No Miley Here — 2013’s Best Music Videos, #10-1

by Cleopatra Parnell, Vanessa Tottle, & Gabriel Valdez
special thanks to Hayley Williams

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

#10: “Q.U.E.E.N.” – Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu
directed by Alan Ferguson

“It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” So begins one of the best performance videos of the year, feeding off the visual history of artists ranging from Paula Abdul to Prince to Kate Bush. It fits into Monae’s continuing ArchAndroid narrative of a future dictatorship rebelled against only by artists, singers, and dancers. In an odd way, Monae’s wacky refraction of today’s protest movements reminds us of the crucial and unique role art has in influencing and shaping our society. Hers might be one of the most influential voices around, if only because the seriousness and urgency of her message is accompanied by so much performance and joy. It makes those moments she chooses to buckle down and teach all the more poignant.

#9: “When That Head Splits” – Esben and the Witch
directed by Rafael Bonilla, Jr.

Watching this makes me feel like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “This means something!” Damned if I know what, but it’s touching and sends chills up my spine. The crudity of its creature design belies a painstaking complexity in its stop-motion animation. I’d also note that Esben and the Witch’s Wash the Sins Not Only the Face is one of the most overlooked albums of 2013, and won my coveted “Best Scandinavian Band You’ve Never Heard Of Award.” They’re the very first non-Scandinavians to do that.

#8: “Hot Knife” – Fiona Apple
directed by P. T. Anderson

Welcome to P. T. Anderson’s masterclass on editing and lighting. Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) highlights Fiona Apple’s multiple vocal tracks by giving each its own distinct look: the competing backups are profiled in side panels, backlit in high-contrast black-and-white. The central chorus, Apple’s most intense performance, is introduced in a frontlit, black-and-white close-up that anchors us – both in auditory and visual senses – throughout the rest of the video. It evolves later as more vocal layers are added beneath it – we pull away to a medium shot and the coloration becomes deeply oversaturated by the conclusion.

As the song grows more layers, those backup profiles are again introduced, first frontlit and then later in silhouette. This last time they’re given lowlit schemes of muted orange and pale purple that complement – and lead your eye back to – the oversaturation of Apple’s intense performance at the center. With stoic profiles at the edge and emotion anchored to the center, additional layers interrupt where they can. Her pulsing timpani performance keeps pulling back to black-and-white. We end by drawing closer and closer to each performance, creating a visual intensity that reflects the song’s crescendo, until Anderson gives each visual and vocal its own send-off.

Essays could be done on this. Classes should be taught on this. I just launched an exploratory committee to start an experimental college based entirely around analyzing this video.

#7: “Without You” – Lapalux feat. Kerry Leatham
directed by Nick Rutter

Happening in a world that could only be invented by David Lynch, but wasn’t, this is a damning allegory for how we adjust our worlds to fit the expectations of those around us. Whether you view it as living life for someone else or as a metaphor for the treatment of outsiders, Rutter shows us the inevitable outcome of living out the values of others rather than developing our own.

#6: “Sacrilege” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
directed by Megaforce

We used to burn witches. We used to gang up on those less fortunate and blame them for the ill outcomes of our own bad decisions. We used to make scapegoats of women for the same things that men do. Now we just shame them in the media. Now we just blame their desire for rights to their own bodies for the mythical dissolution of American morals. Now we just block them out of the political process. We still burn witches, but now we just do it real civil-like.

#5: “Collider” – Jon Hopkins
directed by Tom Haines

A dance piece about the psychological impacts of being raped, playing out the sequence a thousand times in your head as attacker, as victim, as bystander. One vicious, searing, heartbreaking, violent, irrecoverable moment. The most important dance piece last year.

#4: “Like a Rolling Stone” – Bob Dylan
directed by Vania Heymann

This interactive video will require you to watch it off-site.

