POPSCREEN: Red Fang

Never before have binge drinking and sustainability come together as they do in Portland-based rock band Red Fang’s “Prehistoric Dog.” Forget about the title of the song—the real message of the video is as follows.

Drink. Drink lots of beer. Drink awful, cheap beer (e.g., Pabst Blue Ribbon, Tecate, Kokanee). Drink it with your scruffy friends. Drink it until you vomit. Rock out while you do so.

When you’ve had enough beer, hit the nearest metal shop. Now take all your empty cans and weld them together into weapons and suits of armor. How much cooler is that idea than recycling, or even—dare I say it—commingled recycling?

This seems to be the gist of “Prehistoric Dog,” at least until around the mid-way point, when the guys in Red Fang suit up to do battle with their nemeses, a group of non-beer-drinking, role-playing geeks (who seem to be involved in a real life version of Dungeons and Dragons, or something equally cool).

At this point, our aluminum-clad heroes rush down from above and land heavy blows on the role players—the dork playing the knight, for example, gets smashed with a hammer made from a five-liter keg can. But Red Fang hasn’t learned the very valuable lesson that the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies have taught us. And thus, their victory beer is cut short by the Dungeon and Dragons kids’ gory retaliation that recalls a certain scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

No matter the end result, though, the video fucking rocks. And if Al Gore ’69 could make recycling look half this cool, I might actually bring my empty beer cans down the stairs instead of just hurling them down the garbage chute.

—Joshua J. Kearney