Seether - Fake It

OCT 23 2007 · 12:00

Seether - Fake It (2007) Director: Tony Petrossian Era: Post-Grunge Peak / Mid-2000s Hard Rock (2007) - Era defined by arena-ready post-grunge crossover, MySpace-era rock dominance, and MTV Total Request Live's final years; Seether's commercial zenith on Wind-Up Records. High curatorial value as a commercially dominant, conceptually sophisticated artifact of mid-2000s hard rock. The video's meta-deconstruction of music video tropes is rare for the genre and era, making it uniquely valuable for both genre studies and media criticism curricula. Its chart performance and longevity on Billboard retrospectives confirm its status as a period-defining text. Context: Released in October 2007 as the lead single from Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces, 'Fake It' arrived at a moment when post-grunge hard rock was achieving its widest mainstream penetration. The song debuted on a MySpace-era landscape where rock acts competed directly with hip-hop and pop for chart dominance. The video's self-aware deconstruction of music video clichés, glamour models, private jets, snowy performance vistas, functioned as both critique and participation in the very spectacle it satirized, resonating with a generation increasingly media-literate about manufactured celebrity. The single reached number one on both the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks and Hot Modern Rock Tracks charts, cementing Seether's status as a crossover rock force. Director notes: Directed and edited by Tony Petrossian; produced by Dave Robertson; production company Rockhard Films; DP Michael Bernard. The video employs a meta-satirical concept in which band frontman Shaun Morgan is depicted filming a music video on a glamorized plane set with models, intercut with a snowy outdoor performance and an industrial arena show, all three environments then bleed into each other to expose each setting as a constructed artifice. This concept mirrors Petrossian's prior thematic work critiquing Hollywood superficiality. The video debuted as a worldwide fan premiere on Seether's official website on October 23, 2007, the same day Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces was released. The explicit and clean versions both circulated, with the official clean version running approximately 3:23.