In My Head: Music Videos

Music videos can have a dream-like magic few other forms of art can. Here are some to watch. | March 10, 2015

It is so easy to churn out numbered lists of things that the form has become one of the internet’s junk foods. And yet, my head is full of them, all those memories and facts, and if this blog has any purpose it is to vocalize the contents of that place. So, a compromise: I present a list, but keep the words to single sentences that avoid the necessary obvious elaboration so easy to produce.

Bjork

My favorite music video of all time - the energy and dissonance of the music brilliantly and simply captured in physical reality.

Tribal, psychedelic, beautiful, simple, silly - brilliant.

"It's like Karma Sutra meets Industrial Robotics" - unnervingly clean and dirty, perhaps too simple but clearly memorable.

LCD Soundsystem

Music videos have the potential to be short films that capture the spirit of the artist and the song, and this does both fantastically.

The choreographed moves of OK Go are fun, but how often have you seen choreographed chaos?

Radiohead

Probably my favorite work by Michael Gondry and one of my favorite uses of a single take -mind and reality and memories and the present and the future all at once like in nothing else.

The earliest music video I can remember going back to over and over and over again; it does the song justice, no easy feat.

Presumably because of the lighting, this being black and white just feels so purely right.

(House of Cards, Karma Police, Paranoid Android, Just, Wolf At the Door…)

Arcade Fire

Courtesy of Spike Jonze, another perfect music-video-short-film; just like the song, it manages to hit the same depths every time.

The best music-video-short-film I have seen, and the most emotionally resonant on this list.

David Lynch

For those who can find themselves utterly absorbed in the images of a projector when sitting in a dark room, unaware of the existence of the room or even themselves.