In its essence, rock’n’roll is supposed to be a never-ending stream of conscious-expanding expression, a spiked glass of escapism under the hood of the proverbial rebel yell. Outstanding songs tend to paint visuals in our mind, but the intensity of those pictures depends on the listeners’ imagination and their emotional attachment to a particular tune. That being said, conveying the crux of the song to a visual medium can be quite tricky and it has been proven time and time again that music videos can make or break whole careers. The importance of the music video has pushed musicians, visual artists and directors to move away from classic performance shots and create memorable mind-bending clips that stand out as true triumphs of creativity and transgress into a life of their own. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson: »When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.«
What follows is a bouquet of my favorite hallucinogenic rock music videos. Enjoy the trip!
MARILYN MANSON – DOPE HAT
It’s only appropriate to start it off with Marilyn Manson and his merry bunch of sideshow rejects. Taken off the band’s debut, the Dope Hat video delights us with a bizarre sugar-coated incubus set over a shameless rip-off of a Black Sabbath riff (then again, aren’t they all?) and spooky theremin effects. Throughout the video, we follow the self-proclaimed antichrist superstar’s boat trip across a perpetual Willy Wonka nightmare, intercut with cartoonish satanic images and allusions to child molestation, featuring a sordid array of disturbing scenes with ingenious props like insect pills and lab rat baguettes. Sailing on either blood or syrup, this Oompa-Loompa orgy is arguably the best representation of the early phase of Manson’s career, before he started to take himself so damn seriously.
Colors never looked this creepy.
PLACEBO – NANCY BOY
Placebo are well known for high-value artistry and impeccable sense of aesthetics. With Nancy Boy, we are invited to their perverse world of morphing faces and dilapidated bathrooms bearing various transgender innuendos and blueprints to all kinds of depravity. While the key features of the video are often intentionally distorted and blurry, the creative use of lighting perfectly accentuates the macabre atmosphere in which the twisted imagery can be stylized to a full Jacob’s Ladder effect. Get ready for an orgasming bathtub, a thorny wheelbarrow and a torso impaled a fakir’s bench, with the addition of sex doll mouths and human mannequins straight out of a lunatic’s wet dream.
A masterful exercise in goth psychedelia.
BLIND MELON – GALAXIE
To an unsuspecting beholder, Blind Melon seemed like a straightforward rock band that sprouted from the side-roots of grunge. But as in most cases, there’s more than meets the eye and it’s a well known fact that charismatic frontman Shannon Hoon was no stranger to mood-altering substances that ultimately cost him his life. The video for their 1995 single Galaxie starts off in what looks like an unbalanced kid’s meth lab and ends with Timothy Leary’s frown, but most of the crazy scenes revolve around the band goofing around in Hoon’s 1964 Ford Galaxie. It doesn’t take long for the trip to turn into a genuine crackhead paradise as they speed down the birth canal with a swarm of sperm and vividly react to various hallucinations lurking under the neon city lights, with a haunted Hoon, visibly on drugs, literally disintegrating in front of our eyes while lamenting about lost love.
All in all, a lot of trippy stuff happening for what is basically a song about a car.
SOUNDGARDEN – BLACK HOLE SUN
It’s hard to believe that this video almost wasn’t made. By the time the question of a visual representation of Black Hole Sun came around, Soundgarden head honcho Chris Cornell apparently grew tired of the strenuous process of making music videos and didn’t want to put any effort into what looked like a tedious chore. The end result was one of the most iconic MTV staples of the grunge era, a shocking portrayal of quotidian life sliding slowly off its hinges. From the calm of the initial abundance of pastel colors, we are plunged into a mind-piercing slideshow of psycho smiles, barbecued Barbies and other bizarre occurrences representing the moral numbness of the privileged at the dawn of a full-fledged apocalypse, as the care-free and tanned White America gets washed away in a purifying storm of a dying sun, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Eye of Sauron.
A disturbing suburban meltdown.
THERAPY? – LONELY, CRYIN’, ONLY
With the plethora of colors in other videos that appear on this list, I wanted to have a pure black and white entry. Northern Ireland’s Therapy? certainly have the goods and I had quite a hard time choosing from their extensive back catalog of trippy outings. Ultimately, it came down to Teethgrinder and this Buñuel-inspired whirlwind of absurdity which impressed me with its fresh twist to the old head-in-the-box routine.
Simple and surreal.
Disclaimer: This is not a complete list, as I haven’t included the masterpieces from the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie and Tool, which only opens up the opportunity for a follow-up post.