So here's the 411:
Videodrone was originally a goth band called
Cradle of Thorns. Their first album was very straightforward post-punk without much musical surprises. Then they would get a lot weirder, and their divergences from their first album's sound wasn't always to their benefit to me. Their second album had some kind of rap metal song and there was a Motley Crue cover on their third album. Then they changed their name to Videodrone and released this, and I thought that stepping back from the metal elements that creeped into their second and third albums was a good move, but I wasn't really feeling this album's sound the first time I heard it. It had a lot more of an electronic bent and there were also rap songs on this, this time, thankfully from guests and not Videodrone singer Ty Elam (the rappers on this were Fred Durst from
Limp Bizkit on "Human Pinata" and
Psycho Realm on "Pig in a Blanket").
My overall initial impression was that it was good that they didn't play anything resembling metal on this album, but I still preferred the goth/post-punk album they released as Cradle of Thorns back in 1990.
Then I came across a pretty illuminating article ("The Undercore Four: The Forgotten Retro-Future of Rock" in New Noise Magazine) that connected Videodrone to a short-lived subgenre of goth rock that I didn't even know existed that the article referred to as "undercore", defining the style as basically being a mix of synth-pop, goth rock and glam rock with science fiction influenced lyrics and imagery, and that the architects of this style were a goth band that I liked a lot better than Cradle/Videodrone:
Deadsy. So I gave Videodrone another shot and now I actually appreciate this a lot more than when I first heard it, as now I can contextualize it within the context of a fairly obscure and less documented scene that also included
Orgy, and arguably
Mechanical Animals -era
Marilyn Manson, sharing similar qualities of blending together goth, glam and synth-pop and also being miscategorized as nu-metal for no really good reasons, even though the only real connection these acts had to nu-metal was the friends they collaborated with (
Jonathan Davis of
Korn appears on "Ty Jonathan Down").
I don't think
Videodrone is a particularly metal-sounding album. They turn
L.A.P.D.'s "Jesus (Lord of the Apes)" into a
Type O Negative song, and there's a couple of guitar-heavy songs with guest rappers in the middle of the album, but even with those elements, this never really sounded like nu-metal or even industrial metal to me, but the band's retrofuturist intentions stood out on tracks like "Ant in the Dope", "Lucifer's Stained Dress" and "Alone with 20 Bucks", where, in particular, Videodrone does really set itself apart from Deadsy and Orgy and Marilyn Manson with the difference in influences. While Deadsy and Manson were both heavily influenced by
Gary Numan and
David Bowie (who in of themselves had oddly been dipping into industrial and goth in the '90s), Videodrone were also listening to a lot of alternative dance, hip-hop, jazz and funk. The rap guest stars on this wasn't just some random thing, it was reflective of hip-hop's influence on the group, and while that may have hurt Videodrone by getting them miscategorized as nu-metal, it was reflective of the band's desire to experiment with the boundaries of genre and style rather than reflective of some trendy thing, though this wasn't their strongest suit.
Where Videodrone actually rules, though, is the sexy and dangerous sleekness of songs where they're modernizing, not merely apeing, but updating, glam rock's horny, stoned and sexually liberated ethos, whether Ty is telling his sexual partner "I'm not Marilyn Manson" on "Lucifer's Stained Dress" (which is either meaning "I'm not dangerous/the antichrist", referencing the singer's Columbine-era controversies, or trying for a Spooky Kid goth/industrial spin on
David Allan Coe's "You Never Even Called Me By My Name"), or singing about sex on drugs on "Ant in the Dope". Some of the lyrics are less clear in meaning, as it's entirely unclear whether "Ty Jonathan Down" is about drugs, and "15, pure and clean" means $15 for pure uncut heroin, or if it's about sex and 15 is the age Ty lost his virginity. Given the glam rock influence, either could be possible.
It's still pretty wild that within a span of a few years (given that Deadsy's debut album, planned for a 1997 release, didn't come out until 2002), four different bands put out albums that were simultaneously retro yet futuristic, and also this sexy and druggy, but more importantly, different sounding from anything that came out between 1997 and 2002. Though Deadsy was more goth, Orgy was sexier and Marilyn Manson was more queer (his album was a rock opera about an androgynous bisexual alien ala Ziggy Stardust), Videodrone held their own in a niche subculture of silvery sci-fi goths that popped up in the late-90s.
Undercore is a really weird rabbit hole that isn't really covered by most mainstream publications. One of the only people who actually observed the scene firsthand is a woman on YouTube going by "Bones in Black", who said in a video called "The Y2K Goth Genre You Probably Missed" that when she first observed people in shiny silver clothes attending Orgy shows, she was taken back by the idea that these were goths. You know, the notoriously drenched in black Victorian clothes subculture? The audience that surrounded these "Undercore" bands also didn't resemble "cyber goths" (the goths that listened to EBM, industrial and rave music) either. No bright color hair. At least, that's what I pieced together from the YouTube video, considering that I wasn't in Los Angeles when this subculture was attempted and can only gain an
idea of what undercore was in terms of fashion and cultural aesthetics from reading and watching retrospective accounts, given that I didn't experience this subculture first-hand the way I had actual interactions with other subcultures both related and unrelated to Videodrone's thing.
What I saw from looking into Videodrone, Orgy and Deadsy was something that was simultaneously reflective of that Y2K aesthetic and yet also simultaneously futuristic and retro at the same time. The current cultural climate's skepticism to the human race's future (there was a whole
Simpsons episode about this) is most reflected on "Human Pinata". I'm also fairly certain that the title "Lucifer's Stained Dress" is a reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Though I ended up liking Videodrone's quieter and calmer moments where the electric guitars are toned down more than the album's loudest tracks, I don't think any of this album, as stylistically divergent as it is, comes across as insincere or a ploy for radio play, despite the guests' identities. This all really comes across like an earnest attempt to make something that doesn't fit into the era's radio formats at all, and while Videodrone is more appealing channeling trip-hop rather than what they end up doing in the middle of the album, it does have a precedent in
Ministry featuring a rapper on their song "Test" and
Trent Reznor rapping on
Nine Inch Nails' "Down in It".
And while the best reflection of the sci-fi goth aesthetic is still Deadsy's
Commencement, which recently got released on vinyl, and Orgy's
Candyass has grown on me as a synth-rock goth album, I've gained a soft spot for the diversity in sound presented by Videodrone in what I had initially brushed off as the weakest of these goth sci-fi synth-rock albums. Sure, it's not Deadsy, Marilyn Manson or even Orgy, but there's a lot of interesting music here that deserves more than being unfairly lumped into nu-metal and decaying in obscurity, an irony that's perhaps appropriate to the nihilistic approach the band has taken to their gothic science fiction. Videodrone wasn't a band that jumped on stage wearing red caps screaming "are you ready" before bouncing to staccato guitar riffs, they were a band that sounded like they had sex on a space station while high on drugs.
