I’ve been trying to go through this thread and watch every video that’s been recommended and which I haven’t already seen, or wanted to see again. Here are the results so far, ranked
TOP OF THE POPS – The best finds, and ones that are now in contention for my own list.
Criminal – Fiona Apple: Content-wise, I don’t see it as especially transgressive, but that snuff-video spotlighting gives it such a sleazy vibe. Like a lot of great videos, it’s an unexpected but excellent match for the song.
O Superman – Laurie Anderson: I rewatched this epochal music video (probably the first one I saw that really stopped me in my tracks as a pre-teen), and it remains really powerful. The filming couldn’t be simpler, likewise the effects, but the strength comes from the casually iconic imagery Anderson conjures up (the silhouetted fist, the light in her mouth) and the way the visuals give even tighter focus to the music and lyrics.
Honey - Erykah Badu: A delightful concept (browsing a record store where famous album covers come alive to perform the song) that’s even more delightful in execution. I was sold as soon as I saw Ms Badu doing
Maggot Brain.
Happiness – Goldfrapp: A deftly contrived fake one-shot video, with a throughline of a manically hopping man and a neighbourhood that includes multiple Alison Goldfrapps playing dress up. A perfect visual match for the bouncy music.
Oh Baby – LCD Soundsystem: Music video is a form perfectly suited to a number of things, such as formal experimentation, dance, inventive montage, travelling shots. It’s a form that’s really poorly suited to narrative, and for me most music videos that attempt to convey a complete narrative are simplistic or rote. Some music videos succeed by presenting a fragment of a narrative that’s more proportionate to the scale of the form, or by combining the narrative with something the form excels at (e.g. ‘Elektrobank’ focusing on a dance), or including the narrative as an excuse for some interesting formal experiment. This micro-
Primer is an exceedingly rare instance of a music video presenting an engaging, complex and moving narrative with a beginning, middle and end, within the confines of the form, and without sidelining the song. Unlike most videos with these ambitions, there’s no need to add a short film intro or coda, to intrude with dialogue, or to employ explanatory text. Bravo!
This Is America – Childish Gambino: This bipolar tour-de-force is still as powerful as when it was released.
Cirrus – Bonobo: Delightful screwing with period footage for rhythmic and, ultimately, kaleidoscopic, effect. A terrific digital collage.
Dangerous – Big Data: Another way to make the narrative approach work is to structure your video as a comedy skit. This pitch for killer trainers is horrifyingly funny and works well on both levels.
Atlas – Battles: A really simple visual idea (band performing in a cramped mirror room within a void) that serves as a superb visualization of the music.
Ta Douleur – Camille: Perfect execution of a simple, weird idea (ununravelling). And it’s a great song!
COUNTDOWN – Great videos you should all see, but which probably won’t make my list.
Carried Away – Passion Pit: Plenty of clever ideas, especially the war of words at the end.
Imitation of Life – R.E.M.: This is really an impressive feat of filmmaking and I’m tempted to include for chutzpah alone, but I find this such a boring song I just can’t do it. I know we’re supposed to be voting for the video and not the song, but the song’s an intrinsic part of what makes any given video great, and if the song’s mediocre I’ll pass it over in favour of one where both soundtrack and visuals work for me. Kind of related to this, there are some fine videos where the music doesn’t really fit, or is beside the point, and those ones feel to me like they’ve failed their brief in some fundamental way, however pretty the pictures might be.
Fall Underneath – Snakadaktal: Rewatched this to see if I wanted to include it, and it’s a little less impressive on a second watch, like the interesting concept wasn’t quite executed precisely enough, or wasn’t developed a little further, or something (which I think is close to what domino originally said).
Open Your Heart – Mia Del Todd: Another fine Gondry video that I don’t need for my list. Simple, colourful, casually ambitious and a great match for the music. Utterly charming.
The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) – Missy Elliott: A cool video, and great collateral for Elliott’s brand. It’s generic, but with enough style and wit to stand out.
Try – Michael Penn: Nifty technical exercise, but not distinctive enough in the one-shot stakes to ring my bell.
Look What the Cat Drug In (Long Way Down) – Michael Penn: A good Quay Brothers film (and you can never have too many of those), but for me this was one of those instances where the film just happened to be playing at the same time as the music, and they didn’t do much for one another.
California Tuffy – The Geraldine Fibbers: Live anarchic fun with puppets.
Boasty – Wiley ft. everybody: Here’s how to give a generic template enough of a twist to turn it into slick entertainment. The ‘imposter’ gag is cute, but doesn’t really go anywhere, and most of the energy comes from the neat transitions between lively travelling shots, giving a sense of constant movement. “Just a fun video” indeed!
DVNO – Justice: A nifty bit of typographical trainspotting, co-opting lots of vintage animated logos (or ones that should have been).
D.A.N.C.E. – Justice: More of the same, with animated t-shirts. A very nice idea, but I feel like they didn’t do enough with it.
Elastic Heart – Sia: Stark, nicely imagined symbolic dance duel. Reminded me that I hadn’t mentioned the serious fun of ‘The Girl You Lost to Cocaine’, a fancy dress video from before Sia started dressing up as other people, with a cool practical effect at the end.
The Girl You Lost to Cocaine
Shape – Glasser: Weak on narrative, but strong on its exploration of visual ideas (which is a good thing). The old school CGI is cool, but I don’t understand in what universe this qualifies as ‘horror.’ The Bjork-lite music is the weak link here.
Celoso – Lele Pons: A very stylish video, with great use of colour in its serial fancy dress structure.
Down on my Luck – Vic Mensa: Fun rewind concept, well executed.
Smack My Bitch Up – The Prodigy: Better than any Gaspar Noe film to date, for sure.
