Greatest anti-video videos

Well..I was catching up on my "120 Minutes" viewing (which is backed up weeks deep on my DVR) and a video came on that got me to thinking of an RUHtf subject (taking cue from "High Fidelity"): Greatest anti-video videos (heretofore referred to as "AVV"). Videos that were made just to fulfill an artist's contract with the record company to make promo videos.

#1 greatest AVV of all time...The Replacement's "Bastards of Young". On their first major label album, "Tim" they were probably forced into making a video for MTV. Mind you, this is a band who previously had a song "Seen Your Video" with the lyrics:

All day, all night, all music video
Seen your video, the phony rock 'n' roll
We don't want to know, seen your video
Your phony rock 'n' roll
We don't want to know
We don't want to know
We don't want to know
We don't want to know

To comply with their record company, and keep their integrity intact, what do they do? Film a speaker cone for the duration of the song. Sure...they learned to play the major game with their "by the book" videos for "Achin' To Be" and "I'll Be You"...but for awhile they were one of the few bands with balls enough to raise their middle finger at MTV:

Bastards Of Young:


Then there's the Pixies...the new darlings and torch bearers of the modern rock movement. I'm sure they were also conned in to doing videos, so they really screwed with the medium. This is classic..all song, no action:


Someone on You Tube took it one step further to find out how long it really took them to film the video...23 seconds:

Talk about taking the promo money and running with it. They probably didn't even have a cinematographer..it was probably a camera they set up and hit "record".

The Pixies had already, a couple years earlier, perfected the AVV with "Here Comes Your Man". "We're not gonna lip sync" they said:


They took the "lip sync ban" a step further and blew lots of air on themselves for "Alec Eiffel":

That's more of a "traditional" video though.

Mabye they got the inspiration for that video from David Lovering's side gig as a magician:


Well that's it for now...if you have any comments or suggestions, post or e-mail.