Awful Metal Video of the Week: Six Feet Under - Amerika The Brutal

I saw this music video more than half a decade ago, back when it was freshly prepared with MSpaint and some mild skills in Adobe Flash. It took me all this time to repress such a traumatic memory, and upon creating this site and the Awful Metal Video of the Week segment, I knew coming back to it was an inevitability. I held off on doing a review of what I truly, earnestly consider to actually be the worst heavy metal music video ever produced, but I couldn't run from my past any longer. TNM reader, Thomas Newhouse brought the video back to my full attention, and now I have no choice other than to turn and face my demons. Thanks a lot Thomas, you insensitive prick. You have no idea the anguish you have brought back into my daily existence. This is the unapologetically official music video for "Amerika the Brutal" by shitty Death n' Roll band, Six Feet Under...

What hath God wrought? 

This reminds me of a funny story. Back when I first started the blog, I only ran into opposition. After sharing my Gauges violation post on Facebook last December, angry high school kid #27 called me out for dissing an accessory that Chris Barnes wore, and because I made the claim that something Chris Barnes did wasn't metal, there was no way I knew what I was talking about. Now, when I see a comment that's really stupid, my typical reaction is to roll my eyes, shake my head, or scoff or something. I mean, I think they're funny, but they generally aren't so bad that they actually make me laugh out loud. Upon reading his comment, I honestly belly-laughed with uproarious hysteria. It was the kind of laugh that puts tears in your eyes and makes you cough like a smoker. You couldn't purposefully tell me a joke that's funnier than what he said. After I regained my composure, I told him I was now going to write a post about Dreadlocks just to spite him. The rest you know, is history.  

A project started by ex-Cannibal Corpse vocalist, and ex-Obituary guitarist, Six Feet Under is a truly awful band, and they didn't start out good and get worse, from Haunted to Death Rituals, they've always been lame and slow. Musically they are a mediocre rock band at best, with blown out death metal vocals that give you a great idea of what happens to your throat and your voice if you do it wrong for so many years. (Remember kids, over the pencil...) Chris Barnes sounds like a gurgling, hoarse piece of shit now, and throat cancer is already a given.

Chris Barnes, seen here performing live with his illustrious head of feces. 

So we've now established the music is bad enough on its own, but look at this music video. Just look at it. "Crudely animated" doesn't even begin to define just how horrendous the production value of this thing is. It gets progressively worse with every passing moment. Every second is more baffling than the first. If there is a cliche anti-American statement to be made, it is done in this video with the visual assistance of some cracked china dolls playing out how typical Americans do things. We're bulimic, racist, tank driving wife-beaters who bleed oil, randomly turn into skulls and make the planet Earth bleed red MSpaint lines. We also like to squash jpegs of the Declaration of Independence with bigger jpegs of barcodes. It's the American way. 

There is a painful amount of ham-fisted, anti-capitalist imagery in this video, but there's also a lot of symbolism going on that doesn't really symbolize anything. At 1:10, a picture of a barcode is placed inside a china doll's head, and what comes out is an old TV with a mouth on it. The next logical step of course is for the mouth on the television to spit out baby limbs. This visual is immediately followed by a woman mouth eating a barcode-covered Earth with a fork, and then sticking out a snake tongue. Alright? Then at 1:37, you get to see how our minds are filled with the oppressive nature of basic street signs. 

I could go on and on, writing you paragraphs about my violated thought process for literally every second that occurs in this music video, but you just have to really sit and watch it to absorb its unfocused buffoonery to its fullest extent. So I'll shut up and let you do just that. Unfortunately, psychological medicine has turned a blind eye on us survivors, and as of yet there are no support groups to sponsor the victims who have witnessed the Amerika the Brutal music video. 

The only thing we can do with ourselves now is live our lives one day at a time.