Suburbia meets, and is crushed by, Lamb Of God’s furious onslaught after the most misguided party booking ever. Yep, it’s the video for 2006’s Grammy-nominated Redneck, a song about Randy Blythe’s anger at egos in the music industry. It also features people getting hit in the arse with bus doors.
00.01
Look how unimpressed this little girl, Mary, is. It’s the face adults make when you say you’re spending your evening writing a video breakdown of Lamb Of God’s 2006 single Redneck.
00.08
Well, this is why. Look at that suburban Dad-chic on display. You don’t see a lot of salmon-coloured garments in metal videos.
00.10
Mum (sorry, mom) isn’t having any of this shit. She’s married to this golfer-looking chump, she has to put up with him, but she doesn’t want to inflict the strange way he enunciates the Ts in ‘little’ on the rest of the neighbourhood.
00.18
Mom knows they can do better for entertainment, so she hits the Party section of the Yellow Pages to call in some professionals. As it happens, birthdays are just one of the events Lamb Of God are available for. Also, they share a phone number with the Brady Bunch.
00.22
The party is underway and it’s just a delight. Presents, fancy frocks, a very 2006-looking camcorder…. Lovely! It’s like the one Gary from school had, the one where there must have been a mixup with the invitations or something, because nobody would just be that mean, surely. The pictures looked nice, and everyone was talking about it in school on Monday, about how much fun they had. There… there must have been a mixup.
00.29
The little wooden fella has his head in his hands. Does he know something the rest of us don’t? Hang on, what’s this racket coming in?
00.30
Who could be in that imposing, foreboding-looking bus, bowling into this Desperate Housewives-esque suburb? Could it be… Rammstein? Hang on, wrong video. Could it be… Lamb Of God?
00.34
It’s Lamb Of God alright, and their bus is chaos inside. Saucy, sexy, smoky, boozy chaos.
00.36
What a lovely children’s party. It’s so lovely and wholesome.
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00.38
What a decadent tour bus. It’s so gnarly and whatever the opposite of wholesome is.
00.39
If this kid wants to make friends with anyone who wears contact lenses, he’s going about it the wrong way. He’s got a terrible attitude, splashing about like a little so-and-so.
00.41
Everyone in the tour bus is headed to a really bright, sunny suburb, and this guy’s shades raise the question – do sunglasses work like winter coats? By wearing them inside, will he end up not feeling the benefit?
00.46
Fans of Venom (the Marvel character rather than the Geordie black metal pioneers) will appreciate this young lady’s gauntlet.
00.49
Ladies and gentlemen, D. Randall Blythe. Even if his badassedness wasn’t immediately clear, it could be deduced from his location on the back seat of the bus, where all the badasses sit. He’s probably been writing his name on the seat in front in Tipp-Ex.
00.53
Take that, Barbie! Or, possibly, a similar doll for trademark/licencing/copyright reasons. The car seems to be inspired by the eternally popular Barbie Glam Convertible, but that model doesn’t have yellow lights.
00.55
This is the exact moment that the mum (sorry, mom) realises she may, possibly, have bitten off more than she can chew.
01.04
Farewell, punch! Adios, plates! Sayonara, bowl of chips! Later, quite impressive colour coordination!
01.08
Stupid oblivious Dad, with no idea what’s about to go down, grinning with his camcorder like an idiot. It’d be interesting to know how their marriage panned out over the decade since this video. Let’s be honest, Mom could have done a lot better.
01.10
In the current climate where clowns keep terrorising people, this would feel a lot more sinister. If you would like to be like this cool clown and make your own balloon dog, there’s a pretty decent WikiHow page on it.
01.14
This particular noise is not only impossible to make unless you’re D. Randall Blythe, it’s also illegal. It was criminalised under the Groove Metal Act 1998. That’s why his fingers are raised like that – he’s saying “Remember, only I can make this noise.”
