Here’s the video for “Kid Candy,” which anyone who spent any time watching MTV in the early 90s will be able to tell you is a parody of Soul Asylum’s video for “Runaway Train.” When that video came out, it had an incredibly visceral impact for me, and probably for a lot of other people too. The shots of missing children freaked me out. “Here’s a kid who looks like the metalheads you sit with at lunch. He’s missing. Here’s a girl that looks like she could be in your study hall. She may very well be turning tricks at this point.” It spotlighted an uncomfortable truth about life and put that truth right in the faces of kids who didn’t usually think about such things. And in all seriousness, I have to give Soul Asylum a lot of credit for doing that video. During the big alt/grunge boom of the early 90s, there was a lot of discussion in underground hardcore and indie zines about the responsibility of bands who came from a more politically-charged underground to do something positive with their fame once they gained a measure of it. Soul Asylum was probably not the band we expected to take that sort of mission seriously, but it spoke well for them that they did.
The only problem was that the video became such a monster hit that you soon couldn’t turn on MTV for more than an hour without seeing it. Its visceral impact, which existed on first viewing, and which still does if you see it now after a long time (which I did in preparation for writing this; I was surprised at how upset it made me), was temporarily sucked out by MTV’s constant replaying. Some songs are designed to have their biggest impact on first listen, and can seem awkward once that impact fades due to the listener knowing what’s coming. A friend of mine always used Embrace’s “No More Pain” as the best example of this, and I’m not sure that’s really true because even when you know every lyric of that song, the music still holds up, but I can’t think of a better one, so let’s use it and move on. What happened with Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” video separated its content from its attempted emotional impact, and made the whole thing seem kind of awkward. Hence, in 1993, it was ripe for parody.
Enter Seaweed and their “Kid Candy” video, which is a good-natured retort that focuses on the problem of stolen bikes. As far as I know, it’s the only Seaweed video to ever get played outside of the late night timeslot that “120 Minutes” occupied. However, it’s daytime plays came as part of it being included on an episode of “Beavis And Butthead.” Today, it’s rare to find the “Beavis And Butthead watch videos” segments of the show still included in DVDs or re-airings of the cartoon, but when the show was knew, they anchored the entire thing. The episode’s cartoon might not be all that funny, but you watched anyway, just to see what videos the boys would turn their praise, or mockery, towards. They had a surprising effect on music as a whole at the time—no one outside of small cult followings would have any clue who Ween or White Zombie are today if it weren’t for Beavis and Butthead—and would often play obscure videos by unknown bands (Superchunk’s “Package Thief” was featured in one episode. They liked it!). This could be both a blessing and a curse, because Beavis And Butthead only ran video credits at the end of a video, so if you liked the song but the boys didn’t, and they changed the channel before it ended, you never got to find out who it was by.
Although I owned a cassette dub of Seaweed’s previous album, Weak, I didn’t have Four yet when the video for “Kid Candy” hit Beavis And Butthead, so I was not only stoked about the video’s concept but also about the song I was hearing. “This is awesome!” I thought. “I hope they show who the band is.” I felt kind of dumb at the end when it turned out to be Seaweed; I didn’t know how I’d managed to go a whole song without recognizing Aaron Stauffer’s inimitable voice. Regardless, though, it was cool to see an obscure band I liked getting props from a couple of hilariously stupid cartoon dudes with an MTV show. And I thought the video was sheer genius. These days, with “Runaway Train” being removed enough from pop-culture overload to regain some of its impact, I can see how there might have been some people at the time who thought it was insensitive to lampoon a video about missing kids with a joke video about stolen bikes. I never heard any hue and cry at the time, though, so I think everyone ultimately took it in the spirit in which it was intended. Which is good, because this video is too funny and too awesome to deserve any rancor in response.
