Very stupid playlist: Beavis and Butt-Head’s favourite songs of all time
In 1993, MTV first introduced the world to the lowbrow escapades and sniggering commentary of Texan idiots Beavis and Butt-Head.
Dreamed up by future King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, Beavis and Butt-Head largely followed the titular pair’s stupid exploits around the fictional Highland neighbourhood and their high school, featuring one Daria Morgendorffer as a classmate. Half the show, however, was spent focusing on Beavis and Butt-Head’s favourite pastime: wasting hours watching TV.
Devising the ingenious idea of feeding their vault of material into the show, Beavis and Butt-Head would sit on their couch for much of every episode and gawp at the roll call of music videos that would cycle endlessly on the MTV circuit. Affixed to their tatty brown sofa, the duo would pass comment on the videos of the day and earlier, be it Gwar or Milli Vanilli, Butt-Head’s extra brain cell often providing a succinct remark on the bands before them, underneath the layers of puerile buffoonery.
These segments would be recorded unscripted, Judge voicing the two while watching the presented video and improvising the dialogue. Cue observations on David Lee Roth’s solo endeavours, “…right now David wishes he had his old job back”, bemoaning The Bangles as “rich kids” who’ll never date them, and declaring New York glam stalwarts Kiss “pretty cool for a bunch of mimes”.
As their AC/DC and Metallica t-shirts make clear, Beavis and Butt-Head are hardcore metalheads. Alongside a checklist of horror, explosions, and scantily clad women, their criteria for glowing appraisal of any video that the TV throws at them is a monster riff that rocks hard. With such a base threshold, the two were surprisingly hard men to please, virtually all bands passing through their cheap TV set inevitably orbiting some variant of “this sucks”.
But a few made it. Perhaps the highest recognition for any rock band, ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ by Ramones triggers a furious devil horns headbang, replete with Beavis and Butt-Head’s mouth guitar humming Johnny Ramones’ immortal riff. The Beastie Boys’ heavy rap attack of ‘Sabotage’ is so gripping Butt-Head gives Beavis a backhander when he won’t shut up during the cop chase pastiche promo.
Beavis and Butt-Head offer a warm reception to Foo Fighters’ second single, ‘I’ll Stick Around’, Butt-Head pointing out “that’s that dude from Nirvana” before Beavis quips back, “I don’t think that dude’s with us anymore. You shouldn’t say that”. Grunge seems to be a winner, Soundgarden’s ‘Rusty Cage’ is so rock and roll, Butt-Head tells Beavis to settle else he’ll “soil your drawers”, and Alice in Chains’ grinding ‘Man in the Box’ prompts Butt-Head to muse that singer Layne Staley’s eyes may be sewn shut in its unsettling after having watched “that Winger video”.
Motörhead and White Zombie make their list, and naturally, AC/DC and Metallica stand as firm favourites, respective numbers ‘Dirty Deeds Done Cheap’ prompting Beavis to declare he’d “spanked his monkey”, and ‘One’ triggers an argument as to whether Lars Ulrich or The Addams Family’s Lurch would win in a fight. Perhaps most unexpected yet entirely on point is Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, the pair crediting the band’s slow-burning mellowness with easing “a boner that won’t go down”.
It was never gonna win a Peabody Award like Unplugged, but Beavis and Butthead’s politically incorrect and gleefully immature dumb down likely spelt the last time MTV truly had their finger on the generational pulse.
