Halloween always made for cool videos, especially if you were coming up in the age where MTV actually played videos. And Judas Priest’s "You’ve Got Another Thing Comin" was an early favorite, although you had to wait until the end of the video for the Scanners-like payoff. But while you waited, there was lots of leather and smoking guitar to be had.
Did I mention lots of leather?
Yeah, well, the ’80s were strange that way. Hyper-masculine heavy metal was ubiquitous. But Judas Priest, one of its toughest bands, was fronted by Rob Halford, who wouldn’t come out of the closet until 1998, about 16 years after "You’ve Got Another Thing Comin" dropped. Although his homosexuality was something of an open secret among his band and fans, I always found that open secret and the song’s title to be an apt if accidental pairing.
The track, which began as filler for the band’s 1982 effort Screaming for Vengeance, quickly became one of metal’s most recognizable anthems, making its way into gamer fantasies like Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero and more. In a bizarre twist, Christian conservative and gay-basher Pat Boone actually revised the tune on his 1997 covers album In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy, which came out one year before Halford did. Sweet irony.
But Halford and Priest were all about wrecking the squares, as the video shows. A well-dressed man walks to a seaside industrial plant, where Halford and crew are rocking so loudly that their music wrecks his decibel gauge, blows off his head and drops his pants. That’s it, that’s all, the whole video in a nutshell. It may seem simple, but once you add in the backstory, it comes to life in strange, satisfying ways.
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