a-ha: "Take On Me" note A fight with wrenches is implied, and a character hurt from this, but he turns out fine in the end.
Dire Straits: "Money For Nothing" note A character gets frozen, then appears as a severed head before being put in a microwave, but he appears fine at the end and the whole sequence has an abstracted feeling, the dated visuals making it even less shocking.
Parry Gripp: "Space Unicorn" note A dragon menaces an anthropomorphic waffle and is hit by a laser. A spaceship blows up into marshmallows, but no one is seen in it.
Miike Snow: "Genghis Khan" note The secret agent gets menaced with a death ray and the supervillain's mooks point their guns at him, but he escapes unharmed.
Pinkfong: "Baby Shark" note Would be Level 0 however the music video contains characters running away from getting eaten.
"Intergalactic" note Giant monster electrocuted to death in a non-graphic way.
"Sabotage" note A character falls from a bridge and visibly but non-graphically impacts the ground. Some other intense but bloodless cop movie style action without death is largely containable at level 1.
Chage And Aska: "On Your Mark" note Bloodless and mostly unseen deaths from assault rifle fire and grenades.
Lady Gaga: "Alejandro" note Lady Gaga's character gets manhandled and roughly shoved around (sometimes in a sexualized manner), there are a few lingering shots of a realistic (but not gory) disembodied human heart, and there's quite a bit of S/M imagery.
Sugababes: "Freak Like Me"note For sight of Heidi Range biting down hard on a man’s arm in similar fashion to a vampire. While no blood is drawn, the act and visceral reaction are a bit too much for a 2.
Level 4
Aphex Twin: "Come to Daddy" note Despite how scary the video is, nobody dies. It’s rated this high due to the vandalism committed by the children and the heavy menace.
Rob Cantor: "Shia LaBeouf" note The lyrics are pretty violent, featuring fights to the death, serious injuries, non-graphic self-mutilation, and offstage cannibalism, but there's no visual gore, the closest thing to blood you see is red glitter, and the fighting is all presented through interpretive dance.
Disturbed: "Land Of Confusion" note Difficult to rate, as the violence against innocents is cold-blooded, but it generally lacks detail.
Michael Jackson: "Thriller" note Some zombies seem to have visible brains, and one's arm falls off. Not particularly gruesome though.
Metallica: "Here Comes Revenge" note Bloodstains seen on some surfaces. Ghastly-looking undead animals. Silhouetted flesh ripping.
X Japan: "Rusty Nail"note For brief sight of Yoshiki’s anime stand-in getting impaled by a spear. Other level 3 post-apocalyptic animated violence throughout, carried out by one-eyed monsters.
Level 5
Justice: "Stress" note There is no blood, but the acts of gang violence and fistfights between the gang members and the police are brutal enough to be at this level.
Meshuggah: "Bleed" note There's some morbid imagery, like a character who seems to have a small, nasty wound, and the lyrics are violent, but there's not much explicit visual violence.
Flobots: "Handlebars" note A bird attacks another with relatively mild blood splatter. Many people gunned down with white blood spraying, including unarmed civilians.
Linkin Park: "Pts.of.Athrty" note Disembodied, still living heads with exposed brains feature, but not too graphically.
Radiohead: "There There" note For Thom Yorke painfully transforming into a tree at the end.
tool: "Sober" note Creature's face melts, briefly revealing undetailed red meat. Mass of flesh moving through a pipe (not violent, but still unsettling).
"Weird Al" Yankovic: "Party In The CIA" note The bloody headshots would score a 7 if not for the stylized visuals and comedic tone.
Level 7
Angelspit: "Toxic Girl" note Brief depictions of suicides: Wrist-cutting, gunshot to head (very bloody, but not very graphic).
Author & Punisher: “Terrorbird“ note The titular Terrorbird's squawk makes people leak lots of blood from their orifices.
Biting Elbows: "Bad Motherfucker" note Large blood splatters resulting from gunfire and a stabbing
Childish Gambino: "This Is America" note For the bloody headshot of the man in the chair at the beginning, and the brief but bloody shootings of the church choir later in the video.
