Wordburglar, that master of turning the most trivial knick-knacks of the human experience into rhymes, has done it again with his new video “Rental Patient.” Straight from his new album, Rhyme Your Business, Burg cashes in on his his ability to tickle our collective funny bones, while simultaneously making us feel old.
Nothing screams “relatable” more than the shared experience of aging. Everyone is doing it, after all. If you’ve lived long enough to have your local movie rental membership number memorized, you’re at least got a few decades under your belt. Life was different back then. It was a time before Netflix and our perpetual access to a near infinite number of bread and circuses.
If you weren’t around to experience it firsthand, Wordburglar is happy to remind you what Al Gore has saved you from.
“Once upon a time, you had to wait in line to watch a movie on your own couch. Before every movie was at our fingertips at home, it was at our fingertips at Video Rental Stores – unless someone else rented it first,” explains The Burg.
“The idea for Rental Patient sparked when I was babysitting my niece, picking out a movie to watch online. It dawned on me that she would never know what it was like to wander through a dingy video store after school, eating stale popcorn while fumbling through boxes, hunting for something cool to watch because the movie you originally wanted to see was already rented.
Not being able to watch a video because somebody else is watching it struck me as pretty hilarious, but it was just a fact of life when I was her age. If you were a movie fan in the age of renters, you had to have rental patience – and the song pretty much wrote itself from there.”
It never seemed like such a challenge at the time, but in hindsight we’re probably better off with Netflix.
Rhyme Your Business was released on September 4, 2018 and can be found on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play and Bandcamp.