Stuff You Will Hate VI: Hate Harder!

In some ways, this section is getting softer. I feature occasional interviews with artists I actually like, and, in response to feedback asking for more legitimate recommendations, I've recently linked to some genuinely awesome bands. To balance things out, the negative segments clearly have to be even harsher. So I put in the extra effort to track down clips guaranteed to make Sgt. D more enraged than ever, and I subjected myself to some extraordinarily horrible groups. But it all becomes worthwhile when we check the YouTube comments over the weekend and see that you, the readers, hate this stuff too. And this time especially, you'll really fucking hate it.

Carnifex, "Lie to My Face"

I originally slated this travesty for inclusion in the monthly Metal Hell column. I showed it to my co-author het, and this was his initial reaction:

het: hahaha what the fuck is this terrible shit

However, I saved it for Stuff You Will Hate, because I sure as fuck genuinely hate it, and I trust you will too.

I can't imagine anyone watching this bullshit all the way through unless it's part of their job description, so I'll summarize the video. Some douchey-looking guy ties a woman to a chair and tapes her mouth shut. There's a bit of "whimsical torture" when this asshole blows cigarette smoke in her face, like the part in Guinea Pig when the devil's experimenters take a break from all the mutilation to spin their hapless victim in a chair until she's, like, really dizzy. Then he takes off her pants, uses a crowbar to slowly and suggestively lift her tank top, and bludgeons her to death. Meanwhile, a stupid-looking band performs a really bad song.

The music matches the clip, all pointless "brutality" without any contrast or substance. Listening to Carnifex is like watching that "gory kills" montage toward the end of Bloodrayne: They take the "best" parts of something inherently worthless (deathcore) and mash them together artlessly. It's like picking the corn out of shit and calling it casserole.

If asked, maybe Carnifex would say they were just pointing out the fact that evil exists in the world. That's the excuse pro wrestler David DeFalco made for writing and directing Chaos, a film in which a woman chokes to death when force-fed her own sliced-off nipple. It was the ultimate fuck-this-movie movie, and this is the ultimate fuck-this-video video, something that exists solely because its creator confuses "making something no one has made before, because no one wants to see it" with "innovation." In this case, the "no one wants to see it" is debatable, given that 1.8 million people have watched this, a fact much more harrowing than any "brutal" imagery Carnifex could conjure. But I can just change that to "because no one with any fucking trace of intelligence wants to see it," problem solved.

The clip does provide some unintended comic relief, thanks to hack director Robby Starbuck (already featured in SYWH several times), whose Tool Academy-like logo flashes at the end, accompanied by cheesy emo crooning.

"Man, that was totally the most brutal video ever made! People are gonna... hey, Robby, man what are you doing?"

"Sorry bro, gotta make a living." -GD

Slow Club, "Trophy Room"

In the most creatively bankrupt video concept I've seen in some time, Slow Club uses reverse psychology in an attempt to make its clip popular. This paunchy male/female duo aborts its initial video shoot on the grounds that it isn't clever enough to "go viral." Instead, they film themselves in a series of painfully indie moments as they discuss (via subtitles) how they'll never be stars. You see, by acknowledging that "going viral" is the basis of many bands' music videos, Slow Club is making a sly comment on the nature of the contemporary music industry that is itself worthy of "going viral." How clever!!!

Only it didn't work out. With a meager 23,000 views in 6 months, obviously nobody else thinks these two schlubs and their "super meta" video are nearly as clever as they themselves do. How humiliating! Self-clownings can be hard to watch, like when a guy proposes to his girlfriend during halftime at a basketball game, only to have her burst into tears and run for the hills while thousands of strangers look on in horror-slash-amusement. Watching these two try to pat themselves on the back is almost as uncomfortable, but not nearly as funny. Thankfully, they interspersed plenty of b-roll of random Canadian streets and super-authentic ethnic restaurants to minimize the amount of time we have to spend looking at them.

It's equal parts enraging and embarrassing to watch these desperate turds claw for fleeting e-fame. You get the feeling they don't sleep much, instead sitting in front of their Macbooks night and day, pressing F5 in hopes of a new YouTube comment. You can also imagine how disappointed they are when those comments never come.-Sgt. D

Killwhitneydead, "Let Me Give You A Hand Throwing Yourself Out"

Deathcore groups don't only write songs/make videos about killing women. They also write songs/make videos in which a woman understandably decides to dump their creepy asses, and they retaliate by stalking, torturing and murdering her new boyfriend! It's like the patron genre of cuckolds. They are so very angry that they just want to play some hard cucking metal! Whereas normal metal dudes merely wish they had girlfriends, brutal death fans wish they had girlfriends, but only so that their girlfriends could leave them for another guy, thus enabling their idiotic violent-revenge-against-a-woman's-freely-chosen-relationship fantasies.

Killwhitneydead represents the new breed of willfully offensive band, from the generically misogynistic moniker to song titles like "It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself." They bill themselves as "the band you love to hate," but who could muster that much emotion for a group this calculated and uninspired? Shock-metal acts used to come up with creative approaches. Take Pungent Stench and its inexplicably existent full-length video for "The Amp Hymn," a track from an amputee-appreciation concept album. This clip might offend most sensibilities, especially any scenes that involve ambiguous thrusting in the background, and it's not especially well executed, from a technical standpoint. But it still packs a "what the fuck" jolt, and a sense that only this band would have made this video. Killwhitneydead might consider this clip shocking -- boobs! blood! profanity! -- but in the end it's just another cuckold anthem from just another unremarkable practitioner of music's most depressingly pathetic subgenre.

At least the lame theatrics gives viewers a distraction from watching Killwhitneydead perform their laughable guitar-slinging choreography, or from seeing their Best Buy Geek Squad-looking singer get way too fucking pushy about the extended warranty. Another bright side: The woman lives in this one, though it's certainly implied that she won't be alive for long. "But he shouldve killed the chick cuz she did it too," says CONNOREXPLOSION in the highest-rated YouTube comment for this clip. Spoken like a true Carnifex fan. (Or member.) The only reassuring thing about such sentiments is that you know they won't be acted upon, because these guys are just as ineffectual at violent revenge as they are in every other facet of their miserable lives. Enjoy living vicariously through the world's worst videos! -GD