Sonic Youth Feat. Lydia Lunch: Death Valley 69

Death Valley '69 serves as the music video for the metal band Sonic Youth's popular song, and there's probably no better force of nature to bring the song to visual life than underground, New York-based director and photographer Richard Kern. Kern specializes in the depraved and the sick-minded, and Death Valley '69, with its home-video aesthetic, unsteady camera-work, and scuzzy presentation, exude all of that quite fittingly. The music video, despite only being five minutes long, hits hard and remains relentless in its grittiness. It gets by almost entirely on the humid, sun-soaked atmosphere it presents, showing a group of young people vacationing in a grassy field, soaking up rays and engaging in bloody brutality. The video is gory and ruthless, but also quite artistic, mind you, with Kern's style seeping through like the mass amounts of fake blood he uses on set. Kern's strength is portraying the sick and the unkempt in a way that's artistic and beautiful, thanks to shots wildly experimental ideas, quirky camera angles, or a combination of all those plus downright unique and twisted ideas. Death Valley '69 is a beautiful introduction to his principles that only exceed as one continues to peruse his filmography.

Directed by: Richard Kern.

Death Valley '69 is a video for the Sonic Youth song of the same name. The song origionally appeared on the "Bad Moon Rising" album from way back in 1985, at about the same time as Kern was making those Super 8 gross-out masterpieces starring the lovely "Lung Leg" - I swear I'm not making this up - who later graced the cover of the SY album "EVOL." There is a great gorey sequence in the DV '69 music video that looks like pieces of liver or stomach (or something...) plopted down in front of a very crudly "killed" Steve Shelley (SY's drummer at the time the video was shot). Kern's very distinctive Super 8 style (gittery, high contrast, EXTREMELY low budget, and super gross-out) that was - and I know this is hard to believe - really, really popular in the New York art scene in the eighties is captured here in it's full glory. Check out "Hardcore," a collection of Kern's mid-eighties Super 8 porno(?) movies. Anyway, it's a Sonic Youth music video that is collected on the "Screaming Fields of Sonic Love" music video compilation thingy. There you have it....