ALTER BRIDGE HATE THEIR FANS

So Alter Bridge have debuted their new video, “Isolation” (above), over at Noisecreep , and, put simply, it makes no fucking sense. The band apparently made the conscious decision not to turn “the video for ‘Isolation’ into a narrative matching the album’s theme,” and instead decided to produce what guitarist/war criminal Mark Tremonti calls “a tribute to the fans.” That’s really just rockstar-speak for “a clichéd life-on-the-road video,” which is fine, whatever. It seems like every arena rock band makes one of those sooner or later, so I guess it was just AB’s turn.

But I looked up the lyrics to the song because taking a track called “Isolation” and re-fashioning it as “a tribute to the fans” struck me being kinda funny. And, sure enough, the words to this particular song are so incredibly ill-suited for this purpose that we can only assume that no one involved in the making of this video thought that those very same fans would ever pay attention to those words. And that just makes the whole thing even funnier, because it means that Alter Bridge have paid tribute to their fans by assuming that their fans are all idiots.

In case you’re curious, here’s a sampling of those lyrics:

When all is lost to you inside
When all the darkness takes the light
The ritual warning has begun
And now you tear away from everyone
Disconnected so alone yeah
Severed ties from all you know

Okay. So within the context of this video, those sentiments don’t exactly come across as a flattering portrait of the touring lifestyle. (And it’s even MORE hilarious once you see how the lyrics sync up with the images in the video — e.g., the line “And now you’re broken and deceived” appears over a shot of Tremonti signing some dude’s guitar.) But maybe the chorus is about being finding some antidote to isolation — maybe the MUSIC and the FANS are that antidote! That would be great, right?

But that’s not what the chorus says. What the chorus says is:

Isolation
Brings you to the end
Until you love again, oh
Isolation
If you could only see
What will come to be
Yeah

Honestly, I’m not even sure what the fuck that means, but at best, it seems like it’s saying the fans and music could be redemptive. But then the whole shebang ends on another sour note: “You’re disconnected so alone.”

So, yeah, maybe a little more thought should have been put into this video. But in all all fairness to Alter Bridge, I guess that’s how I feel around their fans, too: disconnected, so alone.

-AR