Although Robin Thicke didn't win for any of the categories he was nominated for last night at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, he still managed to be a part of the most talked about performance of the night with Miley Cyrus and had her touch his crotch with a foam finger, so that's something.

Let's take a trip down Robin Thicke memory lane. I remember around this time in 2003, I was a freshman in college just moving into my dorm. My roommate had a few CDs he played a lot, and one of them was A Beautiful World by Robin Thicke, who was then going by just Thicke. This is notable because A Beautiful World sold very few copies when it came out, so the chances of me coming in contact with it were rare. I thought Robin Thicke maybe would disown his first album - for a while it was always filed under a separate artist instead of his Robin Thicke discography on sites like Spotify, plus its kind of a dumb album. But now it seems to be back in the Robin Thicke canon.

So today let's take a look at a video Robin Thicke's first album, "When I Get You Alone" from 2002, directed by Matt Kirkby.

One oddity you might notice about this video is that it has YouTube logo actually in the video for some reason and it is of comically low quality. I guess that has something to do with it being uploaded in 2007 and probably taken from an older YouTube upload, but even in 2007 240p was becoming a pain in the ass. Oh well, it's all we've got - we couldn't find any higher quality uploads anywhere.

The song itself is him singing over "A Fifth of Beethoven", a disco song by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band. You could say "sampling" but basically it's just singing over it. What's interesting is that even 11 years ago, Robin Thicke was using humor in his music and mixing self deprecation with bravado - the same thing he's doing now to great effect. There are goofy lines like "Baby girl you the shit / that makes you my equivalent" in "When I Get You Alone" just like there are lines like "Baby can you breathe / I got this from Jamaica" in "Blurred Lines". Both songs are explorations of a ridiculous sexual bravado that is one part self-mocking, and one part serious.

So it seems to make perfect sense somehow that the video finds Robin Thicke as a bike messenger in Manhattan, going around to different offices delivering things with an amount of swag that is way to high for his position. He's got long hair and is definitely rocking a bit of a Mitch Hedberg vibe (he cut his hair before his first album as Robin Thicke). There's a great moment when he is strutting into some Manhattan office and just feeling the music singing about what he's going to do when he gets a lady alone. He's got enough charm and energy to single handedly carry this video, and although he's much more subdued now, it's good that we have a video of him going nuts.

This video also must've been pretty difficult to shoot. It looks like Thicke just got in traffic and rode around, but the shots definitely don't look like they are coming from someone just hanging out of the trunk of another car. There are some amazing shots of Thicke riding around Manhattan in this video, so it's a bit of a shame that we can't see anything because of the resolution.

Oh well, we'll always have Miley.

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