Remember when you were a senior in high school? I don’t. We probably didn’t even know each other then, so how could I remember you as a senior? Get it together people.

Anyways, at some point you had to watch a slideshow with pictures of everyone from your school (or at least the cool kids). Starting in 1997 this slideshow was always accompanied by “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” (remember to whisper the part in parentheses) by Green Day. Now, “Good Riddance Time of Your Life” is wildly inappropriate for these slideshows. The title is extremely creepy and the song is generally a downer. It makes you think that everyone in those pictures is probably dead.

Fastball looked at this situation and said, “We want our song to play to pictures of dead high school kids.” So they wrote a sad song and made a music video that strongly implies that the members of the band are dead. Take a look at the music video for “You Know You’re Right” by Nirvana. That is a song that is not very good so Nirvana didn’t release it during Kurt Cobain’s lifetime. Much after his death people decided that it doesn’t matter whether the stuff is good or not and they make money either way. So it was released. They needed to make a music video for it, though, so they cut together a bunch of old footage of the band. This seems to be exactly what Fastball did for their video.

Here it is, posthumous video for Fastball’s “Out Of My Head”:

My heart goes out to their families.

What we have here is some live performance footage from various different shows plus what appear to be home movies. Towards the beginning we see some kids and a woman in front of some American flags.

That image strongly reminds me of this:

Those brave little kids.

We see two of the members of the band standing in front of a different American flag, staring off into the distance.

The third member of the band is conspicuously absent. He must have died first. The first line of the song is, “Sometimes I feel like I am drunk behind the wheel.” This gives us a clue of how he died.

Next we get some home movies of the singer.

See how young and vibrant he was? How could he have known that his time would be cut short? How could he have known that jumping into a fireplace was less fun and more dangerous than it looks?

Ah, that’s how. It looks like his older sister told him, “Don’t jump in the fireplace.” Good advice. He didn’t take it to heart, however.

The drummer, who naturally barely appears in the video at all, died a less violent death. He ate ice cream too fast and then immediately went swimming and died. He should have known about the dangers of ice cream.

Look at the pain in that child’s face. Have you ever seen a child with less joy holding an ice cream cone? He can’t fit it into his mouth and his head is splitting. The drummer forgot this precious childhood moment, which led to his doom.

Because the performance footage is from different shows we get to see different hairstyles, which is fun. Here is a long-haired singer, playing bass.

Here is a short-haired singer, playing keyboards.

No matter what his haircut, he was a wonderful person. It’s too bad, really.

R.I.P.

-PTD