Way way back in the land of way back, a little game called Rock Band came on to the scene and sort of butt raped the King of instrument based video games, Guitar Hero, which really was getting stale and boring. Along side of totally tricking out a genera of games, you could now karaoke while playing the faux guitar! But since young people are dumb they probably didn’t know that before video games giving you music there were music videos to these songs. So this week to educate the young, here are the videos to some of the songs you probably rocked out to.
Blue Öyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper
Yep, this is about as exciting as you can get with a music video from the 70s. Awesome eh? I mean the olde times square has almost absolutely nothing to do with the song aside from the couple they show. I could instead ague this is more of an advertisement for Fuji Film as that’s mostly what I take away. But then again, Blue Öyster Cult has some bitching beard action going on. And that actually matters more than anything else.
Coheed and Cambria – Welcome Home
YEAH! BITCHIN’! And a bit emo. Went for that artsy, emotional, yet Metallica like video. I guess there’s a story in snippets or maybe it’s all about the raw emotion of sadness, but it’s all cluttered up by all the hair flying around. If there was more beard action happening, everything would have been better smoothed out, but you cannot have everything in a music video sadly. But there was bleeding in the video, or maybe you were. Best to check yourself over before moving along.
Jet – Are You Going to be My Girl
Uh… more bleeding it seems. Someone either stabbed an ink bag or Mickey’s being murdered. I will have to give credit to Jet for thoroughly mimicking the look of the sound they are trying to achieve. And it shows in the video, however, the random bleeding ink crap is a step back and they lose points for doing that. It’s inconsistent and cheesy as a result which really only earns this a B+.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
And that’s what 110% effort looks like and will do for your video. Nothing seems over produced, kitschy, cheap or half-assed. And for that effort it managed to get four MTV video award nominations (however won none of them). I’m not going to proclaim ‘most original video concept ever’, but it was very well executed and makes for a great video, even if it’s just a video with the band performing. What it does well like other band performing videos is it has an over all self-awareness to it, but not an exasperation about that fact.
Soundgarden – Blackhole Sun
This video hails from that sort of Golden Age of Music Videos, where they were being heavily watched on stations like Much Music and MTV, before the internet rolled around with its increased speeds and bandwidths. What they did in this golden time was make fun music videos. This is a fun music video. It’s close to a literal video, but there’s a lot of visuals happening to make both an effect and affect the viewer. Personally watching this it was hard to turn away. Most videos I sort of passively watch, but videos like these demand your attention and a video that does that, is a good video. Also did you notice how much Donnie Darko borrowed from this?