MUSIC — A Heavy Metal VHS

Years and years (and years) ago, my brother and I used to watch TV. As two middle-class teenaged white dudes from the ‘burbs, from the Nineties, without the internet or even cable through most of high school, media was a prescriptive if ephemeral thing. You watched what they showed you, and then moved on.

However, we were also building, as teens do, identities & communities among our peers, and were equipped with a network of friends’ basements and cheap VCRs, which we deployed to bootleg music videos, concert footage, and ripped video store rentals, to build ourselves, and to build ourselves a collage, a snapshot, a canon of who we were in those times.

We used a VHS tape called, laconically, “MUSIC.”

The VHS in question The Cassette

It was recorded from source, recorded from other bootlegs, recorded over, recorded from. It was, to borrow an expression from its future, gently loved.

For my brother’s recent birthday, I had the whole 5½-hour tape digitised, and over the span of a month, watched through the whole thing, to note the time code for every music video, every backstage hijink, every movie or TV clip, every contextless quote that has since solidified in our idiomatic vocabulary for the past thirty-odd years.

It clocks in at 8GB+, and I didn’t necessarily want to burden my brother with more plastic junk (DVDs/Blu-rays) he’d feel obliged to carry around; but I wasn’t sure how exactly to go about sharing it otherwise. Luckily, friends pointed me at the Internet Archive, which I hadn’t realised already hosts a thriving community library of VHS rips.

And so, for him and for you, here it is:

MUSIC – A Heavy Metal VHS.

Metallica, playing "Fade to Black" live Fade to Black

Dimebag Darrell, from the video for "Five Minutes Alone" RIP Dimebag

Slash hitting a solo outside a church Sometimes you need some time

Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," extremely blurry Teen Spirit

The full archive includes scans of the cassette; and while the main page has a listing of all the music videos contained therein, there’s also another .csv to go alongside it, that has time codes for some of the more context-free clips that became our language, Back Then.

The Internet Archive provides torrents for its items, and I feel compelled to share it and seed it myself in perpetuity.

Smile wiz black-tooth grin.

💀🥃🤘