There’s no quantifying this one. An interactive video for a song that came out 49 years ago, which lets you flip from one reality show to the next to see familiar semi-celebrities lip synching their way through the classic rock song. You can sit on one channel the entire time – the shows go on as normal save for the lip synching – or flip constantly.

It allows the user to create narrative links and select the incongruities that speak to them, to assign meaning to the repetitious meaninglessness of reality TV. It redrafts “Like a Rolling Stone” as a blank slate for our own modern habits, and as such becomes a mirror on which to project our own self-criticisms. After the gimmick wears off, all we’re left with is a meditation on Dylan’s original song and the images that have become most recognizable in our own daily lives – images of false comforts and falser narratives on a TV screen.

#3: “Meltdown” – Ghostpoet
directed by Dave Ma

Two continuous shots enjoy one moment of intersection, creating one of the most powerful visual moments in recent memory. The video, combined with Ghostpoet’s hauntingly uncomfortable song about inhabiting a doomed relationship, replicated a moment we’ve all had – one in which we yearn for what we once had, but don’t reach for it because we’re afraid of losing something we know won’t last. It’s a weird artifact of human nature, and possibly the one we repeat the most in our lives.

#2: “You & I” – Local Natives
directed by Daniel Portrait with Kamp Grizzly

We can’t really tell you anything about this video without ruining it. We’ve shown it to about 20 people so far. They’ve each broken down by the end of it, not just crying but sobbing. None of us wants to do some deeper analysis on it. We don’t want to poke something we love so much.

#1: “Afterlife” – Arcade Fire
directed by Emily Kai Bock
(her 3rd appearance on this list)

Dreams are for lost opportunities, for testing out paths not taken, for expressing our fears and pangs of loss. I had a grandmother I never knew, not when I was old enough to form solid memories of her. Every once in a while, some dream-form of my father’s mother takes shape, guides me, reassures me, stands in the way of the things I fear most. Religion might have me believe she’s an angel. Psychology might have me believe she symbolizes some deeper, definable meaning. I believe it doesn’t matter either way. She or my subconscious would give me a clue if it mattered. It doesn’t. I just know what she does and what it means to me. Those personal meanings, those moments in dreams…that’s what Emily Kai Bock captures in “Afterlife.” – Gabriel Valdez

It’s funny because we all chose this as our #2 video. We whittled things down to a top 60. After that, we were blind to each other’s rankings. Cleopatra chose “Meltdown” by Ghostpoet because it was the most challenging. Gabe chose “You & I” by Local Natives because he’s a big sap. I chose “Collider” by Jon Hopkins because I couldn’t stop watching how the dancer translated a narrative of abuse. But we each chose “Afterlife” for our #2 video, and this gave it the best average. I’m happy it did. I’m not close with my family anymore. I was removed by a distant relative. That means “Afterlife” is a fantasy to me, but it’s a really lovely one to have. It makes me yearn for parents and religion other than the ones I had access to. It makes me miss some humbleness of childhood I never got. It’s like being an archaeologist or some sci-fi pioneer, watching another civilization through a membrane. I’m unable to grasp it, but seeing it is fascinating and it makes me angry and it makes me proud. – Vanessa Tottle

I took care of my grandparents for a very long time. I still check in on my grandmother regularly. She tells me stories about a different time when she grew up. I hear a lot about my grandpa, who passed away but was never really with it for the last decade of his life. “Afterlife” is like one of her stories. They’re completely different from my experiences, but sometimes when she talks to me it’s like having my grandpa back. I imagine he’s listening right next to me. When I’m in a hurry and I ask her to stop, I feel bad later on. I feel like I denied my grandpa a chance to sit next to me again and smile at my grandmother’s stories. I imagine he sits next to me when I watch “Afterlife.” I imagine that he understands how much I miss him and that we found a common story we can wordlessly share. – Cleopatra Parnell

Videos #20-11 ran on Thursday, April 10.
Videos #30-21 ran on Tuesday, April 8.

