Queens Of The Stone Age - Monsters In The Parasol

2000

Queens Of The Stone Age - Monsters In The Parasol (2000) Director: Bob Stevens Era: Palm Desert Scene Breakthrough Era (2000) - QOTSA's major-label debut cycle on Interscope, bridging underground stoner rock into mainstream alternative visibility via Rated R High. This video is a rare promotional artifact from the Rated R campaign, QOTSA's breakthrough album, for a track that was never commercially released as a single, making it an under-documented piece of the band's early visual history. Its street-realism aesthetic, rapid editing pace, and warm desert-tinged palette offer a textbook example of how stoner/desert rock translated its sonic identity into early-2000s low-budget music video production. Its limited MTV2 airplay makes it a historically marginal but culturally significant document of that channel's role in sustaining underground rock visibility. Context: Released in 2000 as part of the promotional campaign for Queens of the Stone Age's landmark second album Rated R, the band's first release on Interscope Records, this video accompanied a track that was originally recorded in 1998 for Volume 4 of Josh Homme's Desert Sessions collective. The song's psychedelic lyrical content, documented as reflecting Homme's first LSD experience, fed into a broader countercultural identity that QOTSA cultivated during the Rated R era. The album itself arrived at a pivotal moment for alternative rock, when the post-grunge landscape was fragmenting and the Palm Desert Scene was finding mainstream footholds. Though 'Monsters in the Parasol' was never released as a commercial single, its video circulated on MTV2, marking one of the few QOTSA visual artifacts from this era to receive broadcast exposure. The Rated R cycle positioned QOTSA as a critical darling, earning a Pitchfork 8.6/10 and a Kerrang KKKKK, and this video is a document of the band's aesthetic identity at that inflection point. Director notes: The video was produced in 2000 as a promotional piece for 'Monsters in the Parasol,' the intended third single from Queens of the Stone Age's Rated R (Interscope, June 6, 2000), though the single was ultimately never commercially released. The IMDb full credits list Randy Sosin as video commissioner. IMVDb records a running length of 3:36. The video depicts a street-level narrative set in what has been described as Los Angeles, following a protagonist on a mission through urban environments. The video received some rotation on MTV2 in the mid-2000s despite the track not being an official charting single.