Whether considering the song or video, where do you start when describing something like "Come to Daddy" to anyone unfamiliar? Or Aphex Twin, in general, even? For me, I suppose, it might not actually be with his music at all, but with another track from someone else within Aphex Twin's creative orbit: "Come on My Selector" by Squarepusher. My memory isn't great, and the timeline is likely off, but I think that song was what prepared me for Aphex Twin, such that when his music arrived, I was as ready as I could be for it.
This fragment of cultural cache sounds strange, now that I'm putting words to the page, but when I was growing up the music video channel we had ran clips sprinkled among ad breaks that regularly exposed me to music I'd never otherwise have found on my own. These weren't commercials themselves, per se, but brief interstitials merely reiterating what channel we were already watching - which, in this case, was the Canadian equivalent to MTV called Much Music. Slivers of music videos served up exotic new options to watch out for elsewhere on the channel and Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector" was one that grabbed me by the ears and commanded my attention. The closest thing I might've had to parallel sound would've been through someone like Goldie's work, but at that age I'd never heard anything like "Come On My Selector" before. I don't think many had. And later, when seeing the full music video for the song, I'd never seen anything like it, either.
IMDB's one-liner for the video explains it as "A girl and her dog escaping from [an] Osaka mental institution," but there's little to be said which couldn't be better understood by watching it yourself. Musically the song is jagged, rigid, fast, and maybe even a little obnoxious, but it's also wonderful. The music video complements the sounds incredibly well and was directed by Chris Cunningham. Cunningham's work was new to me, but he'd previously worked with Aphex Twin on "Come To Daddy," and followed it up with the maximalist 10 minute horror-satire, "Windowlicker." I say that "Come on My Selector" was a gateway to "Come to Daddy" despite being released after it, only because that's how I recall the timeline: "Come On My Selector" was followed by Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," which - as memory serves - lead to an uptick in plays of "Come to Daddy" in the channel's rotation, which is where my journey began. It doesn't matter, really. This article could well be about "Windowlicker" as the influence it had was roughly the same. At times memory is as flexible as it is fragile.
In 2010 Pitchfork praised "Come To Daddy" as the best music video of the '90s. "Darkly comic and just plain dark," they wrote, "Chris Cunningham's tale of television unleashing hell in a dilapidated housing block plays like a gothic graphic novel, an ADD-riddled version of Village of the Damned, and an H.R. Giger-designed haunted house. All at once." (As a sidebar, I had no idea until I was preparing this article that Giger created a pair of sketches inspired by "Windowlicker." Neat.) Along with any talk of Giger's connection or influence, in my mind, is an inherent bridge between the visuals of "Come to Daddy" and the Alien franchise. This only makes sense, recognizing that Cunningham served as one of the principle effects artists for Alien 3, setting him up to design the hellscape that was later unleashed in the darkly atmosphere and twisted "Come to Daddy" video.
A little context goes a long way in terms of expressing how impactful this video was for me. Consider some of the most played music videos of 1997 and names like Puff Daddy, Jewel, Will Smith, Spice Girls, and Chumbawumba come to mind. Then, as if summoned by a demon, a music video channel unleashes the nightmarish squeals of "Come To Daddy" to be scattered among these in the same rotation. In discussing another track of his, Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) once said, "I wanted to make something so fast that they’d just think, 'What the fuck?!' It sounds pretty normal now, but at the time… you couldn’t dance to that, no way." That was about "Digeridoo," but it could easily describe this song in my estimation, as well. We'll never know how many thousands of "what the fuck?!" moments "Come to Daddy" no doubt inspired.
The visuals for the music video are one thing - which absolutely fed my still developing taste for dystopian sci-fi/horror - but the song might be what's had the greater lasting impact on me. In a way, I think it helped usher in an open-mindedness toward industrial that hadn't yet developed because… how could it have? I hadn't been exposed to anything like that and had little to no exposure to anything industrial-leaning aside from Nine Inch Nails or Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod" to that point. (I'll add that to this day, I'm a big fan of the Dillinger Escape Plan cover with Mike Patton on vocals, which one could argue might even be a better version of the song; at the minimum it provokes an equally sinister feeling to the original.)
What's more with this, whether I'm thinking of "Come to Daddy" or "Windowlicker," is that they both helped introduce me to Aphex Twin, who has since become one of my favorite musicians. The double-album Drugks later followed (by way of mail-order via Columbia House... or BMG, I forget), which I tried my best to make sense of as a college freshman. These videos also guided me backwards into the albums and EPs that preceded them. File-sharing was the avenue that allowed further exploration at the time, but once I gained access to more music I became blown away by the otherworldly range of sounds that came from this one single mind. How could the same person who "irrevocably" reshaped the face of ambient electronic music create this just a few years later? What an absolute genius.
[This article is part of Best of the Best - an ongoing series reflecting on and ranking my favorite music and movies.]