Mojo Nixon — Burn Down The Malls

JUL 01 1986 · 12:00

Mojo Nixon — Burn Down The Malls (1986) Era: MTV Alternative Underground (1985–1988) - The pre-Nirvana era of low-budget, college-circuit insurgency when 120 Minutes gave fringe acts like Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper a national platform; anti-corporate psychobilly breaking through on $2,000 budgets and 16mm film. High. 'Burn Down The Malls' is a rare surviving artifact of the earliest phase of Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper's MTV presence and one of the most explicitly anti-corporate music videos to receive significant MTV airplay in the mid-1980s. Its documented $2,000 budget, 16mm no-sync guerrilla production, and approximately one year of 120 Minutes rotation make it an essential primary source for researchers studying the intersection of low-budget independent production, satirical cultural commentary, and pre-alternative-era MTV programming. The confirmed production details from Mojo Nixon's own testimony give this video an unusually well-documented provenance for a work of its era and budget. Context: Released in 1986 as part of the Get Out of My Way! EP on Enigma Records, 'Burn Down The Malls' was Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper's debut MTV appearance and an early salvo in late-Reagan-era anti-consumerist rock. The song's spoken-word rant format — railing against shopping malls, the national drinking age, and America's corporate monoculture — was a precise artifact of the alt-underground sensibility that thrived on 120 Minutes before alternative rock became mainstream. Shot guerrilla-style in the industrial outskirts of Los Angeles on a $2,000 budget, the video's raw aesthetic mirrored the music's contempt for polish and commerce. Nixon and Skid Roper lampooned contemporary American culture and social issues throughout their catalog, of which this track was among the most explicitly anti-capitalist. Director notes: Shot on 16mm film on a guerrilla basis at an oil field near a beach off the 405 freeway in Southern California, with no permits, no permission, and approximately $2,000 in budget. Mojo Nixon noted in a Music Video Time Machine interview that the absence of timecode equipment meant nothing was synced up, and that the spoken-word nature of 'Burn Down The Malls' made lip-sync especially difficult, requiring the director to find creative editorial solutions. Nixon also described the video as containing subliminal messages, including shots of his face morphing into a monkey. The full song was edited down from approximately six minutes to fit MTV format requirements. The video received regular rotation on MTV's 120 Minutes for approximately one year and was Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper's first MTV airplay, predating the more widely seen 'Elvis Is Everywhere' video.