Almost everything heavy metal put on a screen between 1981 and 1993 was a sales document with a working life of about three weeks, paid for out of the band's own royalties and thrown away the month the single stopped climbing. Perhaps a dozen of them survive on their own terms. Those are the ones worth arguing about.
A decoy is cut out of a block of cedar in a shed in winter, weighted along the keel so that it rides at the angle a living bird rides at, and painted by somebody who has spent thirty years looking at the real thing on cold water. It can neither fly nor call nor feed. The whole morning turns on whether the carving is good enough to bring something down out of the sky. The mass produced ones, hollow plastic and shiny in the wrong light, split along the moulding seam in the first hard frost and are left in the reeds.
The best heavy metal music videos are the carvings. They were made by somebody with an idea of their own, they treat the song as material rather than as a soundtrack laid under a performance, and they are still watchable with the sound off, which is a harder test than it looks. Everything else the culture built around its records, the sleeves, the logos and the jackets, sits in the full chapter.
What the best heavy metal music videos do that the rest do not
The template was cut before the channel existed. The Birmingham five who walked into a bank vault with their instruments, played to a security guard who could not help joining in and left with nothing anyone could fence were Judas Priest, and the clip Julien Temple directed for "Breaking the Law" in 1980 got its comedy from taking the song at its word and then refusing to be solemn about it. There is no lighting rig in it. There is a joke, carried straight through to the last shot.
That is the first test. A video that simply photographs five men miming in a warehouse adds nothing to the record and dates with the haircuts, which is why the vast majority of them are unwatchable now, while a clip with one idea in it can survive four decades of changing fashion in clothes, film stock and hair. The second test is craft. The third is whether anybody involved took a risk that could have failed.
The joke played absolutely straight
The comedian who spent the last decade of his life refusing to repeat himself, and who agreed in 1988 to play an art teacher tormented by a wall painting that turns out to contain the band's own mascot, was Graham Chapman, and the video Julian Doyle shot at Tintern Abbey and Chislehurst Caves for Iron Maiden's "Can I Play with Madness" is the funniest four minutes the genre has on film. Chapman plays it completely dry, in one of his last screen roles before he died of cancer in October 1989, and the performance is beyond dispute the best piece of acting in any metal video of the decade.
A lesser band would have let the mascot do the acting. What the clip actually does is set a real comic actor against a cave painting and let the song run underneath the performance, so the band appears as a band and not as a cast, and the joke lands without anyone on screen acknowledging that a joke is being made.
The Pasadena quartet that answered the same question with a dance routine on a row of school desks was Van Halen, and "Hot for Teacher", directed by Pete Angelus and David Lee Roth in 1984 with four child doubles playing the band as schoolboys, is a piece of choreography before it is anything else. Alex Van Halen's shuffle opens it. The camera then holds the four men in step, in time, for a full chorus, which no amount of editing can fake.
A video that photographs five men miming in a warehouse dates with the haircuts. A clip with one idea in it survives four decades.
The ones that had to be somewhere real
The Los Angeles four who took a camera crew to the Giza Plateau in December 1990 and played on sand at the foot of the Great Sphinx were Slayer, and the video Di Puglia Gerard directed for "Seasons in the Abyss" buys with one location what a hundred smoke machines could not. The band looks small against the stone, four men and a backline on sand that has carried worse armies. For a group whose earlier clips had been shot in rooms with the lights turned down, that sense of scale is the whole difference.
The video director who filmed the first single from Roots in 1996 in the catacombs under Salvador, where slaves were once sold, was Thomas Mignone, and what he made for Sepultura is not a performance clip at all: the band's playing is cut against capoeira dancers and timbalada drummers in the streets above, a rhythm that answers the song rather than just following it. Nobody mimes a solo. The camera treats four musicians and a city as a subject rather than as a product, and Mignone carried the same eye into Mudvayne's "Dig" and Slipknot's "Wait & Bleed" in the years after.
A truth that's told with bad intent
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Beats all the lies you can invent.
The short film that owed the song nothing
The one that broke the form open was animated a frame at a time. Directed by Fred Stuhr and built in stop motion in 1993 around a jointed figure moving through rooms of pipework and meat, with the band's own guitarist Adam Jones designing the puppets, the video for Tool's "Sober" abandoned the performance clip completely and put a short film in its place, by common consent the most ambitious four minutes the genre has committed to film. No band member is identifiable in it. The song is left to carry itself.
The economics explain why there are so few like it. A label advanced the money for a video and recouped it from the band, so a group could be on rotation every hour and still owe more than it had earned, and the cheapest way to spend that advance was a stage, a smoke machine and an afternoon, so most of the decade's spectacle was bought by the hour. Ambition cost the band, not the company. Most bands took the afternoon.
| Video | Year | What it risked |
|---|---|---|
| Judas Priest, "Breaking the Law" | 1980 | A comedy sketch, a year before the channel existed |
| Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher" | 1984 | Four men dancing in step, in one take per chorus |
| Iron Maiden, "Can I Play with Madness" | 1988 | A real comic actor, playing it dry |
| Metallica, "One" | 1989 | Seven minutes of a war film against a seven minute song |
| Slayer, "Seasons in the Abyss" | 1990 | A crew flown to Egypt for one location |
| Tool, "Sober" | 1993 | Stop motion instead of a band |
| Sepultura, "Roots Bloody Roots" | 1996 | Real catacombs under Salvador, not a soundstage |
The biggest sellers of the period perish fastest. The clips that shifted the most units, the poolsides, the hired dancers and the cars, are unwatchable now precisely because they were made to sell a single quarter, and a hairstyle is the fastest perishing thing ever committed to tape. The songs under them are often fine. The film is landfill.
The form did not die with the channel that paid for it. Its serious exponents now shoot for a platform that keeps everything forever, which quietly raises the stakes, because a bad clip no longer disappears after its three weeks and sits instead at the top of the search results for as long as the band exists. A handful of clips made since 2010 already belong in that company. What the musicians themselves said about all of it is gathered in heavy metal quotes.
