Ryan Gibbs – Live, “Lightning Crashes” (video, 1995)
As one of the site’s “music people,” I figured I’d talk about a music video that freaked me out instead of a film. As penance for bending this article’s original idea, my story involves like three or four of the most embarrassing facts about me in rapid succession. Deal?
For a bit of background: As a little kid I used to watch a ton of MTV and VH1 (which should explain a lot, right?). Because I grew up in the 90s, I often saw videos that have been regularly cited as being among the most frightening ever made – tons of metal videos, Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy,” Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” the entire Ministry videography – and none of those ever really scared me that much!
Instead the song and video that really freaked me out was “Lightning Crashes,” a milquetoast ballad by the ‘90s alt-rock outfit Live. Yeah, really.
One afternoon I was watching VH1 and it hit me that this middling pop song unnecessarily jampacked with a bunch of ten-dollar words was about death, the afterlife and reincarnation. Those are things you really don’t think about much when you’re five and they really, truly freaked me out at that moment. Somehow, “Lightning Crashes” triggered the “death is horrible and I’m scared of it” phase a good 20 to 30 years early. For months, I was creeped out by the song and its pretentious video. That was unfortunate for me, because the song was a huge hit at the time and basically unavoidable on the radio. Since my parents never acquiesced to us kids’ requests to change the radio to something else, I was stuck with that song coming up on car trips pretty much every week. I always felt relieved when the thing was over, and especially so once it fell out of rotation.
Nowadays, Live’s Throwing Copper has become a CD dollar bin staple (a fitting punishment!) and I just find “Lightning Crashes” to be as ridiculous as the other modern rock radio staples on it. Unless you’re five years old (and even that’s debatable), you just can’t take Ed Kowalczyk mumbling something about a placenta falling to the floor seriously.
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