Death by Music Video

Ouch.

A Music Video that features the band being killed off. Sometimes it's the tragic end to a fun time they were having, other times they didn't make it to the fun in the first place. It can also serve as the plot for a music video that's trying to tell a story or used to make a statement.

Depending on the plot of the video, the musicians might all get killed at once, or they could get picked off one-by-one as a Dwindling Party. It might be a mishap (or mishaps) that does them in, or it could be someone or something actively targeting them.

Generally speaking, in a death by music video situation with a dwindling party, you can expect certain members of a music group or band to last longer than others. Often times it goes something like this:

• The front man or lead singer will survive the longest. This makes sense, as the lead singer is often the Face of the band so they are usually seen as "the star" of the group to begin with. On top of that, if the lead singer is killed off too early, people may wonder who's singing the lyrics right now if he/she is dead, while the other instruments are often subconsciously treated as non-diagetic. Taking this further, they may be treated as the a type of "POV character" for the video, and we may even have moments focusing on the front man's reaction to their band mates getting picked off.

• Lead Guitar will typically last a while, though usually not as long as the front man. Alternatively, they may still get picked off somewhere in the middle but still get something about their demise that makes it stand out from the others. This stems from them typically being the second most recognizable member of the group after the front man, so they "earned" a chance to stand out.

• The Drummer often last somewhere in the middle. Which may reflect the fact that, while the drummer is very important for musical cohesion, via setting the rhythm and the like, they are usually situated behind the rest of the group by necessity and therefore may not be as visually "recognized" by lay people as their band mates.

• The Bassist are typically the first to go because, well, Nobody Loves the Bassist.

Any other incidental members of a group might get offed before the bassist or be scattered throughout the above established order. This order is, of course, not set in stone and is open to tweaks and variations. For example, if one of the face(s) of the band is the bassist, they are likely to last far longer than their place in the above ranking would imply, perhas swapping places with lead guitar. And the front man may take their place in the ranking even farther by not only being the last to survive, but by being the video's Sole Survivor.

Additional wrinkles come in with the inclusion of guest stars, either other artists performing on the track or celebrities acting as characters in the video. In all likelihood they have a better chance of surviving than even the lead singer and they are likely to be the possible sole survivor instead. This is doubly so if the Special Guest is an attractive female.^note Especially in instances where she's the one killing the band.

Hopefully has nothing to do with Fatal Method Acting.

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Examples:

Comedy

• "Weird Al" Yankovic has "Party in the CIA", an Animated Music Video parody of Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA". In it he plays a young CIA operative undergoing a number of illegal missions to destabilize other countries. He's eventually captured and tortured by the general he's supposed to assassinate, last seen having a good-hearted laugh as he stares down the barrel of a gun.
• Ninja Sex Party:
  • The music video for Everybody Shut Up ends with Danny being gunned down by the President's bodyguards.
  • Mansion Party ends with the camera cutting out moments before Danny gets mauled by a psychotic panda.
• Bloodhound Gang's "The Inevitable Return of the Great White Dope", from the Scary Movie soundtrack, has the band being murdered by Carmen Electra. When only Jimmy Pop is left, he manages to throw her off a balcony, only to be confronted by the real Ghostface killer. In the end Ghostface is ran over by a car driven by a monkey from their previous "The Bad Touch" video.

Electronic

• The music video for "Lessons Learned" by Matt And Kim ends with Kim getting hit by a bus.
• FKA twigs' Concept Video for "sad day" (the page's photo example). She gets her body partially sliced in half just as she manages to stab her opponent in the heart. Though it's implied to be All Just a Dream.
• Grimes's character in the video for "Player of Games" loses the duel and is killed by the knight. Though, she was fighting in just a dress against a knight in a full suit of armor, so she likely wasn't ever going to win in the first place.

