More of your picks, picked over and ranked.
INVINCIBLE
Beethoven (I Love to Listen To) – Eurythmics: I vaguely remembered this from the time of release as a fun video, but it’s held up remarkably well. A portrait of suburban psychosis that’s well conceived and shot, but the video is mostly distinguished by that rarest of things: a good acting performance from the singer.
The One Moment – OK Go: My head exploded like a bag of paint when I tried to figure out how they figured this video out. It’s up there with 'Come Into My World' in terms of filmmaking ingenuity and precision, and it would have been a much bigger clean-up job after each botched take!
On – Aphex Twin: Directed by Jarvis Cocker, who’s actually a pretty interesting filmmaker on the strength of this and the very different ‘This Is Hardcore’ (which I’ve already recommended and will be voting for). This starts out like a Chris Welsby film (kudos to Cocker for knowing his work!) and then takes a sharp left turn into quirky object animation, on a beach. Possibly the last thing I’d think of to illustrate this music, but it works brilliantly.
Low – R.E.M.: I never even knew this non-single
had a video, let alone one this great. Absolutely gorgeous to look at, and a concept that could have been too-cute is brilliantly camouflaged by the amateur patina of shaky super 8 footage. Easy top ten for me.
What’s a Girl to Do – Bat for Lashes: A very simple, eerie film (riding a bike at night as weird things manifest around the singer) that fits its song to a tee. This is kind of the Platonic Ideal of a music video.
THRILLER
Here It Goes Again – OK Go: Now I see what the fuss was about. This is a brilliant low-tech video fuelled by ingenuity and lots of practice. My OK Go vote will be going elsewhere (see above), but this is a worthy contender. If their music was more interesting I might be making space for more than one video.
T69 Collapse – Aphex Twin: I watched this when it was released and thought it was very cool, but would likely look dated before too long. Well, it’s still striking, and has enough visceral pulsating energy on its own terms to keep up the interest. I could have done without the branding that arrives towards the end, though.
Lost in a Moment – Dennis Wheatley: This couldn’t be simpler, but it’s low-key sublime, and a perfect match for the dreamy music: the view of the world from a sushi conveyor belt. There’s a twist, and it’s a great one in that it’s as hilariously low-key as the rest of the film.
DANGEROUS
All Is Full of Love – Bjork: This has always been an admirable video, beautifully crafted, but it’s never really resonated with me compared to the quirky originality of much of her other work. The same goes for the song, I guess.
Baker Man – Laid Back: The freefall idea is clever enough, but it doesn’t really go anywhere (but down, obviously).
Talking to a Stranger – Hunters and Collectors: This one is ingrained on my synapses (though I don’t know if I’d seen the train station intro before), and at this distance it’s a nostalgic mixbag of post-punk video tropes of the day. Richard Lowenstein made lots of videos for Australian bands, and went on to make the definitive student flat movie,
Dogs in Space, a few years later, but to me he’ll always be the guy who convinced Mark Seymour to put rubberbands around his face.
The Slab – Hunters and Collectors: I didn’t think I’d ever seen this video, but I remembered the “Slab Dance”, so I must have. One of those 80s videos that looks like it was more fun to make that to watch. Do non-antipodeans realize that the eponymous slab stars in the video?
The most memorable Hunters and Collectors video for me was the one for ‘Say Goodbye’, but looking back at it now, I think that’s just because it’s their most iconic video (and arguably their best song).
Say Goodbye
Acid Rain – Lorn: Fatally injured cheerleaders dance around a diner. I’m finding that ‘edgy’ content in a music video often doesn’t work for me if the delivery is this glossy. This is hardly the worst offender (see below), but it hobbles the film.
Gosh – Jamie xx: Kind of in the same boat, but the concept here was genuinely wonky (thousands of wild kids moving en masse through a vast cityscape, plus narcoleptic albinos – a twist on “white man got a God complex”), and the sheer scale of the images gave it a lot of power. Really dull music floating somewhere in the background.
Wide Open – The Chemical Brothers: Really just a solo-dance-in-a-warehouse video with some simple digital enhancements. I could see where this was going from the first few seconds, and the dance itself wasn’t strong enough to make this work for me.
Strawberry Swing – Coldplay: An amazing piece of filmmaking, and you’ve got to love any 21st century music video inspired by a 100+ year old comic strip, but this falls foul of two personal rules: 1) the video might as well have been accompanying ‘Yakety Sax’ or ‘Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ for all it worked with the music; 2) the song was too shitty to live.
