Five Creepy Music Videos (accumulated while watching ‘The Wedge’ as a teenager)

When I was a teenager, I used to babysit a lot on Friday nights. I didn’t go out to a lot of parties, but the for the most part, I didn’t want to. Fridays were when ‘The Wedge’, (MuchMusic’s show for obscure/weird/upsetting videos) was on, first at 11pm, then midnight, then 2am (I stopped watching around then), and it was one of my favourite rituals of the week. I would finish some homework, make some popcorn, and watch the show with my brother, or better still, watch it alone after some kids I was looking after had fallen asleep.

‘The Wedge’ used to present videos in the creepiest way possible, which I think is largely because it didn’t have a host back then.There was something creepy in and of itself about seeing music videos with no context, no sense that a human had any say in their selection or presentation. They say that listening to radio, alone, at 1am is a nice way to remember there are people, and fellow-feeling, somewhere out in the world. I feel as though The Wedge always had the opposite effect, it made me feel utterly isolated, especially when I turned it on near the end of a long babysitting shift. It had this deeply estranging Omega Man effect.

The new ‘Wedge’ certainly does not do that (I wrote about it’s newly humanized form for The Walrus magazine over the summer), and I think it’s for the better. However, with Halloween approaching, I thought it would be nice to revisit those videos that triggered something deep and unsettling in my teenage self. Some have no aged super well - some have the same potency as ever. Remember to watch these with the lights down!

Honourable Mention - Ladytron - Seventeen

In hindsight, this video is not very creepy, and it’s much better lit than I remember it being. Ladytron was already pretty famous by the time I saw this video, which probably explains that. But at the time, this thing freaked me out like crazy.

#5 - Spiritualized - She Kissed Me

This one doesn’t hold up so well either - the song is too raucous to be conducive to something ‘creepy’, I now realize. However, watching it on a crappy TV, it looked a lot like the parts where his face blurs were errors on the set, which was kindof disturbing, right?

#4 - Bjork - All is Full of Love

This one’s kind of cheating a bit, because they used to play this on daytime Much once in a while, when it was ok to play really upsetting videos during the day, apparently. (Or ‘the golden years’.) This is a video by Chris Cunningham, the grandmaster of terrifying music videos. He also made this trippy number for Leftfield’s ‘Afrikashox’, and another video which I will address at #1. For me, the female robots with Bjork’s face making out (yup) aren’t the creepy part - it’s all of the shots of water running droplets pooling in reverse, the fetishistic images of machinery, the obscuring shadows.

#3- Sigur Ros - Untitled (Vaka)

This video is great for the juxtaposition of Sigur Ros’s weird, made up language (creepy in and of itself), which in this case serves to actually make a kind of uplifting soundscape, with these abjectly despairing images with children. This one was directed by Floria Sigismondi, back when she was still an interesting art photographer.

#2 - Mogwai - Hunted by a Freak

This video is maybe the creepiest use of animation I have ever seen. By rendering a really horrific idea - a sociopath throws animals off the top of a building - in blocky, unrealistic, ‘Money for Nothing’ style animated figures, the animators make the idea seem even more cruel somehow. The animation makes it watchable, which makes it creepy.

#1 - Aphex Twin, Windowlicker

This is the creepiest, most singularly upsetting video ever made (when viewed at 1am on a Friday night, as a teenager, without context). Yes, I now recognize this as a (fairly clever) satire of the mores and excesses of stereotypical rap videos from the early 2000s, but I feel the same way about this video as I do about Lost Highway - this is a direct tap into the psyche of a man dealing with deeply conflicted sexual politics (made by Chris Cunningham! Who also did my #4!). And the depths that Aphex Twin distorts, twists, and loops his music on Windowlicker especially was unprecedented for me at the time. Even now this thing upsets me. Jesus Christ. Make it stop! Make it stop!!!