We’ve all seen ’em at some point – the kind of music videos that just make you cringe for the artists and hope that nobody spent too much money on their creation. Being a fan of heavy metal and punk rock, there’s more than a few video accompaniments I’ve seen that have clearly been made to cut costs that somehow managed to also cut the artist’s dignity too. For this week’s EwTube, our weekly journey into Youtube’s seedy underbelly, I’ve picked a few of my favourite music videos that are just too crap to let be buried!
Darkkirchensteuer – Leb Doch Selber
Black metal is a subgenre classic for the fact that it’s hard to distinguish at times whether anyone is actually sincere about the imagery and showmanship of it all. All the satanism and forests and noise can be just a bit much and, without the horror of a band like Gorgoroth, comes across a bit more like a camping trip home video than anything. This particular slice of attempted wretchedness is particularly offensive in the “Things My Mother Will Show Everyone At My 30th Birthday Party” category.
Snapcase – Coagulate
Snapcase are a band who are still drastically over-looked for their contribution to hardcore and punk in mainstream culture during the late-’90s and early noughties. At one point being arguably the biggest band on the scene still riffing their way through 3 minute belters with breakdowns and gnarl, they ultimately became just another casualty of the ebb and flow of the times. It didn’t help that their hits, of which ‘Coagulate’ is a supreme highlight, are accompanied by videos tantamount to Windows Music Maker demos.
Megadeth – Super Collider
There’s just no excuse for this at all. Dave Mustaine and Megadeth have been on a steep downturn since the release of Thirt3en and Super Collider was just the apex of irrelevance. Nobody knows how it happened, and nobody’s sure if it’ll ever be this bad again, but it happened, and I’m not sure I can ever forget. Once a God, now a disgruntled dad in his own music video: The Dave Mustaine story.
Boys Like Girls – The Great Escape
Putting the rant about pop-punk commodifying the angst and rage from which its biggest genre benefactors drew their entire inspiration to one side, Boys Like Girls are just flat out offensively bland. Catchy chorus and all, for a song about making the “great escape”, there’s as much rebellion here as there is in a 16 year-old’s house party where there’s two naggins of vodka being passed around. And the video is a full motion version of the kind of tacit MySpace photo albums that would accompany such bold acts of refusal, aptly titled “<3 FORGET YESTERDAY <3” with over 200 photos, two thirds of which are selfies.
What kind of completely silly music videos have you encountered on the YouTube highways? Let us know in the comments!
