MOG

"Come to Daddy came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed [drunk] and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all!" -Aphex Twin

You know you're watching a good music video when you completely forget it's initial intent to showcase the music. Those really creative and convincing videos that make one feel like their watching a short film that just happens to emit lyrics instead of scripted dialogue. When Chris Cunningham created the video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy" he successfully used a dark, electronic song as motivation for an even darker video. The 1997 video, one of the neatest/eeriest videos I'd ever seen on TV, hooks you from the beginning with shifty camera work and its grey, urban wasteland environment. Oddly enough the desolate setting Cunningham utilized was the very same council estate Stanley Kubrick shot many scenes from A Clockwork Orange.

The Best Part: The Who once famously proclaimed "The kids are alright!" but in this video.. the kids are not alright, they're straight up demonic and make the video excellent in being so. They run around scaring old ladies, breaking things, terrorizing people, and wreaking havoc all whilst holding hands and skipping about. Their faces, which may remind many of the more recent Vanilla Sky-like masks, are actually molds of Aphex Twin a.k.a. Richard James' face! At the end of the video you can't help but recall the Scooby Doo phrase "those meddling kids and that darn dog too!" Besides, who needs candles, pentagrams, and spells to summon a scary demon when you can have your dog urinate on a broken television?

 

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Posted on 08/08/2008