Weirdest videos of the 00’s (redux)

This is an amended version of a list I made two years ago, upon reflection, I’ve decided that it was wrong for me to include music videos on this list for the simple crime of having scantily clad women in them. While I stand by that it was a bizarre trend throughout the decade, I’ll admit that’s just a personal taste of mine and that I simply don’t understand why it appeals to so many other people. That said, I don’t want to be accused of burying my past, meaning that I’ll not only leave the original post up, but also link it here for anyone looking to cringe at how out of touch I was (and admittedly still am to an extent) with this phenomenon. Just know that I disavow everything I’ve said for all the entries on there that fail to appear on this list.

With that out of the way, let’s revisit what I consider to be the strangest music videos of the 00’s!

This is going to be a running theme for Eminem as for whatever reason, he ran with the Batman and Robin imagery throughout the singles on the Eminem show which began with this lead single. It’s not that he’s a terrible actor (although he clearly took lessons shortly after making this and while making his film) but rather how bombastic the symbolism is throughout its runtime.

Lady Gaga’s first few videos were rather tame, as such we’ll only be featuring two of them on this list with this being the more bizarre of the two due to the strange choreography and overall imagery that heavily reminds me of Kylie Minogue’s video for “Can’t get you out of my head.”

There are two separate videos for this remix, both of them are weird as one is a cage soccer match that was supposedly for the 2002 FIFA World Cup whilst the other showcases rooms in one of those old school TV shows where you can see every room of a house at once. What either of these videos have to do with Ocean’s eleven or indeed Elvis’s back catalogue is beyond me.

I get that this was meant to be a throwback to the 70’s, however I feel they could’ve left the pre-MTV music videos in the past instead of paying homage to them in this video. I guess if nothing else, it serves as a reminder of how quickly the art of music videos evolved over the years.

You’d think a rock song from this decade wouldn’t qualify for this list, however I can’t get over the strange moves that lead singer Austin Winkler makes in the video while performing the song. The rest of the video is fairly tame; however, the band probably should’ve hired a choreographer given how badly he wants to bust a move during its runtime.

I don’t even know what to make of this video, it’s kind of like that Adam Sandler movie where he finds the remote that can alter reality only mercifully much shorter and without any painful Happy Madison comedy. Still, it makes you wonder why these guys chose to go for such a strange premise with this video.

Whereas the video to “I kissed a girl” was perhaps too subtle considering the subject matter, the video to this song was simply too over the top for me to ignore for this list due to how everyone involved is overacting as well as the premise of Katy torturing her partner throughout its runtime being too ridiculous for me to enjoy.

OK what’s the deal with the duo escaping from whatever the heck is supposed to be chasing them? I know that by the end of the video it catches them which seems to turn them inside out, however they already seem to be in a void of nothing with random objects scattered about, so it’s not like they have much to do if they were to hypothetically escape from the distortion.

Who’d thought that Gwen Stefani would make a better Tim Burton esque adaptation of Alice in wonderland than Tim Burton himself six years prior? I’m not sure I even understand why this video is themed around the Lewis Caroll book as there aren’t any explicit mentions towards it or even its themes in the lyrics.

OK so we all know that White chicks was what made it impossible for people to take this song seriously, however I have a feeling that the video also played a part in that as it boggles my mind why anyone thought it was a good idea for Vanessa to play the piano while green screened to a traveling montage of what appears to be a road trip around America.

While I’m sure there are people out there who find James Blunt attractive (he is a former army officer after all) however was the video for his debut single the best place to showcase his sexual appeal given its subject matter?

I get that by this point, Eminem was more interested in producing cheap laughs for his audience when it came to his videos but still, why did he feel the need to only pull references from the early 90’s in this particular video? I mean the MJ reference makes sense as he does reference him in the song, but MC Hammer? Beavis and Butthead? Madonna? Actually, that last one might just be an excuse for him to cross-dress and denounce his perceived homophobia.

OK I get that this video was meant to be a launching pad for Ali G, after all it does play out like one of the more tasteless skits from Sacha Baron Cohen that was popular throughout the decade. My issues come from the animated section which even in the context of the rest of the video, has nothing to do with anything other than an excuse to have an animated sequence of Madonna fighting people.

OK I just had to include this video on this list, I know it technically doesn’t belong here as the visuals do match what the song is about, however this was the moment where Lady gaga decided to abandon any form of subtlety in her visual medium which she only regained when she made the soundtrack to her version of A star is born.

This video is worse than weird; however, I get the feeling the only reason why it’s set in what appears to be a chocolate factory was due to the success of the Johnny Depp version of Charlie and the chocolate factory from around this time. There were a number of videos based around popular movies of the day but this one has very little to do with the movie it’s based on as Fergie doesn’t make candy references in the song.

I think my love for this song as a nine-year-old came from the fact that there was a weird robot in the music video that vaguely resembles Agent 9 from Spyro 3 (yes, I’m a huge Spyro fan, don’t @ me) there were a lot of space themed videos at the turn of the century due to the theme in pop culture being that we were in the future, however this video in particular is very dated due to the bad CGI.