Lil' Jon: "Turn Down for What" note For the face melting bit. Rest is Level 1.
MILGRAM: "MILGRAM Project" note Mainly for Amane being tortured by cult leaders with tasers and waterboarding and the implied child molestation in Kotoko's music video. Most of the violence is offscreen, though substantial blood splatter is seen.
MGMT: "Kids" note Fairly gross body horror monsters.
Pearl Jam: "Do The Evolution" note Shark chomped on by dinosaur. Whale briefly seen in an ocean of blood with a harpoon in its side, but no visible wound. Countless displays of human cruelty without much blood or gore.
Pink Floyd: "Welcome to the Machine" note Fairly gruesome corpse briefly seen (borderline 8). Brutal decapitation with surprisingly little blood. Ocean of blood seen.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: "Behind the Sun" note Due to the climax, with animated whales being brutally killed. Borderline 8, but it's tamer than the advert the scene was taken from.
Rihanna: "Bitch Better Have My Money" note The singer and some accomplices kidnap and drug a woman, tie her up and hang her nude upside down in a warehouse (with some bloody marks shown), drown her, and possibly dismember a corpse (the latter two acts are offscreen but heavily implied). The final shot shows Rihanna nude, only covered in blood and (strategically placed) money. Borderline 8, and it would reach that level if not for the liberal use of Gory Discretion Shots.
Caravan Palace: "Lone Digger" note For the climax depicting the animals violently killing each other with lots and lots of blood spurting, including a bull ripping a snake's mouth open (a borderline 9).
The Cardigans: "My Favourite Game" note For the alternate ending where Nina Persson loses her head during the car crash.
Deftones: "You've Seen the Butcher" note For the blood rain orgy before the end.
Disturbed: "The Vengeful One" note Many demons and journalists are shown getting graphicallyshot in the head and generally gunned down by the eponymous Eldritch Abomination protagonist with generous blood splatter. One demon stabbed in the eye before received a brutal headshot. A woman's corpse shown on the ground with two demons feasting on her intestines. A Satan-esqueCorrupt Corporate Executive shot several times before being thrown of a building by a massive ray of power before being torn to shreds by a helicopter. All of this in depicted in a very over-the-top style, and the lack of gory detail keeps it from having a higher ranking.
The Gentle Men: "Skynut" note Bodies are bloodily diced up and sliced in half by sci-fi weaponry; men are placed in machines that rape them until they are emaciated.
Glay: "Kanojo wa Zombie" note Zombies shot to gory bits, with exposed organs visible. The very cartoonish presentation brings it down a level.
Iron Maiden: "The Writing On The Wall" note The climax has a group of Eddies massacre the villains in their citadel, complete with several head explosions, a brain being absurdly knocked clean out of the skull by a thrown hatchet and a scythe cutting several people apart. Borderline 9, the quick pace and lack of lingering focus keeps it down here.
Nine Inch Nails: "Closer" note Features a pig's head, a still-beating heart, and a monkey strapped to a cross (Though all of them were faked), but avoids going up any higher due to a relative restraint on showcasing more extreme violence.
Amanda Palmer: "The Killing Type" note Lots of blood and a realistic human heart at the end. The lyrics also mention killing someone and stepping on a dying bird.
The Prodigy: "Smack My Bitch Up" note Very bloody fist fight in a dance club, bloody vomit, attempted rape, brief gore from a hit and run. While not quite as graphic as other examples, the first-person perspective accentuates the violence enough to reach a level 8 on this scale, and it probably would have been a 10 on its initial release in 1997.
Soul Asylum: "Runaway Train" note A rock ballad that's a two on the Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness and a six on the Mohs Scale of Lyrical Hardness. It is, however, an eight on this scale due to the semi-infamous (though well-intentioned) music video, which had several editions featuring missing persons posters of kids from America, Great Britain, and Australia as part of an initiative to try and find them. The video did work in some cases and lead to some twenty-six children being reuniting with their families; unfortunately, some had run away for perfectly good reasons and the video forced them back into bad homes. Several were also found to have been murdered by their parents, or, for three of the teens featured in the Australian version, murdered by a serial killer. (More information on the fates of the kids featured in the video can be found in this post). The video itself intercuts between the missing posters and scenes of heavily implied abuse, murder, and child prostitution, an infant abduction, and children with injuries running away.