No Miley Here — 2013’s Best Music Videos, #30-21

You might wonder why we’re running a Best Music Videos series for 2013 in April of 2014. It wasn’t something I intended to do, but music videos remain my favorite form of short film. Call them the last bastion of the avant garde in American storytelling. Plus there’s dancing.

So I was upset when I recently looked at music sites’ choices for the best music videos of 2013. These awards used to be opportunities to highlight little-known artists and cleverly experimental filmmakers. A few years ago, Kanye West amused/upset the zeitgeist when he grabbed a microphone from Taylor Swift at MTV’s 2009 Video Music Awards and declared, “I’m going to let you finish, but…” What turned out to be a brilliant career move for Kanye overshadowed the fact that Best Female Video had come down to a plaintively cheesy Taylor Swift lullaby and an above-average, yet fairly standard, Beyonce dance video.

What did the experts declare the best music video of 2013? Well, British staple NME awarded their Music Video of the Year to the Eagulls for “Nerve Endings.” The video featured time-lapse photography of a pig’s brain rotting and being eaten by maggots, with other images washed over it.

Fantastic, Eagulls. You’ve recorded the equivalent of a fanfiction video for Nine Inch Nails 20 years ago and, like a lot of fanfiction, you missed why that imagery was used in the first place. I get it, the Eagulls are punk and their whole schtick is that their interpretation of the imagery doesn’t matter, with a light coat of flipping the bird to those who say punk’ll rot your brain. It’s cute, or as cute as rotting pig brains can be, but it’s a one-note joke, two decades derivative, and it doesn’t deserve to be video of the year.

Rolling Stone‘s top 10 was a similar travesty. Their argument for Vampire Weekend’s “Diane Young” was that it had a lot of music industry cameos. So do commercials. They also chose Atoms for Peace’s “Ingenue” because it has Radiohead’s Thom Yorke dancing in it. Both videos have cameos to get done, but neither has much of a point to make.

Worse yet, Rolling Stone chose two of the most inane videos I’ve ever seen in an attempt to attach themselves to those videos’ popularity. At #5, they chose Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” which is basically about a singer and his friends molesting nude women. Rolling Stone argues it’s really feminist deep down, because even though all they do is leer at topless women while Thicke sings about how they’re nothing but sex objects, they do it really obviously.

Then they chose Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” at #1, their argument being that – even though it’s a disaster – look at how much of a disaster it is! It’s like a flaming car wreck! Good job furthering the art, Rolling Stone. Their choices largely seemed to be made by how ironic their inclusions would look in a top 10. Feminism by way of molestation and good by way of being so bad it’s a disaster. Everyone stop trying to communicate insightful social messages and raw emotion. Just make something extra-disastrous. Rolling Stone has really got that irony thing down.

Spin was more consistent – at least while they were awarding “Blurred Lines” best video of the year, it included Miley Cyrus dry-humping a hammer in “Wrecking Ball” instead of “We Can’t Stop.”

My issue is that choosing the best music video of the year has turned into choosing which one made the most news. It’s choosing which celebrity you covered the most, not which video had the most creative energy or artistic merit. By that logic, we don’t need any of those sites to hand out awards – we just need Google Analytics.

In response to this, several of us sat down and watched nearly 400 music videos to come up with a top 30. Cleopatra Parnell and Vanessa Tottle helped to narrow the field and made the final rankings with me. Special thanks to Hayley Williams for additional suggestions.

Without further ado, #30-21 on the list. Please be aware that music videos disproportionately carry epilepsy warnings because of the tendency for quick edits and flashing lights.

Honorable Mention (we cheated one extra): “gun-shy” – Grizzly Bear
directed by Kris Moyes

The Gif-style editing, combining repeated actions together, will either annoy or hypnotize you. Personally, I tend toward the latter, and the more I watch it, the more engrossing it becomes. It’s a fantastically weird video that we all liked immensely, but couldn’t agree on giving a place in the list.