Heavy Metal

• Korn
  • The band is killed in a car accident before the "A.D.I.D.A.S." video starts.
  • In "Alone I Break" the lead singer murders the rest of the band after a disagreement.
• In Limp Bizkit's "Re-Arranged" video, the band is made a scapegoat for causing a riot at their concert. They're convicted and sentenced to death by drowning.
• The music video for "Ich Will" by Rammstein depicts the band robbing a bank, the video alternating between the robbery and its aftermath. During the robbery, Flake is seen wearing a rather large and elaborate bomb strapped to his chest. Scenes showing the aftermath and the band being arrested have Flake notably absent (apart from a large In Memoriam picture of him), implying that he died when the bomb detonated.
• Sabaton's video for "Primo Victoria" features one version of the band performing the song on a stage, while another version battles an assortment of German panzers in an Ace Custom Swedish Army Centurion tank. The performing version is run over by a Panzer IV that bursts through the wall behind them at the end of the second chorus, and is then blown up by the infuriated tank-driving version.
• Unleash the Archers:
  • The video for their Cover Version of "Northwest Passage" depicts Brittney Slayes jumping through a series of Alternate Timelines. In one version she finds the gravestone of her bandmates. In the end she kills another version of herself by shoving her down a flight of stairs at a concert venue, and takes her place onstage.
  • The video for "Faster Than Light" depicts the band members doing a foot race on a running track... except the referee starts killing anybody who stops running with the starting pistol. Brittney wins and leaves the track... to find the referee sitting in the front seat of her limo. Cut to the muzzle flash seen from the outside of the car as it drives off. (The video is a parody of Stephen King's The Long Walk.)

J-Rock

• Maximum the Hormone has 2 songs that became part of Death Note Anime OST, which were the second opening and ending for the anime version: What's up, people? and Zetsubou Billy. In the videoclip of the latter is shown a lot of kind of Japanese bands and soloists, since Visual Kei to an Idol Singer, all of them dying one by one because of the Death Note written by a mysterious person behind the TV (assumed to be Kira) only to left the real MTH playing the instruments left by the Visual Kei band that recently died.

Pop

• Fergie: Zig-zagged in her video for "Beautiful, Dangerous", which was a collaboration she did with Slash. In it, Fergie plays a stripper who's obsessed with Slash. She stalks, drugs and seduces Slash before killing him at the end of the video. She survives, but Slash, obviously, does not. It's also a rare instance where it's one of the musicians killing the other.
• For Foster the People's "Houdini" video, the rehearsing band is crushed by a collapsing light fixture, the day before their concert. Regardless, their manager decides The Show Must Go On. A crew is brought in to Dead Guy Puppeteer the band with black-suited kuroko stagehands and remote-controlled animatronics for a final wild concert.
• Coldplay's video for "Talk" ends with the band in their UFO being eaten by a giant robot because one of the members stole its power knob earlier.
• In the original video for "My Favourite Game" by The Cardigans, a suicidal Nina Persson drives recklessly at high speed down a desert highway, causing numerous accidents as other drivers swerve and crash while trying to avoid her, before deliberately plowing head-on into a van carrying the rest of the band. The final shot is of her broken body lying dead on the pavement. Because the original version was so violent, several alternate versions were also prepared, some of which had her survive the final crash or even removed it completely.
• Take That! released a cover of "How Deep is Your Love" as the final single of their original run. In the video, a villainous woman had the band tied to chairs and put on the edge of a dock. At the end, she pushes Gary into the water, still tied to the chair, and is implied to do the same to the rest of the band.
• In their music video for "Greek Tragedy", The Wombats are murdered one at a time by an obsessed fangirl who spent a lot of time stalking them. Two of the band members suffer a case of Slashed Throat while the third is electrocuted in his bathtub. The fangirl later dresses and strings up the bodies in a warehouse to make it seem like they're holding a private concert for her.
• Peterpan: While they're alive in the cutaways, the whole band get shot at the end of the main storyline of "Tak Ada yang Abadi" video. Fitting since the song is about mortality.^note "tak ada yang abadi" means "nothing last forever"
• In the Director's Cut version of Maroon 5's "Wake Up Call", Adam Levine is sentenced to the electric chair.
  • In the "Misery" video, Adam's psychotic girlfriend repeatedly tries to kill him, but ends up killing the other band members in the process. Special mention goes to drummer Matt Flynn, who gets blown up by a bazooka.