The fact this song even exists is bizarre enough given how it comes from a band whose music was more in line with the likes of Marilyn Manson rather than Faith no more like their one and only hit is, however it’s the psychedelia imagery in this song that earns it a spot on this list as it makes an already corny song even cheesier to witness.

The whole track was only made as a way of poking fun at the fact that people confuse D12 as a band rather than a rap posse (seriously what difference does that make?) however, they really went overboard with this music video as they picture themselves as a boy band complete with the outro which really hammers home the “Milkshake” parody that the track ends on.

The song was ridiculous enough as it was, however adding the fact that the duo A: visualise the tale they tell in the song and B: cut back to them recording the song in a public recording booth, we have this video that is more than worthy of appearing on this list despite it also being a contender for one of the best videos of the decade.

OK this video has been haunting my nightmares ever since I first saw it as a kid, we have the sight of Robbie Williams butt naked (which would be fine if he were more attractive in my opinion) only for him to then start tearing off his flesh until there’s nothing left but a skeleton. The video even ends with the disclaimer that no Robbie’s were harmed during its production, I guess because they were worried the effects were that good that people thought he was.

This video is basically the sequel to “Just lose it” from earlier on this list, just replace the celebrities in that video with those that were more relevant (at least at the time) and you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two of them.

OK so did Scott Stapp have some sort of God complex? I know this song isn’t the only one where he posed stoically throughout the video and believe me, this is one of the band’s more sensible videos from their discography as their other work has him doing much more ridiculous poses throughout their runtime.

I never quite understood why this was set in what appears to be a village in a jungle, sure it doesn’t have the kaleidoscope imagery that “Time to pretend” has, but at least that video had the excuse of having it work with the psychedelic sound that the band was known for. This feels like a version of “Butterfly” from earlier on this list, in fact both of these videos wouldn’t be on here if they came from the other band.

I get that the video to this track was meant to be an homage to how she began her career as a model before taking the music industry by storm, however I get the feeling she wasn’t aware of the 80’s film Mannequin given how this manages to make that movie seem sensible by comparison (or maybe she was but didn’t care about that.)

OK can someone please explain to me the point of this being based on a popup book? It’s one thing if Fergie wanted to do a bunch of random skits for the video considering the song is absolute nonsense to begin with, but did she really feel the need to have these skits presented the way they are in this video?

First Madonna and now Shakira, all I can say is there seemed to be a trend of pop diva’s having videos of them in an animated fight sequence for a while and each of them are as weird as the next. At least the rest of this video is fairly straight forward as it sees Shakira getting hit on at a bar and rejecting the guys advances by dancing the tango.

Yeah, there was no way I was going to grant this video mercy from this list, it’s somehow even more confusing than their other video from the 90’s and you’d think they would’ve done something to improve the CGI but that’s arguably gotten worse on this track as well.

Who the heck thought this video was a good idea? Seriously, we have giant heads of everyone in the video in a poorly rendered CGI environment (even for the late 90’s when this supposedly came out) that I think we’re supposed to find funny but instead is a nightmare to watch.

While I don’t agree that the video of this song is particularly awful, I will admit that having it follow an astronaut who runs into Britney’s lair on Mars (a possible acknowledgement towards her haters that her music wasn’t meant for them) is a bit weird. It also visualises the spoken word conversation from the album version which adds to the confusion as this implies that alien Britney is familiar with the James Cameron Titanic movie somehow.

Yeah, you knew this video was coming, why Gwen and Eve thought it was a good idea to have a video about how money isn’t what makes the world go round have a pirate’s theme is beyond me, however what really gets me is that it turns out they’re the personifications of Barbie dolls with their Japanese fans using these dolls for voodoo which leads to their disaster by the end of the video.

There was no way this was going to avoid making it on this list either as we have Gwen Stefani acting out the scene from the Sound of music that has the song this track samples; it was controversial for depicting her as a nun in a sexually provocative way and also for having some of the stranger choreography to come out of the decade.

Really any one of Missy Elliott’s videos could make these lists, the only reason why they don’t is because the rapper unfortunately wasn’t very popular here in Australia save for the two hits I’ve talked about on this side of my site. In any case, we have some of the wackier visuals from her videography in this video, from her eating a car to acting like a dunce in a classroom to getting covered in bees.

I debated about putting this on the list as the intentions of the video do match up with what the song is trying to convey, however the members (and possibly their friends given that there’s only four members and six women on screen) are clearly having way too much fun dressing up as the pop stars mentioned in the video for this to be a flattering tribute to the queen of pop.

This is on here more because I’m not sure what’s happening in the opening section of the song, it depicts Nelly dancing in what appears to be a mud bath with some extras before eventually cutting to what appears to be a Portuguese town where things start to make more sense in the video. The mud bath doesn’t even come back which makes it that much more random.

