The usual straightforwardness of How To Dress Well (see: “Very Best Friend”) makes it almost to unfathomable to imagine that he might have a sense of ironic nostalgia the way most other millennials du jour (see: Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” video) tend to possess. Thus, his latest collaboration with beloved Twitter handle @Seinfeld2000 comes as a delightful surprise. The two diverse entities have come together to create a playful take on the episode “The Millennium” during which Jerry dates a woman named Valerie (Lauren Graham, pre-Gilmore Girls), who moves him to number seven on her speed dial after two dates. At first creeped out, Jerry then becomes more concerned with achieving number one status on her phone, only to be courted by her stepmother for a favored place on her speed dial list.
And so, with this context in mind, How To Dress Well highlights the unavoidable fact of relationships–whether set in the 90s or not–by crooning, “People get jealous for the strangest reasons/And Jerry Seinfeld was no exception.” Because Valerie succumbs to Jerry’s “wine and dine” ways, she bumps him to number one on the speed dial, only to later find out that her stepmother has put him under the category of poison control on her phone, which Jerry deems to be “even higher than number one.”
The seamless melding of How To Dress Well’s aural style paired with clips from the episode, as well as other found footage, is capped off by a subtle sample from Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize.” All in all, “The Speed Dial” is the perfect embodiment of what the internet age is capable of doing with pop culture, beautifully contorting it into something new.
