METALVIDEO MASSACRE
Think of heavy metal videos and what comes to mind? Well, let's see...there's leather, of course, and dwarfs, musn't forget them, and maybe some good old fashioned Third Reich symbolism as well, and hey, can't leave out the most important visual element of any rock video—namely, Chicks In Their Underwear!
METALVIDEO MASSACRE
Mommy, There’s A Moron On TV!
BILLY ALTMAN
Think of heavy metal videos and what comes to mind? Well, let's see...there's leather, of course, and dwarfs, musn't forget them, and maybe some good old fashioned Third Reich symbolism as well, and hey, can't leave out the most important visual element of any rock video—namely, Chicks In Their Underwear! Which makes your basic metal video a kind of bad bondage mini-flick wherein blondes wearing leather boots and no pants are savagely attacked by whip-wielding dwarfs decked out in full Nazi regalia, and...hey, wait a minute! Isn't that Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone"?
Anyway, like the weather, everybody talks about videos, but nobody does a thing about 'em. I mean, up until recently, videos were purely "for promotional use" only and you couldn't even buy 'em, so the only way to know if a particular video was successful or not was if its airings could be translated into actual record sales. So, outside of perhaps Tony Basil's "Mickey" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It," you couldn't really say that videos proved anything—outside of the fact that, given the opportunity, most rock video directors are in-