Oingo Boingo's "Insanity"

Oingo Boingo

I can't really go through Halloween without watching Oingo Boingo's video to "Insanity". It's still one of my favorite videos and seems the best example of the much darker part of Oingo Boingo's personality. While the edited version of the song erodes some of the album version's saturating and resonating power, it's still a very punchy version that works well enough for a music video version. The stop-motion animation is done well and contributes to the song's subject matter quite well - people as puppets, fantasy/reality, fairy tales, the uncanny, the grotesque, etc. Basically, there's a lot here. This song isn't out of character for Oingo Boingo, who made a long and phenomenal career out of addressing these subjects and others, but I think the dark, dark tone of the song (as well as the whole Boingo [1994] album) was rather new. But at the core it was still very much Oingo Boingo, and that is a wonderful thing.