#30: “The Same Old Ground” – He’s My Brother She’s My Sister

He’s My Brother She’s My Sister just makes good, enjoyable blues folk music. Their glam rock style reflects Jack White’s style minus the egoism. Really, this is an energetic performance video, but sometimes being joyous and colorful is enough.

#29: “Lovers in the Parking Lot” – Solange
directed by Emily Kai Bock, Solange, Peter J. Brant

This is a low-energy, chilled out dance piece featuring Solange at closing time in a Houston mall. It reminds me a bit of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” featuring Christopher Walken – it’s just fun to watch, listen to, and there’s very little pretense. You’ll also notice co-director Emily Kai Bock’s name a lot in this top 30. That’s not a coincidence.

#28: “Despair” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
directed by Patrick Daughters

“Despair” is a song that thanks that feeling of helplessness for being a lifelong companion. Its video succeeds because of two crucial decisions. The first is in isolating Karen O’s vocal track to start the video. The song itself is a cathartic piece of music that takes a few listens to achieve its full impact, but a music video doesn’t always get those repeat viewings. Isolating Karen O before starting the song proper delivers the message point blank at the beginning.

The second decision was to film at the top of the Empire State Building. The location isn’t the building’s impressive tower itself – the band is instead filmed in front of the fences put up to stop people from jumping off the top. The encroaching morning over New York’s skyline, the arrival of the band, the crescendo of the music, and Karen O’s costume and energy changes each contribute to feeding the cathartic, triumphal energy of the song itself.

#27: “Horns Surrounding Me” – Julia Holter
directed by Angus Borsos, concept by Ramona Gonzalez

Combining the narrative cinematography style of David Lynch and bold art direction that echoes horror master Dario Argento is a solid recipe for a music video no one will get, but that is still fascinating. It fits the intent of surrealism like a glove, evoking curiosity and danger while sparking the kind of narrative connections that allow the viewer to edge out the director as owner of the story.

#26: “Reflektor” – Arcade Fire
directed by Anton Corbijn

“Reflektor” encourages a lot of debate. Its imagery is simultaneously weirder yet more literal than something more unabashedly surreal like “Horns Surrounding Me.” Its a wickedly fun blend, and the song is one of 2013’s best.

#25: “Loaded Gun” – Lightning Dust
directed by Zachary Rothman

This is the definition of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s composed of incredibly simple visual ideas. You’re going to wonder why it’s on the list until its powerful, central image is revealed. Then you’re going to call that friend of yours in the Tea Party and get in an argument.

#24: “Childhood’s End” – Majical Cloudz
directed by Emily Kai Bock

This is director Emily Kai Bock’s second appearance on the list already. Her video for “Childhood’s End” shows a mastery of storytelling and photographic presentation. I could go on and on comparing her framing to photographer Philip-Lorca diCordia or Hungarian director Bela Tarr, or I could just tell you that this is going to make you choke up big time.

#23: “This Place Was A Shelter” – Olafur Arnalds
directed by Adam Bedzsula and Erik Kocsis

What makes this video special is that the metaphor it’s describing to you and the metaphor you think you’re seeing are wholly different. It’s a twist – not a narrative one, but rather one in your own perception – that connects you to that powerful moment of loss that each of us undergoes at some point in our lives

#22: “Katachi” – Shogu Tokumaru
directed by Kijek and Adamski

OK, we’re done making you cry…for today. “Katachi” is a video made entirely using stop-motion animation and paper cutouts. It’s a visually inventive and joyful accomplishment.

#21: “Lillies” – Bat for Lashes
directed by Peter Sluszka

This is simply a celebration of growing into and trusting one’s own imagination. It features a ton of stop-motion animation and singer Natasha Khan forming bonds with giant muppets. It harkens back to Kate Bush’s influence on British music videos, and it’s a fun and touching video to witness.

Videos #20-11 will run on Thursday, April 10.
Videos #10-1 will run on Tuesday, April 15.