My eyes welled up when I revisited the “Goodbye Earl” video recently, not because it’s crying-emoji funny, and not because it’s trying to be jump-scare upsetting or maudlin or melodramatic. It was just my baffled reaction to a piece of mass-market pop art so tonally dense and horrifying, but also goofy, but also deadly serious. It’s as close to truly shocking as I think a nationally distributed music video is ever gonna get, and shit, then I’m skimming the YouTube comments and someone argues that the most crushing line in the song is “Right away Mary Anne flew in from Atlanta on a red-eye
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