Friday 5: Five Most Disturbing Videos
Happy Friday, MetalSucks reader! Welcome to MetalSucks Friday 5, our awesome series that appears every Friday (duh) on MetalSucks (duhh) and involves the quantity of five (duhhh).
Here’s how it works: A list of best/worst/weirdest/whatever five somethings is posted by one of your beloved MetalSucks contributors or by one of our buds (like you!). Then you, our cherished reader, checks it out, has a chuckle, then chimes in with a list of the same. No sweat, just whatever springs to mind, k? (Just like that movie about those losers working at a Chicago record store!) After all, it’s Friday — the day dedicated by the gods to mindless, fun time-wasting.
Here we go!
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THE FIVE
What five videos have freaked you the fuck out?
THE LISTER
Anso DF, MetalSucks Senior Editor
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“Suffer The Children” by Napalm Death
from Harmony Corruption (Earache)
dir. we’re not sure | 1990
This week a loud music act experienced blowback over a newly released video. In it, an innocent pet is shot down like a dog during the course of an attack or something. It’s showbiz truth that depictions of animal abuse kinda ensure that no viewer can attach positive feelings to your art, so it’s a gaffe of commerce not of artistic expression. Even fans are like, “That’s ugly.” But the music video’s function often is to shock and discomfit, especially in fringe, anti-commercial fields like metal. Which videos have creeped you out good?
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“One” by Metallica
from ... And Justice For All (Elektra)
dir. Michael Salomon | 1989
A music video can make you unpleasantly upset, not the positive kind of upset that connects you to its accompanying song. These stirring, queasy videos probably crossed your path when you were a young person — like the abovementioned clip by a young people’s band — or at least when you were new to disturbing-ass metal. Soon your “tolerance” increased and so grew your awareness of the context of this type of hair-raising imagery. But before then, Metallica came along and made you suddenly fear that somehow you would fuck up your life so bad that you’d end up without limbs, sight, speech, hearing, a face, and anything but soul-shattering isolation.
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https://youtu.be/F5sIXUbMgF0
“Prison Sex” by Tool
from Undertow (Zoo)
dir. Adam Jones | 1993
America’s biggest metal band resisted MTV for years, yet their eventual first foray into music videos in 1989 delivered such a jolt to our emotional well-being that we began to pine for their days of abstinence. Still, in 2016 the now-common NSFW video grew from the end of music videos on broadcast TV and from the fight for your attention amid the many other demands for it. It implies that if Metallica’s fifth album had arrived in 2016 and the video for “One” was created for a today’s market, it’d probably involve airborne organs and blood sprays. Alien rape puppets, however, require no upgrades.
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https://youtu.be/JnMJsqqYtew
“Mother” by Danzig
from Danzig (American)
dir. Ric Menello | 1988
The invention of the “home video” helped us hurdle censors and guardians of our fragile souls to enjoy uncut scariness. That’s how we came to learn the anger of Glenn Danzig.
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https://youtu.be/XJnhaXwK86M
“Bachelorette” by Bjork
from Homogenic (Elektra)
dir. Michel Gondry | 1998
A video can freak you out for reasons that you don’t understand, reasons you will never understand for you refuse to ever examine them or even view the video again. Fuck that. Thanks a million Bjork.
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Your turn! Have a great wknd!
