July 26, 2007

Galifianakis Explains “Alternate” Kanye Video

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This week Kanye West posted on his website an “alternate” video for his new song “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’,” featuring comedian Zach Galifianakis (right) and musician Will Oldham as a pair of rural yokels, carousing on tractors and accurately lip-synching to Kanye’s lyrics.

Watch it here.

The world responded with a collective “WTF?!”

Today Galifinakis talked to MTV News about what inspired the clip, saying basically that he and Oldham were “drunk in my basement:”

“Kanye’s trainer, Harley Pasternak, is a friend of mine, and he showed Kanye some of my videos. Then Kanye came to a stand-up show of mine and asked me afterwards if I would produce and perform a video for him,” Galifianakis told MTV News. “I was flying to my farm in North Carolina the next morning [and] I told him that if I could shoot it there, then I would do it. There was no audition. I did whatever I wanted. He told me to just do what I thought would work. … [The song has] lots of words that are quite fast. Plus, my horrible dancing throws off the rhythm inside my head.”

Question: Zach Galifianakis has a farm, with tractors just ready to go? Does that make him a comedian who farms, or a farmer who tells jokes?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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