Videodrone is a weekly(ish) feature looking at music videos from the last half century.
Space Lord (1998)
The music world was changing in 1998. The alt-rock revolution of the early to mid-'90s was fizzling out, replaced by one-hit wonders (Semisonic, New Radicals, Harvey Danger, etc.), teen pop (Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC), and pop country (Garth Brooks, Shania Twain). Hip hop was also faring well, especially on MTV with flashy videos directed by the likes of Hype Williams showcasing the glamorous life of rappers with plenty of cash, dancers and bling.
For a guy like Dave Wyndorf, frontman of the New Jersey space metal act Monster Magnet, things were getting a little lean. Heavily influenced by Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and Marvel Comics, Monster Magnet was formed in 1989 and signed with A&M Records in 1992 (they opened for Soundgarden and Swervedriver at Avalon in Boston in April 1992, but I got to the show too late to see them). They had a minor hit with "Negasonic Teenage Warhead" in 1995, getting some radio and video play, but like the band's previous album, it didn't sell well.
So Wyndorf holed up in a hotel room off the Las Vegas strip and wrote a song a day for 21 days, mostly around the Vegas themes of desperation and despair. One of those songs was "Space Lord," about a Thanos-esque supervillain. The label had encouraged him to write simpler songs in the hopes of scoring an actual hit of the complex and often long epics the band was known for.
For the video, Wyndorf asked director Joseph Kahn (who has directed videos for Taylor Swift, George Michael, Eminem, Snoop Dogg and many others) to make it look like a rap video, since rappers were becoming the real rock stars by this point. Kahn obliged and filmed scenes at many of the same Vegas strip locations used in Mase's "Feel So Good" video (see below).
The video starts off with a slow-building intro that mimics Metallica's "Enter Sandman" clip, haunting and shadowy, before exploding into the bright colors, pyrotechnics and fisheye lens angles utilized by Williams in the Mase video and many others. Wyndorf is wearing a shiny blue suit in some scenes, a white suit emblazoned with light bulbs in others. The song is an all-out rocker and the video jumps off the screen, with Wyndorf and a group of dancers gyrating in front of a Vegas hotel while fireworks go off all around them.
For some reason, Wyndorf went with a sanitized version of the song's refrain "Space lord, motherfucker," changing it to "Space lord, mother mother" instead. It still works. The song ended up reaching #3 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and #29 on the U.S. Alternative Airplay chart. The album Powertrip hit #97 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold.
Monster Magnet's video was so similar to "Feel So Good" that once Wyndorf realized it, he was concerned that Mase would be upset but Mase was amused by the homage.
As it turned out, "Space Lord" was the first video ever aired on MTV's Total Request Live, which was an extremely popular show for several years.
Monster Magnet is still together, although they would never again reach the heights they did with "Space Lord." Still, Wyndorf's Vegas stay certainly stands the test of time, even if Monster Magnet was never able to top it.
