If you’re a fan of strange and unusual media, you might just love these five surreal and bizarre music videos. From grunge to experimental hip hop to acid house, there’s likely at least one crazy unique music video on this list that will suit your musical taste and fancy. Let’s dive in, shall we?
Videos by American Songwriter
1. “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel
Surreal music videos didn’t start getting really weird until the turn of the century, but this 1986 piece of dance-rock gold had a pretty unusual and surreal music video worth mentioning. The video features a very creative mix of stop motion animation, pixilation, and claymation. According to Peter Gabriel himself, he had to lay under a sheet of glass for almost 16 hours as the video was filmed one frame at a time.
“I was thinking at the time, ‘If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them,’” said Gabriel of the filming process for “Sledgehammer”.
2. “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches
This song is definitely a product of its time, and it’s one of the most addicting examples of turn-of-the-millenium turntablism and plunderphonics in music. “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches has a similarly unique and wild ride of a music video to go with it. It’s really the kind of thing that you just have to watch. Describing it won’t do it justice.
3. “Window Licker” by Aphex Twin
There’s a virtually endless number of surreal music videos by Aphex Twin that deserve spots on this list. But, there’s just something nostalgic about “Window Licker”. It’s such a bizarre electronica-meets-R&B song on its own, but that music video is absolutely insane. It’s sleazy, follows a loose narrative, and is riddled with unnerving but quite comical parodies of American gangster rap music videos.
4. “Believe” by The Chemical Brothers
Ever feel like an English factory worker plagued by the paranoid delusions that the automated assembly robot you work with will hunt you down and kill you? No? Whatever. Regardless, we’re sure there’s an analogy or something to interpret in this killer music video from The Chemical Brothers. It’s a classic “weird” music video that won an MTV Music Award back in 2005, and we definitely get why. Music videos just don’t have narratives like this anymore.
Photo via YouTube
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