The year's best music videos are as free, utopian and radical as the musicians themselves
A useful guide from Creative Review of the best music videos of 2019, and Thrillist citing their top 73 so far. (We like to find videos that shake the frames of values and reality—or inspire great action within them).
Now, this is the music business - so there can be both silly animal-liberation revenge fantasies, and plain daftness about space dogs. Not to mention too many drugs, clearly not working.
But a few of the CR and Thrillst videos are like concentrated shots of a few of this year’s grand themes - particularly youth’s protesting instincts, their alienation from the working and occupational pathways expected of them, their growing disgust with the polluting and toxic society their elders have left them.
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At the top of the blog is the video from Powder - New Tribe:
From CT: “Created by Japanese studio AC-bu, this kitsch animated music video for Japanese DJ Powder’s house track New Tribe is a hypnotic watch. The video’s meaning is open to interpretation, but essentially it traces Powder’s personal evolution from a 9-to-5 Tokyo office worker to a bona fide DJ travelling the world, embodied in the video as a little cheeky peach.”
We’d also say it partakes of the Hong Kong protests, with street lasers flashing and confrontations with state forces.
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Same shit, nothin' new (Yo, yo)
Got a job I gotta do (Yo)
I get down and dirty, too (Yo)
What it is? What it do? (Yo)
Same shit, nothin' new (Yo)
Everything is alienated in this work place - not just the rapper Tierra Whack, but the animated potatoes she diversely chops up, fed to large tubers in fine dining conditions. This reminds us of the Afro-Surrealism of the movie Sorry To Bother You - again, another protest against the modern work-ethics of our age.
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A powerful video from Strangers on a Plane, “All My Life”, which works on the metaphor of our lives wrapped in plastic - played for emotions and relationships here, but obviously with an environmental reference.
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James Blake, “Can’t Believe The Way We Flow". A startling, superfast montage of intense life moments in 21st century UK. Properly challenging - from the transcendental to the excremental.