18 of the G.O.A.T. Music Videos
Curated program presented to The Glove film club // Cincinnati, Ohio // May 2018
1. Modern Huge. My Feelings For You Are Complicated. Austin Burcham and Matthew Sachse. 2014. Clocking in at under 2 minutes, this song cuts to the chase, eschewing repetition and conventional verse-chorus structure in favor of a kind of linear momentum that nonetheless reaches a stirring emotional climax. The video perfectly amplifies these musical characteristics through a spare, linear visual concept that consists of a tracking shot of the performer walking backwards in close-up. Though there are edits, it feels like a single-shot video. By focusing on the vulnerability and expressiveness of the performer, the video captures the song’s main appeal: its raw romantic passion.
2. The Chemical Brothers. Let Forever Be. Michel Gondry. 1999. A prismatic video that beautifully explores the notion that as much as abstract interpretations of reality can inform how we create media images (in this case, video editing), media images can then, in turn, affect lived reality. Meanwhile, the video is graceful, gorgeous, boasts terrific choreography and use of color, and matches the mind-bending, psychedelic song utterly.
3. The Knife. Pass This On. Johan Renck. 2003. Anticipating the unfortunate debate among the Democratic commentariat following the 2016 election about whether or not working class (read: white, straight cis males) voters should be prioritized over identity politics (minorities, women) this video declares such dichotomies as false. Here, everybody’s pretty much working-class in the same shitty rec center and everybody ends up united in dance: white, brown, cis, trans, old, young, gay, straight. Fraught with palpable menace at its outset and characterized by an overall haunting tone visually and musically, the genuine optimism about pluralism and solidarity feels earned.
4. Liv. Wings of Love. Lykke Li. 2016. The typography, editing of the yonic paintings, and the cinematography all immaculately reproduce idioms of early-70’s filmmaking, which suits the neo-Fleetwood Mac/Neil Young sound of the song. But the retro atmosphere is far from pandering nostalgia or stylistic affectation, as the content of both the song and video channel the hippie era’s ideology of free love sincerely and update it for today's feminist context. An unabashed celebration of nature, the video depicts the nude human form in a picturesque Swedish wooden setting, at once desexualizing nudity (butts abound) while depicting a would-be orgy as somehow wholesome. Informed by Lykke Li’s pregnancy (she and her partner, Jeff Bhaskar enjoy a visibly mucosal make-out), this is a video with a sincere appreciation for women, butts, trees, people, and human life.
5. Depeche Mode. Wrong. Patrick Daughters. 2009. Wrong depicts a bound and gagged man unable to express himself either with his face or his voice, trapped going in the wrong direction of a car: an apt metaphor for the song’s lyrical content about existential despair, helplessness, and self-loathing. It's also a haunting little short film that works well on its own terms, aided immensely by the macabre mask design.
6. Joan as Police Woman. Eternal Flame. Leah Meyerhoff. 2006. What does being an independent artist in New York City during the aughts look like? Something like this, I think, as the video for Brooklyn-based Renaissance woman/outsider artist, JAPW’s song, “Eternal Flame” depicts a collection of thirty-something beautiful freaks frolicking on a Coney Island beach on an overcast day. You can practically smell the pollution and catch a chill from the overwhelming shadow cast by the gargantuan city just out of frame. Yet, the video’s depiction of a talented band à part is warm, and Joan’s climactic raising of the torch while wearing full Statue of Liberty garb is heroic - not in spite of - but rather because of - the darkness both around the edges and in the frame.
7. Björk. Declare Independence. Michel Gondry. 2007. The best thing about this video isn’t the beguiling sex appeal of Bjork as fascist dictator/revolutionary liberator. It's the fact that it asks itself the question about the connection between dictatorship and revolution in the first place. As if the video weren’t impressive enough in every aspect of its formal concept and execution, it even has a philosophical autocritique built right into it.
8. Fiona Apple. Across the Universe. Paul Thomas Anderson. 1999. PTA takes an effective if literal-minded dialectical conceit and executes the daylights out of it, directing his then-girlfriend in a tour-de-force of staging and innovative camerawork - all of it rooted in the spare poetry of Fiona’s guileless performance and a sober acknowledgment of the profound consequences of bigoted violence.
9. Bat for Lashes. What’s a Girl to Do. Dougal Wilson. 2007. The mythical, pagan, fairy-tale-like imagery visually translates Bat for Lashes’ musical aesthetic so perfectly it suggests the question that many great music videos do: does the song score the video or is the video the visual accompaniment for the song? It's difficult to tell because of how individually cohesive yet synchronized the two elements - sound and image - are.