Toby Fox & Itoki Hana: "The Greatest Living Show" note A girl is made to dance with puppet strings until her body is ripped apart, with spurting gore visible. The heavy stylization tones it down a bit.
tool: "Parabola" note For the bisected remains of a humanoid creature. This and the man's skinless-looking appearance at the end could get a higher level if not for how abstract they are.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Heads Will Roll" note Would be 9 or 10 if it weren't for the use of red glitter instead of blood.
Level 9
Avenged Sevenfold: "A Little Piece of Heaven" note Victim repeatedly stabbed, chopped up, and raped; but the acts aren’t too explicitly shown or else it would be a 10.
Carpenter Brut: "Hang'em All" note Uses footage from The Ninja Mission and War Dog, including head obliterations and multiple children being gorily torn apart by assault rifle fire.
Daft Punk: "The Prime Time of Your Life" note Character removes her skin, but it's not quite portrayed graphically enough for a 10.
Gunship: "Dark All Day" note For the cut open head with visible brains and assorted bloody deaths.
Little Big: "Dead Unicorn note The entire video is shot with elements of a slasher film, including large amounts of blood.
Dir en grey: Pretty much all of them. note To be specific "OBSCURE" features Geishas being raped to death by Oni and a man being drawn and quartered to the point that he's a collection of organs, "AGITATED SCREAMS OF MAGGOTS" has a man's stomach being devoured by a giant maggot from a fish, and "DIFFERENT SENSE" features clips from real tentacle rape hentai. They're kind of out there.
Dizzee Rascal: "Couple Of Stacks" note Heart brutally ripped out, woman beheaded with a cricket bat while her body still moves, bound victims whose fingers are chopped offscreen and used as candles for a cake (the first one gets his own right arm chopped off, the second one gets his throat sliced, the third one gets her own left eye ripped out and the last one vertically beheaded), a woman getting stabbed into vagina while jumping over her bed.
DyE: "Fantasy" note For the surreal Body Horror at the end.
LeaF: "Marenol" note Surreal grotesque Body Horror, Pink-haired girl losing her head at the beginning, vomiting blood, getting dismembered by three giant gears, stabbed, impaled onscreen and chestbursting offscreen.
Joruzin: Iron Maiden and Dreamy Princessnote Contains gutting; decapitated heads; eyes, fingers and jaws being ripped out; multilple impaled bodies; a disfigured woman that was whipped and attacked with a sword; corpses of people after being placed in iron maidens and a child rape.
"Happiness in Slavery" note Despite being in black and white, it still earns this rank due to the sheer brutality of the violence being depicted.
“The Broken Movie” note Contains the previous video, and several more, containing the entirety of the EP of the same name. The video is based around a serial killer viciously mutilating, raping and disemboweling a victim while showing him various horrible music videos. Not all of the videos are a 10 though, "Pinion" and "Help Me I am In Hell" have absolutely horrifying And I Must Scream concepts with no gore, and therefore score a 7.
Royal Blood: “Out of the Black” note It was animated by the team behind Superjail!, so this is to be expected.
Skinny Puppy: "Worlock" note Although the music video is full of Stock Footage, these clips are so bloody that the video earns this level.
TeddyLoid (feat. Daoko): "ME!ME!ME!" note Brief but gory frame about Shuu (the Otaku protagonist) missing his right eye and the entire half (with visible guts) along with Me Me-Chan having one of his pieces in her mouth and Shuu getting mutilated, dismembered and eaten by the Me Me-Chan's clones (with his falling half-eaten head) at the end.
Robbie Williams: “Rock DJ” note Extremely gruesome self-mutilation depicted in sickening fashion, with Robbie stripping his flesh, muscles and organs with lots and lots of blood and gore flying everywhere until he's nothing but a dancing bloody skeleton, all done with the use of grisly practical effects and realistic CGI work. Although it's comedic, it's so drawn-out and detailed that it still reaches this level.
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