Why Women and ’90s Rock Videos Don’t Mix

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We recently noticed that the ’90s was a dangerous decade to be a female actor in a rock music video — almost as bad as being a young male actor in a hip hop video. See: “Waterfalls” and “Crossroads” for proof of the latter. For confirmation of the former trend, click through for four of the most morbid rock music videos we could get our hands on; let us know if they are any ladies we left off our list and what you think the body count means.

Example A: Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” Petty plays a morgue assistant who takes Kim Basinger’s body home for a romantic date. He has a little fun and later throws her corpse out to sea.

Example B: Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain” Beautiful woman marries rock star while wearing really short dress. Commits suicide. Or maybe he killed her. Or maybe she was struck by lightning at the end of their wedding reception. No one is really sure. Either way, there she is.

Example C: The Toadies, “Possum Kingdom” A man (serial killer?) drags a body bag out of a swamp/river/lake. Inside the bag is a huge block of ice. He hacks away at the ice to reveal a woman’s face. It’s actually rather anticlimactic.

Exhibit D: Live, “Lightning Crashes” While we’ve had some internal debate over whether the mother in this video is the one who dies or not (“Lightning crashes, an old mother dies/Her intentions fall to the floor”), the placenta bowl below has been burned into our retinas since 1994, and every person we talked to while compiling this list mentioned it.

According to Wikipedia, “The band dedicated the song to Barbara Lewis, a 19 year-old friend of the band who was killed in 1993 by a drunk driver who was fleeing from the police after a robbery in York, Pennsylvania. Barbara had many of her organs donated including a liver to a 10 month old baby, and the song lyrics reflect how her death enabled others to continue living.” So there you go.