How ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ kick-started White Zombie’s career: “It changed everything”
Premiering in 1993, MTV’s adult animation series Beavis and Butt-Head was an unlikely sensation, following the titular slackers and their lowbrow humour. Blatantly absurd with a dry, apathetic humour, Beavis and Butt-Head was one of the original forms of “brain rot”, but their immaturity was, admittedly, hilarious.
Conceptualised by Mike Judge in the late 1980s, much of Beavis and Butt-Head centred around the two friends sitting on their couch, mindlessly watching television and consuming junk food – when they weren’t being menaces to their peers, including the deadpan icon, Daria Morgendorffer, of course. Beavis was regarded as the less intelligent half of the duo, comparatively, while Butt-Head appeared as the more relaxed version of his friend. During their spells on the couch, the two would comment on the most popular music videos that MTV had on rotation.
Unscripted, Judge would voice both of their remarks. They refer to Nirvana as “Narvana” of the “grudge” movement, and Butt-Head likens Kurt Cobain to Beavis’ dad. They dismiss The Bangles as “rich chicks” and whine that the members would never date them, and decide that Korn’s ‘Blind’ would be easier to watch if they were “dizzy in the head”, with countless more quips that veer into political incorrectness, all while laughing with their bone-chilling, earworm giggles that are the stuff of nightmares.
Beavis and Butt-Head were obviously metalheads: Beavis’ uniform was a light blue Metallica T-shirt, while Butt-Head wore a grey AC/DC T-shirt, but in rare instances, they would give their seal of approval to an occasional metal or grunge track, and this would influence MTV’s curation in real-time. An unlikely underdog success on the show came from White Zombie, a shock rock outfit from New York City.
Frontman Rob Zombie had conceptualised White Zombie while attending Parsons School of Design in 198, which took its name from the pioneering 1932 zombie film starring Bela Lugosi, and Zombie rooted White Zombie’s image in horror and the occult while meshing together noise rock, heavy and industrial metal, creating a funk-infused blend that could make you dance while indulging in the gore of a scary movie. Audiences couldn’t digest White Zombie’s eccentricity, and their first few albums were received with little attention as a result.
Their earliest collections were produced in extremely limited quantities, and their third album, 1992’s La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol 1, had only sold about 75,000 copies upon release. But, it marked the beginnings of a slow burn for White Zombie when, roughly a year and a half later, three of their videos would feature on Beavis and Butt-Head: ‘Welcome to Planet Motherf*cker/Psychoholic Slag’ (censored as ‘Welcome to Planet MF’ on MTV), ‘Black Sunshine’ and ‘Thunder Kiss ‘65’.
“There was a moment around 1992,” Zombie recounted to Larry King in 2013. “Our band had signed to Geffen Records, we had a single out, and we were trying to promote it, but it was really hard to break through because we were pretty weird, for what was typically on MTV at that time. But then, Beavis and Butt-Head broke and played one of our videos. Overnight, it changed everything. We went from selling 500 records a week to 30,000… [and] from playing tiny clubs to arenas in six months. It was an explosion.”
La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol 1 would go on to chart the Billboard 200 at number 26 in 1993 and sell over two million copies in the United States alone, with ‘Thunder Kiss ‘65’ and ‘Black Sunshine’ receiving extensive airplay on MTV’s Headbangers Ball and the former earning a Grammy nomination for ‘Best Metal Performance’. White Zombie would record the single ‘I Am Hell’ for The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience compilation album during this period, appearing alongside Nirvana, Megadeath, Primus and more, and Zombie would further his creative collaborations with Judge.
As the brain behind Beavis and Butt-Head, Judge tasked Zombie with animating a sequence for the upcoming film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, giving the musician full creative control to get as weird as his heart desired.
“Beavis starts tripping after, I think, he eats a cactus, or something, and starts hallucinating,” Zombie explained, and the result became one of the most recognisable moments of Beavis and Butt-Head’s existence. “Hey, Butt-Head, are we gonna die?” Beavis asks, before he begins to hallucinate shapes and colours, zombie-fied rockers playing to partying monsters, Beavis’ hair turning into a human torch and more bizarre, alien-like caricatures.
Having worked as a production assistant on the children’s show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, his animations for the Beavis and Butt-Head film marked his proper venture into the film world, where he would go on to shock the horror genre, beginning with House of 1000 Corpses in 2003 and followed by numerous other cultish endeavours. Yet, it all began with a nod from Beavis and Butt-Head, the crowned unofficial tastemakers of the 1990s who, for a time, dominated MTV and the hard rock world.
