THE VIDEO Megadeth, "Foreclosure of a Dream," Countdown to Extinction, 1992, Capitol
SAMPLE LYRIC "Foreclosure of a dream / those visions never seen / until all is lost, personal holocaust / foreclosure of a dream"
THE VERDICT Given that it's election week (though by the time I've put this up Election Day will be past us, and as I write this now it's still a few weeks away), I figured that yes, I would go all political on you this week.
I don't like to do it — mainly because metal is (believe it or not, despite all the PMRC antics!) a very conservative genre, and I am emphatically not conservative. But given everything that's going on, I figured a more subdued mood might be appropriate.
Hence, I decided to turn to Megadeth, as out of every metal rocker of whose politics I am aware, Dave Mustaine's are closest to mine. [NOTE FROM 2020: Let's remember that I wrote this blog post in 2010, before Dave Mustaine lost his freaking mind. I can't even bring myself to link to his FOX interviews post-Trump. Just recall that back in 2010, to me he was still the guy who covered the DNC for MTV News.]
I mean face it, the other choices are like Ted Nugent and Gene Simmons, and they're pretty far right. If I had to guess what other metalheads might be on the left, I'd have to go with the guys in Anthrax.
But for real, it turns out I haven't written about a Megadeth video for the past five years. Can we also mention that Dave's gorgeous (still!) and from the San Diego area? But okay, okay, I know. I said I was going to try to be more serious this week. But for real, that hair! Those lips! Can we mention also that he owns horses?
Okay, I'm really stopping now, because we live in depressing-ass times [NOTE: Again, I wrote this in 2010, which from the POV of 2020 looks like a banner year], and this is one depressing-ass video. Videos like this one are the reason why authors who write about heavy metal always have to be like "Well, it's mostly apolitical except" and then mention Megadeth.
So what, exactly do we have here?
This is a song that, unfortunately, probably way too many people can relate to right about now. Though I think Megadeth are describing a more general, metaphorical foreclosure of the American dream, the video actually begins by dramatizing an actual, non-metaphorical foreclosure. We see an older white couple — think an up-to-date "American Gothic" — sitting by as their home and possessions are auctioned off.
They're sitting in a black armchair that is, for whatever reason, the key visual motif in this video. Dave's sitting in it too the first time we see him, and as we move through the video, we see more and more different Americans sitting in the chair in different settings.
Dave's got a goatee in this video, and lord knows I am not a fan of facial hair, but I can ignore it. Why? Because by god does that man have some amazing non-facial hair on his head.
Anyway, who else is in the chair? A trio of Black women beside a bombed-out tenement. A couple of Native American dudes who have for some reason brought a tipee to a strip mall. Some white people on Fremont Street in Vegas. An old white lady in a vacant lot. They seem to like the Vegas location though — we keep cutting back to it, first just to the neon lights, then to a bunch of tourists taking photos.
In case it's not obvious how foreclosures wind up happening (or where credit card debt comes from), we see a rancher-looking guy sitting in front of a sign that reads "BUY Now PAY Later." Hmm, maybe that's the metaphor of this video — we bought into the American Dream, and now we're paying for it? Though given what happens later in the video, I would actually guess Megadeth are chastising us for having bought into twelve years' worth of Reaganomics.
I always can't get over how high budget this video is for Megadeth, especially given the late date. Despite the whole grunge thing, it's clear their label really believed in them. Goodness knows I did at the time, desperately as I tried to hide it! (It was definitely not cool to still be into metal at my ultra-preppy middle school, with the exception of Bon Jovi who got a pass.)
I mean in general, Megadeth's few videos seem more professionally done than those of many other bands. But in particular, given that this is the 90s, their label is really still putting money behind them. I mean just the number of actors in this video is humongous compared to your average metal clip. Not to mention the number of different locations where parts of this video were shot — even if they aren't flying the same people (or the same chair!) around, hiring a crew in a dozen cities isn't exactly cheap.
In addition to the chair stuff, we see Megadeth playing the song in a weird space not unlike where they play in the "Hangar 18" video. Grated metal floor, really dark, metal walls, with random bluish spotlights highlighting the band members as they play.
The spotlights turning on and off backlight them and as per the usual in this kind of video, make it a little hard to see anyone except Dave Mustaine. I mean based on his silhouette, Marty Friedman could be Jake E. Lee for all we can tell. The weird camera angles (up through the floor, down from the ceiling) don't exactly help the situation.
The spotlights do help them, I guess, to transition between scenes. Often a spotlight will bleach out the screen, and then next thing you know instead of looking at Dave Ellefson (who really you can barely see in this video he's so backlit) you're looking at someone in the chair.
Seriously, everywhere from Vegas to Mt. Rushmore to the White House to the Grand Canyon!
There's also a pretty long sequence involving the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial — so again, the treatment of Vietnam veterans upon returning home, another instance of people being sold out by the government. (See also Poison, "Something to Believe In.")
Hmm, what isn't Dave Mustaine getting at with this song? Seriously. Dave even gets all dramatic and does the Undertaker's throat-slitting gesture at this part. (I know, that's been around way before the Undertaker and has wider applicability, but whatever, it makes me think of the Undertaker!)
Toward the end of this song, we get a spoken word interlude courtesy of George H.W. Bush — the "read my lips, no new taxes" thing. We see Bush on a TV in the window of a pawn shop, where two guys are walking out who appear to have just bought the armchair from this video.
This rings a little weird for me. I mean, I get it — the whole point of this song is promises broken, right? The American dream has become tarnished, or possibly we are delinquent in our payments toward it, or whatever. But I don't know.
Based on what I know of Mustaine's politics [See all notes above!], he would favor some amount of taxation as necessary for allowing the state to provide services and for alleviating inequality. Then again, he probably would also favor a progressive tax that taxes the wealthy more heavily than the types of people they show in this video.
Anyway, even though it's a) a catchy campaign phrase and b) something Bush senior reneged on, it doesn't work as well for me as say, Ministry's George H.W. Bush sampling in "N.W.O." ("a new world order," "what we are looking at is good and evil, right and wrong"). Yes, in many ways the "N.W.O." video (which isn't on YouTube?!) is a retread of Megadeth's own "Peace Sells" video, but the point is, I think the Bush stuff is used to better effect there.
Long story short, I'm not 100% sure what's going on here. It's political commentary, yes, but let's face it — it's political commentary in a music video, and this is no "Who Cares Wins" (in other words, it's not like "let me explain this social problem to you").
At the end of the video, Dave Mustaine gets out of the chair. What does that mean? Move to Canada? Interestingly now, if you look at the lyrics, it would be really, really easy to turn this song into a song about bailouts. And before you go all crazy on me, let's remember what president got the whole bailout ball rolling. (Hint: It wasn't Obama.)
P.S.: The national debt clock in the video says our national debt is $4,018,392,803. How quaint! As of my writing this, it's $13,605,571,600,000-ish dollars. Yeah the last six digits were going up so quickly I couldn't even keep pace with it long enough to finish typing the number. I'm not very good at adjusting for inflation, but so far as I can tell the 1992 amount of debt from this video would still be just $6,068,286,642. in 2010 dollars. Um... yikes.
P.P.S.: Since I keep commenting from 2020, I might as well mention that the national debt as I'm writing this is about $26.6 trillion dollars, so that's roughly double what it was when I wrote this post almost 10 exactly years ago (not accounting for inflation, which is just... I can't).