Monday, December 17, 2007

More Industrial Monday!

When you kick off your week with six cups of coffee and a raw video clip of an early Ministry/Skinny Puppy collaboration, followed by intense production meetings, making impossible schedules possible, and facing a long evening of putting out fires, the last thing you want to do is chill out. The accelerated heart rate feels good. You're getting stuff done. Nothing keeps the blood flowing better than pure teen-angst-laden machine music.

So presented here are a selection of classic cyberpunk music videos you can bookmark to keep you going for that next pre-review all-nighter, battle day at the office, or to just rock out to at home.


Front Line Assembly - Mindphaser (1992)
This appears to be a multi-million-dollar music video, which wasn't exactly feasible for a highly influential but rather small Canadian indie label like Nettwerk. FLA and their production team masterfully blended original footage with clips from the Japanese cyberpunk film GUNHED. The resulting narrative... wait, there isn't really a narrative here, but it looks f*cking awesome. Mindphaser went on to win MTV's "Alternative Music Video of the Year" in 1992.


Nine Inch Nails - Happiness In Slavery (1992)
I remember when Madonna's Erotica came out, there was so much controversy - "Oh, it's so radical... S&M, oh my!" Shut the hell up. She's so consistently late to the party it's not even funny anymore. Within a few months Trent Reznor, director Jon Reiss and performance artist Bob Flanagan showed everyone what "hardcore" really meant. One of the best music videos as art film ever, and banned everywhere. Nine Inch Nails went on to win multiple Grammys that year.


Einsturzende Neubauten - Blume (1992)
Not heart-racing materieal by any means, but probably my favorite video ever - from the godfathers of industrial.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I’ve never seen the video for ‘Blume’ before. Good stuff. Also I’ll restrain myself from commenting on your ‘godfathers of industrial’ comment.

Unknown said...

If you mean T.G., yes, I'd consider them more the maternal parents of Industrial. What popularly became known as a genre was [in most simple terms] equal parts influenced by T.G., Neubauten and early EBM.