I get what this video was trying to do, showcasing a more innocent Britney to juxtapose with her new image, however if the best she could do had her pole dance for her younger self, then all I can say is “gimme more” content to work with.

Someone should’ve really told Fergie that she was at the Tower of London instead of London Bridge when she was bouncing around the place in the video, also I’m pretty sure impersonating the queen’s royal guard is a federal crime in the UK, which means several people got into serious trouble for this video or they somehow managed to convince members of the royal guard to dance along with her.

I’ve avoided putting videos on here that were bad simply due to their usage of greenscreen, however this video has such awful greenscreen that I had to make an exception as it looks like the girls are floating around the scenery they’ve been put in rather than them interacting with it. It’s especially noticeable when you get to the ocean shots.

Yeah, I’m not buying the parody angle that Jewel made when justifying her selling out on her fourth album, especially since the video seems more like a collection of sincere commercials that she wanted this song to be a part of rather than it lampooning how she felt commercials and pop music had gotten by the mid 00’s.

I’m stretching to call this a weird video as it’s a song about being on drugs and the visuals are accurate with what that feeling is like (not that I would know of course) I’m including it mainly because it seems inappropriate for Eminem who did have a large audience of underage listeners to push onto them which no doubt further the fuel that his haters had against him.

I guess Ida Corr wanted to one up the likes of “Addicted to love” and “Simply irresistible” by having clones of herself be part of a big band that was common throughout the 50’s and 60’s, the issue here is that because this is one person bluescreened to make it look like there’s dozens of her as opposed to actresses that happen to look similar to each other, it gives off the impression that the video is falling apart.

OK someone went a little crazy with the greenscreen effects on this second single from Jamelia, normally I would give a pass to these types of videos because bad greenscreen effects are dime a dozen in music videos, however I had to make an exception here because you’d swear this video came out in the 80’s with how poorly implemented Jamelia is in each frame.

What’s weirder than a song that’s a remix of a chorus from a 60’s classic? How about its music video which showcases a bunch of babies going skydiving. I’m not sure if this is a green screen effect or unusually impressive CGI rendering the babies in the video, but it makes for a bizarre viewing experience either way.

I thought we were done with crappy CGI by the time the video to this final hit from the Offspring came out, evidently not as this not only is about on par with an Eiffel 65 video in terms of the quality of the CGI, it also only applies to Dexter Holland’s head and the dog which suggests that this is an emo homage to the Jim Carrey adaptation of the Mask.

OK is the video to this classic taking place in some sort of Matrix? What are those filters that Kylie plays with throughout the runtime? People reckon “Can’t get you out of my head” had a weird video, this really takes that cake for the weirdest video that Kylie’s ever made.

I know that putting a video that uses Claymation on these lists is kind of unfair, however I’m not sure what the point of having this be an homage to the Nightmare before Christmas is meant to achieve. At least I think that’s what this is an homage to as the models are honestly hard to make out and the location heavily reminds me of that movie for some reason.

OK you know the question I brought up for Creed earlier on this list? It applies to Daniel Bedingfield as well as like Scott Stapp, he’s also making a bunch of weird poses in this video which suggests that he has some sort of Jesus complex. Admittedly these are interspliced with him making poses of him cowering in self-pity, so perhaps this is more a case of awful choreography than anything else.

This is the only entry from my original list that I’ll be adding new commentary to as if you’ll recall, there were two separate videos that accompanied it back in the day. I’ll ignore the one with the girls in sexy outfits and instead focus on the other one which features a still image of four anonymous individuals with edition that makes it look like two of them are singing the lyrics as the song progresses, it’s a massive head trip to say the least given how it often goes for several seconds without anything happening on screen.

This video isn’t on here because it’s a puppet show, considering who Eminem is attacking, it makes sense that he would mimic their style here. Rather it’s the fact that Insult the comic dog is in the video, which suggests that the two made peace during the video’s production even though Eminem hasn’t altered the lyrics to suggest as such.

This is quite tame all things considered (especially compared to other entries on this list) however I never quite understood why the band went with the gimmick of them only being able to be seen in reflections and being invisible to the naked eye, it just confused me as a kid and even to this day still doesn’t make any sense.

I get the feeling the video director was a massive fan of Toy story 2 when they concepted the vision for this entry, specifically when the characters were at Al’s toy barn, and they were asking directions from the different toys from the shelves. The difference of course is that this feels like an early concept for Sausage party given how chaotic the drama is during its runtime.

Even though there was a higher budget for this video, I have to say that the visuals still don’t make a lick of sense to me as it appears they wanted to remake their Star trek homage from “Lollipop” but settled instead for a generic space theme to cash in on the “we’re in the future” trend of the moment.

I think I’ve lost count with how many videos I’ve featured on these lists that have a Wizard of Oz theme to them, this time we have that theme mixed in with Team America of all things as lead singer Connie Mitchell becomes a marionette once she puts on the red slippers and has the same puppeteering that was used by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their film. Thankfully though, there’s no politically incorrect humour throughout the runtime.