Music videos are the artistic representation of a band's music, a visual extension of muscle from the shoulder to the fist, jarring a deeper emotion in your brain. If music videos were never created, who knows what would've happened? Well, actually a couple things are certain: We would have been spared the '80s full of hair-metal power-ballad pageantry, and also having to witness and endure the egregious corporatization of MTV. Then again, these ten awesome metal videos would never have existed. So, good with the bad and all that...
See also: The ten geekiest metal bands
10. The Dillinger Escape Plan - "When I Lost My Bet" Shit's just fucked up here. What the hell is that thing attached to their mouths? Did they puke their intestines into their tongues somehow and then puke that out of their mouths? Hey, your tongue intestines are crooked -- you might want to straighten that. There ya go. A close up of a charred screaming mouth in between other demented shit gives the video a fine color, an excellent bouquet and a nutty, earthy flavor.
9. Dethklok - "I Ejaculate Fire" The title of this song says it all. Need we say more? Yes, because we want to talk about ejaculation and fire, and ejaculating fire, and ejaculating fire in a frenzy of annihilation. At the end of the video, right when you think that Egyptian female mummy is going to come fire from her vagina, it's her nipples of fire that destroy the male mummy. A twist like this in a video makes The Sixth Sense look like a Police Academy movie.
8. Dio - "Holy Diver" "Holy Diver" is a mini-epic fantasy before the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy unsheathed its sword for battle before the eyes of geeks with CGI and Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Come on! Dio is brandishing a sword while his vocals slash your ears with his Horn of Gondor Borimir-channeling power vocals. It doesn't get much better than that. And it doesn't get much more distinctively Dio than that. The only thing the video is missing is a dragon...no, two dragons...and a three-headed dragon belching massive fireballs.
7. Behemoth - "Lucifer" There is no comparison when it comes to newer metal music videos: Behemoth videos just have a higher quality that matches their brutality, visually cascading blackened blood from the forehead down. Long gone are the low-quality cheesy metal videos that are treasured for this same reason. "Lucifer" has the production value of a big-budget short film and a horror-rich narrative dark enough to contaminate the souls of even Teletubbies.
6. Meshuggah - "Rational Gaze" This video is a hazed and diffused, magic-mushroom swirling, bluish-green acid trip into a Smurf village, blasting Meshuggah from Grouchy Smurfs' gigantic stereo. The track's lyrics are 20/20 ocular: "Squint your eyes to see clearly/Blur reality to make it real/Let focus go from your deceiving eyes to know what's been concealed/We've all been blinded -- subjects to visual misinformation."
5. Slipknot - "Duality" It's hard not to live vicariously through this video. Who wants to smash some shit and rip apart a house with your bare hands? Uh, yes, please. You don't have to ask that question twice -- well, unless if you've stood next to the speakers one too many times.
4. Pantera - "Five Minutes Alone" Who's the genius that thought of filming the majority of a six-minute video with a close up of Dimebag's guitar? Someone get that person a Pulitzer Prize, Noble Peace Prize, the Stanley Cup and a James Beard Award. "You've waged a war of nerves/But you can't crush the kingdom." If you got any closer to Dimebag's guitar you'd singe your eyebrows.
3. Korn - "Freak on a Leash" Even if you're a metal purist that thinks Korn is shittier than corn kernels at the center of a massive pile of dung, you have to admit the video for "Freak on a Leash" satisfies a desire for destruction. This video was directed by comic book artist Todd McFarlane, known for creating darker malevolent comic book characters like Venom and Spawn. The video combines his comic book animation style with live-action footage of a single bullet shooting across an abnormally long distance puncturing and smashing random objects in slow motion.
2. Melvins - "The Talking Horse" "The Talking Horse" is as wild, strange and head scratching as Buzz's hair. Everyone just help yourself to a piece of a man-in-a-suit's human head, turned cake head, at an office party. No need for water cooler talk here; affirmation of this clip's oddness is clearly seen wide-eyed. What kind of concoction of drugs does it take to make a video like this? Hand it over.
1. Tool - "Stinkfist" There isn't a shortage of good Tool videos, but if there was an apocalypse, Tool fans would be clambering to get them off the shelf and into their bunker stockpile for 10,000 days. There is a shortage, though, of stop-motion animation about a race of sand people that eat metal objects like glass eaters to grow clumps of sand to keep in jars. There's only one, and its worth saving for a special occasion, such as drinking a glass of wine with Maynard.
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