I Changed My Mind – Lyrics Born: Mildly interesting mix of then-current / now-dated CGI and retro cartooning, but I had to shut this off because not being able to remember where that intimately familiar string sample came from just got too annoying. And I still can't place it and I'm still annoyed.
Ten minutes later: Of Course! It’s ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’! That’s like taking a dump after a fortnight’s constipation.
Playboy – Hot Chip: Nodding in a coal mine. Had a nice look, but this video slotted into the “merely cool” niche for me.
Paptouai – Stromae: All of the Stromae videos suggested were interesting enough to keep me watching, but none of them quite made it into the ‘great’ pile. This one had nicely artificial art direction, good dancing, and a decent, if slightly schmaltzy, concept.
Formidable – Stromae: Really interesting concept here, with the singer performing the song in public as if he’s drunk as a skunk, filmed with hidden cameras. For me, the execution was just too glossy for that idea. He’s filmed with
dozens of hidden cameras, it seems, to give the video as “professional” a look as possible, where I think it might have been a lot more effective with more limited coverage, or coverage that mimicked, say, standard surveillance footage. And I found this song the worst of the three I watched.
Ta Fete – Stromae: Very glossy ‘Hunger Games’ knock off (in which gladiatorial games are performed for the delight of a baying crowd of . . . orthodox Jews?) It’s all a metaphor, maaan, but that last shot is graphically strong nevertheless.
Born Free – M.I.A.: A video of its moment, but unfortunately that moment seems to still be here, intensified. A great piece of provocation, where inspiring outrage is entirely the point (imaginary discrimination against white people is an outrage; actual discrimination against non-white people is business as usual), but it’s not much of a music video. The song is just kind of there, until it isn’t, then it comes back intermittently in the background. It’s entirely superfluous to the film.
On the Nature of Daylight – Max Richter: Elizabeth Moss walks morosely through the streets. That’s it folks! Not to slight Moss’s skill at walking morosely – she’s very good at it – but this wasn’t enough for me. The question about music videos for instrumentals reminded me of Jean-Luc Ponty’s ‘Son of Koyaanisqatsi’ video for 'Individual Choice'. The music never really fitted in their indie wheelhouse, but our most interesting music video show in the 1980s,
Radio with Pictures, would screen this at the drop of a hat for years:
Individual Choice
200% - Akdong Musician: Cutesy but ordinary. Various effects are tested, but nothing that gives this video a defining identity. The most interesting one is a visual ‘fold-out’ that reveals an unwelcome additional schoolgirl between the schoolboy and his wannabe girlfriend, but this only made me pine for a video in which Michel Gondry explored the filmic implications of Mad Magazine’s old ‘fold-ins’.
I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie: This is a fun idea, but the execution is flat-footed (of course we know who the taxi driver is going to be) and the message dumbly obvious (Americans are obsessed with guns? You don’t say. . .)
Pass This On – The Knife: Dead simple video concept that I must have seen done before, but I can’t recall where: flamboyant singer performs to an ostentatiously bored audience that gradually gets into the groove.
Le Petit Train – Les Rita Mitsouko: I’m surprised that their most famous fan, Jean-Luc Godard, hadn’t shot a video for them. This was okay, but it really depends on the audience not having seen a Bollywood musical, as this is an extremely pallid imitation.
Smalltown Boy – Bronski Beat: This song was a very big deal at the time, and the big surprise of the music video was that it didn’t fudge the content. At this distance, it’s a competent narrative video, but it was delivering a narrative that you hardly saw anywhere else in 1984, least of all on prime time television.
BAD
Dayvan Cowboy – Boards of Canada: That opening freefall from space is amazing documentary footage, but then it completely squanders the awe by turning into a surfing movie. A waste of found footage.
The City – Madeon: See my comment on the Lorn video above. Whatever potency and energy this paintball battle might have had in conception is crushed by the wanky execution: portentous slomo intercut with Benetton posing. And the music is abominable: dull, autotuned boyband guff with somebody desperately fiddling with the volume knob to try and impart some auditory interest.
I Touch a Red Button – Interpol: A decent song, but Lynch’s crappy animated video is there for starfucker value only.
Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free – Zombie Zombie: After five seconds you get the idea –
The Thing remade with dolls – and after that, this video is just curiously dull. If I were going to vote for a “they remade this famous film for some reason” video, it would be The New Pornographers’ take on
Simon of the Desert (which is much more fun than this one):
The Laws Have Changed
Bitch – Ashley MacIsaac: Mediocre song set to mediocre animation of animals having sex. For people who find
South Park too visually sophisticated.
Away – The Feelies: I like The Feelies and I like Johnathan Demme too, but this is a bog standard performance video that could have been shot by anybody.