, God is merely presented as the kind of guy who laughs at people who assume they go to Heaven before tossing them over to The Devil. Later, however it's revealed that The Devil is God; he just wears either title based on his mood."Surprised? Most of 'em are.
I'm Mufasa and I'm Scar.
Lily white shit gets old and trite
Now tell me why you’re in my sight." - Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ryan and Dave. Despite the very different lives they lead, Dave isn't willing to give up on Ryan, and helps him go through rehab.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: The Panda and the Eagle in "Knives, Guns, and Bed" fight with each other while aggressively making out.
- Literal Metaphor:
- In "Money!", the "rat race" is literalised as a dangerous rollercoaster/obstacle course.
- In "Hullabaloo", Uncle Graham feeds off the working class by literally eating them.
- Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: The Panda brought a knife to fight against the Eagle's gun, in the song titled "Knives, Guns, and Bed."
- Rule of Symbolism: A lot of Rare American Music Videos run on symbolism while also telling a story:
- The video for "Knives, Guns, and Bed" shows a panda and a bald eagle (the latter wearing a red, white and blue outfit) having a self-indulgent duel/make-out session surrounded by dissatisfied humans (with visual cues from the pro-Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter protests, respectively).
- Self-Titled Album: Their first three albums follow this pattern, albeit 3 has a subtitle to it.
- Stable Time Loop: Brittle Bones Nicky pushes himself down into Hell so he can become the skeletal trickster from his first video.
- Take That!: In the video for "Money!" (the first song in Searching for Strawberries), caricatures of Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos appear, representing the ideal of super-wealth that drives the common person to enter the rat race. Musk is also seen landing on Mars and planting a flag saying "MINE" on it (after protagonist Jongo Bongo is fried by the flame from the billionaires' rockets).
- Tom the Dark Lord: The Corrupt Corporate Executive in "Hullabaloo" runs his prison-like company with an iron fist and is actually an Eldritch Abomination who eats his employees. His name is Uncle Graham.
- The Trickster: "Brittle Bones Nicky was crafty and tricky, and that son of a bitch was gold."
- The 'Verse: Somewhat, as characters from certain music videos will show up in others.
- Visual Pun:
- The salespersons get turned into wolves that attack and eat each other in the "Milk and Honey" video. In other words, corporate offices are a dog-eat-dog world.
- In the same video, the CEO wears a golden suit and his wife/girlfriend wears a white dress, making their appearance correspond to the "milk and honey" of the title.
