MEDIA: I AM THE INTIMIDATOR — GASOLINE (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (NASCAR/DALE EARNHARDT TRIBUTE)

EVENT: A man in Portland admonishes you to pump gasoline into the vehicle nearest to your person. 

I AM THE INTIMIDATOR’s I AM THE INTIMIDATOR by might be the most important album of 2024. It doesn’t Push Music Forward or whatever, but it is definitely an extremely Motorhead/Judas Priest-inspired metal album by a guy in Portland doing a bit where he pretends to be Dale Earnhardt. Most of the lyrics of the above song consist of the dude just yelling, “Better pump the gasoline, motherfucker!” over and over again. All of the shots in the video are of one of the following:

1. I AM THE INTIMIDATOR riding around on a moped.
2. I AM THE INTIMIDATOR pumping the gasoline (motherfucker) into his moped at a Shell station in a strip mall. 
3. The full I AM THE INTIMIDATOR band playing their instruments while wearing NASCAR gear and/or corpsepaint and/or holding a sword in front of a green screen where we see shots of Dale Earnhardt being badass. Because I AM THE INTIMIDATOR consists of just one guy, he’s superimposed a bunch of takes of himself doing all the different parts over each other. The drummer version of him is wearing corpsepaint; the singer version of him is holding a sword. 

As someone who appreciates cool shit, I must say that this music video, as well as the entire I AM THE INTIMIDATOR project — both musically and conceptually — is perfect. 

As Kim Kelly, renowned metal journalist and Friend of Media Events, recently noted, NASCAR metal is weirdly having a moment right now. In addition to I AM THE INTIMIDATOR, there’s also RESTRICTOR PLATE, a Richmond band that plays even faster and louder than I AM THE INTIMIDATOR (these bands’ names don’t have to be in all caps, necessarily, but it feels apt). Strap on your seatbelts, because these drums are about to go BONKBONKBONK:

While I’m not a professional metal writer, I do professionally pretend to give inane advice to an audience that, in my brain, consists exclusively of the most brain-dead creative directors in existence. So what can this “Media Event” that is I AM THE INTIMIDATOR’s “GASOLINE” (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (NASCAR/DALE EARNHARDT TRIBUTE) from the album I AM THE INTIMIDATOR teach us about branding? 

First off, going all-caps mode is a POWERFUL MOVE. Like, the letters are literally taller than they otherwise would be. That’s obviously sick as shit, and very important to do if you want to STAND OUT IN TODAY’S CROWDED ATTENTION LANDSCAPE. 

Second, as Kim and one of the RESTRICTOR PLATE guys touch on in their interview together, cultural ephemera that’s coded “working class” has been the main cool/“fashion” thing for a while now. Feels like people are pretty “over” the whole camo/workwear thing, or at least it’s reached a critical mass and people are starting to complain about it. We were in this bar in Catskill over the winter and it was just packed with those hipster Carhartt memes, rendered into flesh. There was a DJ playing that night named “DJ Indie Sleaze,” which feels like an important detail supporting my argument that this stuff is kinda played out. This is, I should be super clear, is a huge bummer for me, because the only place you can buy clothes in my hometown is a Tractor Supply and all the thrift stores where I used to live in North Carolina have cool old NASCAR shit, so a lot of my wardrobe is the exact type of stuff. It’s unsurprising that the cool kids, in an attempt to distance their aesthetics from olds such as myself, are now shifting to a different conception of “working-class” — or at least demonstrably inexpensive — fashion, rooted instead in weird, algorithmically designed stuff from Shein that serve, as Caroline Busta put it in a May 2024 essay for Document Journal, “raw materials for the shopper to animate.” All of this will not, I stress, stop me from wearing my faded Tony Stewart t-shirt with black jeans and cowboy boots when I go out. Doing so will let people know that I am old, which is fine. 

Thirdly, and this might just be me shoehorning a rapper I like into this piece, metal is having a moment right now. Some, mainly metalheads, would argue that metal is always having a moment and will never not have one, but I mean it’s having a moment in the sense that there is a rapper named Sematary that I like who is super into metal. He and his Haunted Mound crew are wildly popular among young adults; his three main influences are Chief Keef, Salem, and black metal. He dresses like he just rolled out of bed and fell through a True Religion store, and he seems allergic to conventional shirts. Sometimes he just sing-raps over Salem samples, but a lot of the time he sing-raps over black metal samples that have been refashioned into trap beats. His adlibs kinda sound like the wails in a Darkthrone song, which is super fun.

Sematary is from the part of Northern California where there isn't anything to do if you are a teenager (or an adult). According to metalheads with whom I have discussed this topic in the past, these circumstances lead to metal being fairly popular around those parts. I do think that the entire Sematary cinematic universe – extremely scare-quoted “scary” lyrics, a visual sensibility that runs cheesy horror tropes through the same 90s VHS filter that all the internet rappers used in the early 2010s, intentionally pixelated mixtape covers that look like the horrorcore version of something Uncle Murda and DJ Green Lantern would have put out in 2006, shiny belts covered in real diamonds and fake blood – is evocative of the larger trend I just discussed above, in which more and more, the internet has become vehicle for mining cultural schlock to create something deeply personal. The lack of meaning inherent to the source material becomes a feature, not a bug.

Below, please behold the Sematary single “Wendigo,” which incorporates a FOURTH musical influence — Joy Division!

Other people have written more in-depth stuff about him, his artistry, and the associated lore around him, so I’m not going to do that here. Maybe I will at a later post if I’m feeling desperate for content and want to appeal to some teens on Reddit. Instead, I’m going to get back to NASCAR.

NASCAR cars are made out of metal. Metal is the type of music that I AM THE INTIMIDATOR and RESTRICTOR PLATE make. Ergo, their music is about CAR, specifically of the NAS variety. This is all quite simple. 

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAY: Whatever you’re doing, you could be doing it in a much, much dumber way.