Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo spent a lot of his early career being a brooding front man. He had one of his legs extended to match the length of the other in the mid-90s, for example. That's a great brooding front man move. Somewhere around the mid 2000s, however, Rivers Cuomo decided he was going to have fun. He wrote songs about pork and beans, had fun at concerts, and just went for it. I saw Weezer in 2001, and again at 2009, and they were like a completely different band.

One of my favorite things to come out of the fun Rivers Cuomo era was his bizarre appearance on the B.o.B track "Magic". I like to picture Rivers Cuomo sitting around thinking "I want to be on a rap song", finding out who is the hippest rapper out there, and meeting a Starbucks with B.o.B (who I will not just refer to as BoB)

So today, we're watching the equally fun music video for "Magic" from 2010, directed by Sanaa Hamri.

The concept of this video is that Bob wakes up and there is some magic happening, such as a woman in his bathroom pouring cereral into the sink. BoB does not eat the cereal. BoB then finds himself, lifeless, in bed and tries to wake him. Intercut with that is a night time performance with Cuomo out on a stage outside the house. Although Bob does a good job with the narrative pieces, my favorite part is the performance with Cuomo.

BoB is America's favorite fun rapper, so Rivers Cuomo has to bring his game up for this performance a bit. For instance, BoB is America's choice of celebrity to entertain you in an airplane while you are experiencing a delay on the tarmac. People are generally happy to see him, or else they wouldn't make commercials about people being happy to see him. No offense to Rivers, but if he came busting down the ailse on that plane instead of BoB, people would most likely be scared and confused.

So what does Rivers do? He tries really hard. He has clearly not been in this type of performance situation before, and he goes into full fun Rivers Cuomo mode. Director Sanaa Hamri seems to realize this, and she has her camera operators turn the camera motion exictment up to 11. At one point the camera is furiously zooming in and out on Rivers. Cuomo, in turn, is at one point violently shaking his body in unison with the camera. It is a heroic effort, and it's a really fun performance.

Rivers Cuomo has not, to my knoweldge, has given up on appearing in rap songs, but we'll always have "Magic".

Adam Fairholm is the co-founder and lead developer of IMVDb. You can find him on twitter at @adamfairholm.