01.18
Viewers may gasp at what initially appears to be a band member clad in his own band’s shirt. Don’t worry, he’s part of the crew. Breathe a sigh of relief. Also, he’s put his joint out in the kiddie pool. The kids look unimpressed.
01.23
Pinatas are fun. There’s a bit in Billy Madison where they all hit a pinata and Rolexes fall out. That’s a funny film. Everyone watched it at Gary’s house. Everyone else, anyway.
01.28
The old bus-door-to-the-face. Awesome. That chap’s losing a tooth.
01.39
If a drunk, leather-trousered giant plopped down in the middle of a kids’ party, how would they react? Like, they might be terrified but they might think he was the wrestler The Great Khali.
01.53
How enormous is this guy? He’s making the whole world around him look like Bekonscot Model Village in Buckinghamshire.
02.09
The old bus-door-to-the-arse. That’s probably a chipped coccyx. Nice one.
02.13
Nice-looking cake. Fucking Gary.
02.15
It would actually be amazing to get Lamb Of God to play a kids’ party, wouldn’t it? It’s taken seeing the backdrop getting raised for the idea to fully sink in. It would be fucking incredible, especially given the competitive one-upmanship of suburbia. Like, the next kid to turn six would book Meshuggah or something. By the time six months had passed every kid’s birthday would be like Ozzfest.
02.21
Haha! Stay down, suburbanite. Taste the manicured lawn.
02.34
You might have expected a bit of the ear-blocking to have come in a bit earlier – maybe a distressed mother to clamp her hands over little Timmy’s lugholes when the first growls of “This is a motherfucking invitation” came out.
02.40
Mary’s digging it, she thinks. And in all the planning and fretting and panicking and commotion and bus door impacts, it can be all too easy to forget that today is about her.
02.45
The lady in the background could close the window and then she wouldn’t need to have her fingers in her ears. Just saying.
02.46
Even as clowns go, this guy seems particularly obnoxious. Nowhere near enough music videos feature a clown getting biffed in the mush. Imagine him afterwards, his red nose swelling as it fills with pooling blood, his fat lip just making his painted-on smile even bigger.
02.51
The jolly home video now looks like something from Cloverfield. RUN AWAY!
02.56
Some absolute A++ metal squatting from your man Blythe, here. He makes it look incredibly easy, but as anyone who’s ended up fishing a shoe out of a squat toilet in rural China knows, it’s hell on the calves.
03.00
When you look at fingerwork like this from John Campbell, you think, “If he emailed me and there was a typo in it, that would be a real surprise.” Don’t you?
03.07
The cake’s still good. It’s only had a lady’s face in it. It’s absolutely still fine. Again though, it isn’t out of the question that their marriage didn’t survive this episode.
03.18
Does she like it? It feels like Mary likes it. She’s transfixed by it, anyway, like she’s working it out in her head, like “I think… I think I need this.” She’s gonna grow up with the greatest answer to “How did you get into metal?” ever. “Well, my dad had this guitar, right…”
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03.39
A Dad going actually insane, there.
03.41
Um, this boy looks genuinely kind of traumatised. Have we been laughing at something that’s actually going to scar a bunch of kids? This was a decade ago, this fictional group of party goers might have grown up to be maniacs. Maybe they’re the clowns currently terrorising people. Lamb Of God, what hath thou wrought?
03.48
You can only be in Lamb Of God if you have no hair or all the hair in the world. Don’t even think about trying to be in Lamb Of God with slightly shaggy curtains or a grown-out fuzzy buzzcut, they won’t have you.
03.59
Will the band get a positive online review for today? We’re not so sure. Although they should get some good feedback for handing out branded balloons.
04.05
Everything’s okay! A nice bit of lead singer slapstick has brought joy to Mary on her birthday, and it’s made the friendly ladies from the tourbus laugh as well. Good work, Lamb Of God! Best birthday party ever! Same again next year?
What did we learn from Redneck?
When putting any kind of event together, it’s absolutely worth doing a bit of research. Don’t just go for the first thing available, you’ll end up with egg (and cake) on your face.