Rap

• Tupac Shakur is gunned down in the "I Ain't Mad At Cha" video. Harsher in Hindsight as Tupac was actually killed in a drive-by and the video was the last he ever filmed.
• Eminem:
  • The video for "Like Toy Soldiers" tells the story of Proof (the founder of D12 and Eminem's best friend and mentor) getting murdered by a rapper as collateral damage of a beef with Eminem. Proof would be murdered for real two years after the video came out, making the video extremely difficult to watch.
  • "When I'm Gone" shows a dark-haired Marshall murdering Slim Shady in order to kick his drug addiction and return to his pre-fame life.
  • The music video for "Space Bound" shows Eminem blowing his brains out in order to prevent himself from murdering his girlfriend.
• Danny Brown is stabbed by anthropomorphic drugs and bleeds to death while an audience cheers in "Ain't It Funny."

Rock

• Smash Mouth's "Walking On The Sun" ends with the band dying in drag race.
• Subverted by Def Leppard's original video for "Pour Some Sugar on Me" sees the band performing in a house which is being besieged and demolished by a horde of angry women. The house progressively collapses on the band while they play as the demolition escalates from axes and sledgehammers to a wrecking ball. In climax, explosive charges are set to bring the performance to a decisive end—the house goes up in a fireball but the band has somehow escaped outside into the crowd.
• The video for Cage the Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked" has the band's car exploding with all of the band members on it, seemingly killing them.
• At the end of the music video for "Talk" by Coldplay, all four members are Eaten Alive by a giant toy robot as it takes a bite of their flying saucer.
• Inverted in the video for "Touch of Grey" by The Grateful Dead; at the beginning of the video, the members of the band are portrayed by stop-motion skeletons ('cuz they're the Dead — get it?), but in the course of playing the song, come back to life.
• Played for Laughs in Red Fang's "Prehistoric Dog". The band are killed in comedically violent ways by a group of larpers.
• The video for Stevie Ray Vaughan's cover of "Superstition" features the band being killed off one-by-one by a black cat in a Superstition Episode.
• Peterpan's video for "Bintang di Surga" downplays this. Half of the band play hostage takers while the other half play cops. The former group get killed one-by-one as the video progress while the latter made it completely fine.
• Lit's video for "Miserable" features the band playing on a giant woman portrayed by Pamela Anderson. The video starts off with them simply playing the song, but the woman develops a taste for men, causing the video to take a sick turn. It starts with the bassist being devoured and ends with the lead singer getting thrown into the air and caught in her mouth.
• "Sick, Sick, Sick" by Queens of the Stone Age has the band chained by the legs and performing for a beautiful cannibal. One by one, the band are picked off to be eaten by her.
• Audioslave's "Show Me How To Live" ends with the band crashing head-first at high speed into a bulldozer. The video is an homage to Vanishing Point.

Ska

• Fishbone gets nuked at a party during the "Party At Ground Zero" video, leaving white shadows on the walls.

Other

• Chris Ray Gun: In the Animated Music Video for "Ain't No Rest For The Triggered", Chris's character ends up going to jail, escaping jail, and being chased off a cliff. The last moment of the song is him dying in the desert.
• Me Olvide Ti by Los Retrovisores features the band running through a city while being stalked by a brunette woman, implied to be the lead singer's ex-girlfriend, who has grown to enormous size a la Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. She eventually corners them while they're performing inside an apartment building and, after knocking out the power, reaches inside the building, drags the lead singer out a window and devours him.

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