RADIO WITH PICTURES - Good stuff, but not good enough, or not up my twisted alley.
All I Need – Air: A music video that really wants to be an earnest short film, so it’s basically an earnest short film with some music playing meaninglessly in the background.
Dry Town – Gillian Welch: Cute puppet animation.
The Spoils – Massive Attack: This is an interesting concept that I found rather dull in execution.
Freedom – George Michael: This video is the epitome of shallow MTV glitz. I don’t have any interest in that stuff, but this is at least well-executed enough to remain alluring (and it’s a great song, which helps).
Bedtime Story – Madonna: This is just another species of generic: pretentious pseudo-“arthouse” twaddle that’s had money vomited all over it. Skulls! Dervishes! Shots nicked from
The Colour of Pomegranates! Teal! Orange! Would make Matthew Barney blush. (And this is one of the few Madonna singles I like.)
Excalibur – William Sheller: Glitzy, derivative “epic”. Impressive use of limited production values, I guess, but ‘epic’ is something music videos don’t do well, and I hated the song.
Bastards of Young – The Replacements: And at the opposite end of the spectrum, this ultra-minimalist video is some kind of sarcastic genius. Not much of a film, but an excellent statement.
Vindaloo – Fat Les: A fun parody, but since I’m not voting for the video it’s parodying, I’m certainly not voting for this.
Numb – U2: A decent enough collage, but it’s no
Rhythm
Candy – Cameo: A good example of well-used digital effects of their day now being hopelessly eclipsed by technological advances. Still has some visual energy, but it’s more interesting as an accidental technical document.
Steam – Peter Gabriel: Like the Cameo video, the technology involved here is hopelessly out of date, but the cheesy effects are saved from redundancy by the gusto with which they’re applied and attacked. It’s really hit and miss, with the opening recreation of a Tex Avery short unfortunately the high point.
Good Life – Kanye West: The So Me crew (see the interesting Justice videos above) hit the big time, but there’s nothing new here, with their aesthetic applied to a bog standard music video like frosting.
Mary Don’t You Weep – Prince: Too tastefully PSA-serious for my tastes.
Every Little Thing – Homeshake: Nice dancing, shame about the dull tune.
Never Catch Me – Flying Lotus ft. Kendrick Lamar: Funeral plus incongruous dance. It’s an interesting idea, but for me they didn’t pull it off. Too glossy, maybe.
120 MINUTES (I won’t get back)
Perfect Life – Steven Wilson: I found the video pretty twee, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is the song Tindersticks were parodying with ‘My Sister’. The problem is, the wicked parody came twenty years before the straight version.
Brilliant Disguise – Bruce Springsteen: Sometimes a boring videos is just a boring video.
Ain’t Nobody (Remix) – Rufus & Chaka Khan: This just seemed to me like hundreds of other videos from the period that I’d seen and almost immediately forgotten. If I had seen this one before, it didn’t register – but why would it?
As – George Michael: First up, I dislike this mediocre cover of a great, great song. The video has an interesting concept, but it doesn’t do anything interesting with it, so it never rises above a hollow “Behold the New Technology!” gimmick. Once the premise is established, we just get more of the same, and the digital clones don’t even interact in any meaningful way. Oh for a single moment that had the bravura panache of four Kylies ducking and diving around one another and a lamppost.
Uptown Funk – Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars: This video seemed a completely banal, boilerplate example of the form. Maybe it counts as retro now, but it’s another clip I’ve seen hundreds of times before.
212 – Azealia Banks: Ditto, in black and white and close-up.
King Kunta – Kendrick Lamar: Tritto. A rap video with the star and his buds driving around the ‘hood in a car, sometimes in slow motion. Great song, but what am I missing that makes this any kind of contender for a great video?
Désenchantée – Mylène Farmer: Turning your silly little pop song into a cast-of-thousands feelgood Holocaust epic might be ambitiously bonkers in some hands, but to me this was just self-seriously grotesque. Horrible.
Beyond My Control – Mylène Farmer: Maybe I just struck Farmer on a bad day (or year, given the pompous scale of the former video), but no: here’s a vapid aftershave ad involving wolves and dozens of smoke machines.
California – Mylène Farmer: Even with Abel Ferrara and Giancarlo Esposito in tow to give it a bit of bite, this is more bland music with lashings of pretension. Ever been watching
La Double Vie de Véronique and wondered, “would this be a lot better if the main characters were whores?” Well, no. No it wouldn’t.
Fuck You – Cee Lo Green: This makes ‘Sign ‘o’ the Times’ look cutting edge.
Overpowered – Face Tomorrow: Abominable 3rd rate version of a 3rd rate Radiohead power ballad, (barely) accompanied by Greenaway outtakes. I know the man is well past his prime, but I never knew he was this desperate for a paycheck.
The Child – Alex Gopher: An ingenious word world, very basically animated, is saddled with a lame narrative, and stock dialogue that intrudes on the song. Not much of a music video, and the filmmakers’ thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
Bring It Down – The Redskins: Apart from the overlaid text, this is a bog-standard shouty indie video from the mid-80s.
Miss Atomic Bomb – The Killers: Is the bad animation supposed to distract us from how bad the song is?
Can’t Deny My Love – Brandon Flowers: Is the bad costume drama supposed to distract us from how bad the song is?
Walking on Broken Glass – Annie Lennox: According to my maths, Nothing x Celebrities still = Nothing.
Amanaemonesia – Chairlift: Decent dancing + bad animation + karaoke subtitles. Huh? For some reason, this reminded me of the existence of Portishead’s weirdly evocative ‘All Mine’, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
All Mine
Love all these. Slave To The Rhythm deserved a better production, imo. Perhaps a composite of all (or some combo of) the mixes on the album. The single release is the least interesting mix on it!