Rest in peace to the notion of the guilty pleasure. I love Dating Naked, and just like the increasingly debauched crew of personalities that it features week after week, out there doing naked yoga on the beach, covertly analyzing each other’s junk, forming and dissolving infatuations in real time, guzzling tequila by the cabana pool, I feel no shame about it. I appreciate the show’s flagrant airing of contradictions: its participants claim to be seeking some kind of true connection, deeper than the typically “shallow” interactions offered by normal dating, and yet there they stand discussing the penis or breast size and musculature of their potential mates. “Have you ever tried dating naked before?” is a typical icebreaker for this posse, and the answer is uniformly, “Uhhh… no.”
Major props to whatever VH1 studio exec decided to compound the show’s absurdity with the Dating Naked: Love’s a Beach sidescrolling platformer video game — and to enlist Ary Warnaar of 8-bit pop/punk/rock warriors Anamanaguchi (remember: Scott Pilgrim VG OST, pizza in space, +$250K Kickstarter) to soundtrack it. Warnaar’s score bounces along over shiny Neo Geo-core synth tones, thick triangle wave bass tones, and syncopated new jack beats a la Streets of Rage — minus all the streets and all the rage. The ecstatic melodies of “Beach” gather layers of supporting arpeggios each time they swing back into view for another refrain. “Raft” plays out like a big tent EDM jam, with radical shifts in intensity between its day-glo climaxes. “ATV” brings the four-on-the-floor pound and steel drum tones needed to carry our nude and pixelized protagonists through the final stage and onward to eternal love, or something.
• Ary Warnaar: http://ary.tumblr.com/
• Anamanaguchi: http://www.anamanaguchi.com/
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