Giveittomesayittomeworkitwithmeifyou’rereadyI’mabouttopop

The Village Voice on Irwin’s genius video rendition of Escort’s “All Through the Night”:

Jim Henson is doing the Hustle in his grave. For the finest collision of infectious disco and Muppet exuberance known to man, avail thyself of Escort’s video for “All Through the Night,” the zenith of a truly splendid couple of weeks as far as YouTube is concerned. (Its partner in dominance is that bewildering clip of Filipino prison inmates re-enacting the “Thriller” video.) For three and a half mesmerizing minutes, Rolf, Animal, Sam the Eagle, the Pigs in Space, and various other furry personages are expertly synced to the Brooklyn disco orchestra’s fourth and latest single, a Technicolor blast of dance-floor dynamite propelled by a helium-huffing, syllable-stuffing chorus of Giveittomesayittomeworkitwithmeif- you’rereadyI’mabouttopop. Given the relatively basic mechanics of Muppet speech—few teeth, fewer tongues, mouths just clamping open and shut—they are credibly edited so as to espouse more erotic commentary than you have perhaps grown accustomed to; it’s amazing. Irving Coffee, a jovial filmmaking friend of the band who’s worked on The Chappelle Show and a documentary called The Beauty Academy of Kabul, sat down with eight DVDs’ worth of raw Muppet material and bashed it out. “Discounting all the technological bullshit, it took three days,” he recalls.