10. The DØ. Despair, Hangover, and Ecstasy. Noel Paul. 2015. A grab-bag of irreverent dance moves and gestures filmed on a tarmac, this video demonstrates that allowing a charismatic, stylish, and colorful musician to do their thing can be a sufficient cinematographic conceit on its own. The kinetic, at times frenetic camerawork in this video mimics the larger-than-life, quasi-cartoonish performers, responding to their silly yet undeniably glamorous presence with speedy zooms, slow motion, and exquisitely framed symmetrical shots of the performers in jet propellers. There is no story, no gimmick, and no heavy-handed visual allusions to the lyrics, yet the message that’s conveyed by the video is clear enough: life among the rich, young, beautiful European jet-set may be fast and decadent, but it’s best to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. This video is a celebration of cool that feels authentically self-deprecating.
11. Feist. My Moon My Man. Patrick Daughters. 2007. Characterized by an inventive in-camera visual gimmick involving an airport moving walkway, traditionalist musical theater-style choreography, a charismatic and comely main performer, and expert framing and lighting design, this video synthesizes multiple disciplines into a cogent whole and, by its breezy ending, seems to, in fact, say something true and knowing about modern alienation and loneliness.
12. Hooray for Earth. True Loves. Alex Takacs and Joe Nankin. 2011. A song about love that is both tender and galvanizing, cerebral and primitively euphoric. This extraordinary music video which seems influenced by The Fountain, follows a medieval time-traveler pursuing singular love through past, present, and future. The costume design does a lot of the narrative heavy-lifting, as the characters’ garb not only conveys the time period (and thus tells the story) but also flatters its already toothsome protagonists so that there’s a plausible romantic motivation for all the schlepping through time and space depicted. Like all great music videos, this video transmutes the song’s ineffable emotions into narrative and visual themes that render it part of a total artistic piece.
13. David Bowie. I’m Afraid of Americans. Nick Goffey and Dominic Hawley. 1997. David Bowie and Trent Reznor were/are two of the most cinematically and politically literate rock stars of all time. So it’s fitting that they would collaborate on one of the all-time greatest dissident songs/music videos. The paranoia is palpable, and worst of all, reasonable. As we barrel ever-closer towards fascism in 2018 America, it's important to reflect upon why the most astute political thinkers are so often relegated to the frivolous margins of pop culture rather than positioned at the center of political discourse and the electorally exigent conventional wisdom it generates.
14. Micachu and the Shapes. Golden Phone. Director Unknown. 2008. The low-budget, handcrafted aesthetic reflects the same attributes in the music as well as succeeds in distilling the band’s personality and charm: namely their youth, unorthodoxy, puckishness, and nerd-chic.
15. Nine Inch Nails. Closer. Mark Romanek. 1994. I think what’s so disturbing about this video is that it presents a vision of both the primitive man and the civilized man that is equally bleak. Primitive man is hog-tied, helpless and lashing out because of his animalistic sexual fantasies. Civilized man, meanwhile, is torturing animals (who were not harmed during filming, according to Romanek) and coming up with crackpot pseudoscience. Reznor’s sinister charisma on camera is terrifying in that his rage and violence feel the result of careful consideration. The song’s endless inventiveness as a sound recording is mirrored by the inventive camerawork, gags, and imagery.
16. Model Child. Too Much Night. Annapurna Kumar. 2017. Danny Parker has co-written Top 40 hits and shows his avant-pop bona fides with this dark, alluring track and video which features some unsettling imagery befitting of the horror subgenre popularized by James Wan as well as colorful animations that accentuate the song’s splashy appeal.
17. Stone Temple Pilots. Sour Girl. David Slade. 1999. The androgynous, vulnerable beauty of the late Scott Weiland is singular and striking, and the editing style seems both sped up and slowed down, transforming Weiland’s unconventional dance moves into a brand new form of movement - both frantically urgent and perpetually frustrated and jerky. Through this expressive temporal effect that evokes the inability of people to properly sync and connect, the interplay between Sarah Michelle Gellar (who plays the titular character) and Weiland achieves a rare kind of romantic poignance.
18. Foster the People. Coming of Age. BRTHR. 2014. A polarizing group with good reason (they reek of smarmy pseudo-indie corporatism), Foster the People nonetheless consistently puts out music that’s smarter and more evocative than many of their more hipster-credentialed peers. That intelligence is manifest in the way their songs effortlessly remix idioms spanning the entire history of pop/rock music over the past 50 years without getting bogged down in specific pop culture references. This song and video are no exception, as there is no direct allusion to specific coming-of-age films or TV shows, yet “Coming of Age” captures the ideas and emotions of that particular genre of storytelling. The point isn’t to congratulate the audience on its mastery of nerdy trivia; rather, it’s to evoke feelings.