The music video has been a unique art form for nearly 30 years. The
medium has produced some truly inspired works of art, especially out of
a format that is intended to be little more than a promotional tool. Of
course, for every Sistine Chapel there will always be a thousand
midi-laden, clip-art-infected websites from the mid '90's. Here I
present to you a mere 5 of the countless music videos that just never
should have been created.
First off, the criteria for selection:
Each one of these videos isn't merely bad or uninventive. Every video
here represents some exceptionally awful aspect of the art and the
people who make it. Without further ado...
Oh, boy. Where to start? I'm not giving much weight to the songs themselves
in determining the awfulness of these videos, but this gratingly
melodramatic pile of cliches doesn't help an already dire situation. In
its attempt to be taken seriously, the video for "Forever Young" looks
a lot like unwitting self-parody. I'm not saying that music videos
can't be both good and arthouse, but if that's what you're looking for,
Bauhaus has a fine catalog from which to choose. Alphaville's attempt
here is just painful. Basically what we have here is a series of
extras from a wide selection B-grade period dramas who must have been
horrible people in life, because now they find themselves trapped in a
derelict church as a captive audience of the most unnecessarily
dramatic band in the entire universe. We know this is on a cosmic scale
because the video is bookended by a cheap diamond wipe containing a
starry background. In the jumpsuit-clad band's only display of mercy,
they open the aforementioned diamond so their audience can escape the
tortuous concert by stepping confidently into the void.
There are two things wrong with this video, primarily. First, it's the single most depressing attempt to shill a CD in the history of the format. Second, the entire premise of the video is that we have to accept the concept of Moby as a decrepit, old man. The problem with that? Moby already looks like a decrepit, old man. I would make the case that there's no substantive difference between a scrawny, bald vegan and an octogenarian, but I honestly believe Moby has looked the same way since birth and will continue to look that way until the day he dies. This music video only confirms it for me when an angel played by none other than Christina Ricci drags old-man Moby into The Light, only to produce a baby in some kind of lame circle-of-life nonsense. The only reason you can tell it's a baby and not just Moby stripped naked is that, if you look closely, you might notice that it's slightly smaller than the wan creature taken into oblivion by a thoroughly unnecessary celebrity apparition.
OK, here's the problem- total waste. Unlike everything else on this list, "Kim and Jessie" is actually a pretty good song. This video, however, is just unacceptable. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something that I wouldn't if I were French like the folks in M83. How does a slick, New Wave throwback warrant four solid minutes of amateur roller skating? The fact that it ends with a complete non sequitur romance doesn't help. They might get away with it if the skating was somehow impressive, but the footwork here just doesn't cut it.
Everything. No Toby Keith video past, present, or future has any right to exist. Ever.
Peter Gabriel- Shock The Monkey
This video is absurd in about 100 different ways. The problem here is that it would be genius if it were intended to be comedy. Instead it's a wank-fest of rampant symbolism and Peter Gabriel pretending to be deep. Every time this video plays, Salvador Dali spins in his grave. This really is the ultimate trainwreck of a music video. Go ahead, laugh about it, but no amount of gut-chuckles can take away the horror of realizing that a large group of people spent several days and many thousands of dollars making this atrocity a reality.
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