Alright let's just get down to it!! I just watched this video for the first time today and think it's absolutely amazing! Over time my enthusiasm may cool, but as of right now I feel pretty comfortable calling it 2019's best. Not for lack of competition either! Plenty of treasures soon to come. However, Rasga gives me so much of what I want from MVs. Its acid-drenched filters recall BRTHR's videos for Travis Scott and Kali Uchis, while the overexposed whites in dark places tap into some of my deepest, longest-standing aesthetic predilections. That grungy, sweaty, libidinal energy is like shorthand for the animating spirit I often cherish in art. Less charitably, I've seen it described as "heroin chic" (in reference to Gaspar Noe's cover art for Sky Ferreira's Everything is Embarrassing), and I can't deny there's some truth to that. But emphasis is key: the style here isn't stylish squalor, it's overcranked euphoria. Images bleed into each other like synapse-fried memories of last night against a beat that clangs, throbs, gallops its way into your ears. Urias' punchy Portuguese provides the barest structure, though even her voice gets swallowed by the uproar much of the time. There's simply no containing the riot Rasga unleashes: once it's loose, you're caught between bass and syncopation in an audiovisual assault. This MV and its accompanying song are something rare and special, a distillation of why dance music is the kind I love the most.
Twice - Fancy
So here's where I stand with Twice. I really liked Like Ooh-Ahh way back when it first came out, really disliked Cheer Up, and have struggled to get onboard with them ever since. Their other songs are, for the most part, fine; some are even quite good. Yet I could never work up the innate excitement that came naturally for me with WJSN and Red Velvet. I never felt any attachment to their immense success, least of all when groups like my beloved Dal*shabet were falling apart in the background. Thus they've never had a place on MV lists until this year, with the undeniable Fancy. Watching the video now reveals that it's a little lackluster, but there are some nice moments, like that final post-cinematic rollercoaster ride. The customary K-Pop charisma is also rather lacking (except for the shot of that member above, whose ambiguous affect is strangely compelling). Really though, all they had to do was not drop the ball with a song this good.
This, on the other hand, gives me a lot to enjoy. Although there's an abundance of visual information communicated in Pinky Star, several motifs stand out. The staccato rhythms of the (brilliant) chorus are mirrored in the video's exacting formalism. While the first verses are constricted by a tight aspect ratio, the more delicate bridge gets an expansion, which also allows for a better view of this fantastical environment. I hate to just call everything CGI "post-cinematic," but I do feel it's worth considering how the visually impossible worlds of K-Pop videos create a new reality of magic and artifice. This castle in the clouds reminds me of Super Mario games -- or, even more specifically, Wario World, though I can't recall exactly what level. The connection is no coincidence: post-cinema draws heavily on the spatial infinitude of gamespace. Where analog cinema focused on the indexical recording of time, post-cinema acknowledges the alterability of everything contained within moving images. Time can be lengthened beyond the camera's "recording," and space can be elaborated through entirely digital environments. In Pinky Star, the GWSN girls' movements serve as explorations of their computer-generated stage. Most often we see them framed within the frame, performing stereotyped actions, or navigating spatial dislocations exaggerated by the camera's rigidity. They are at their freest when singing the chorus on the castle's platform, an endless horizon stretching out behind them.
P.S. While I don't like this MV quite as much, both the video and its song are still quite good, and the MV's clear similarities with Pinky Star seem to suggest this is a house style.
(Also, I just found out GWSN has no relationship to WJSN, despite the very similar names? I'd assumed they were like a sub-unit who performed in other territories...also also, the pink-haired rapper gives off intense Faye Wong vibes here)
Chemical Brothers - Got to Keep On
Not much to say about this except how well it all comes together. At first it just seems like we'll be enjoying good dancers doing their thing for a really nice song. Then things start changing, and that break comes, and it becomes strange, unsettling even....until, suddenly, all is normal again, the pleasure principle back in operation. Nothing groundbreaking, just a well-made MV that pushes its boundaries enough to excite, all conducted with Michel Gondry's tactile touch.
A$AP Rocky - Kids Turned Out Fine
I love this, but I don't love it all evenly. Let me see if I can explain what it does to me. In the song's first minute, that chiming guitar line and the singer's gentle voice stoke a warm glow inside me. It harkens back to some now-distant but very fond time in my life, maybe to do with childhood but in addition, almost certainly, a drug-induced state of mind. Some time when I felt affection for all the things and people around me, friends, lovers, maybe even family...That soft assertion, that the kids turned out fine, feels like a corrective to all the worrying, the disapproval, and the challenges we young people faced growing up. It was never a sure thing, but we're here now. Dexter Navy's visualization acts like a scrolling tableau over times of love and friendship, but it's not all poems to youthful freedom. There are moments of abjection too, like the girl lying dazed as she sparks a bong hit, and the other girl crying alone in her undergarments. Starkly underlit, seemingly with a single light source, these feel like flashbulb memories of the worst times of your life, emotions as vivid upon reflection as they were in the raw. A$AP Rocky's reminiscence at the end, of love cut short by changing preferences, speaks to the pain counterbalancing those happy days spent in the sun. Violence and police misconduct also intrude upon the reverie, suggesting that the kids may be alright, but the world around them sure isn't. There are definitely some larger suggestions percolating about altered states, ways of seeing, and how images affect us, but none of that really connects with me. The zoetrope and meta-filmic breakdown, for instance, just feel like grasping for meaning. But every time I start the song again, I fall into a fugue of comfort and melancholy, grieving the way things so precious to me have faded away, yet somehow finding peace in reconciling the distance between who I was and who I am now.
Toro y Moi - Ordinary Pleasures
This is hardly the best video on the list, but its focus on process makes for a nice little snapshot of creativity in motion. I've never listened to Toro y Moi before and don't feel like I need to start now. Being more interested in MVs than music proper means developing a touch-and-go relationship to things you don't usually sample. But you know I can't resist a song whose key lyric is "maximize all the pleasure" -- and which does, in its own way, attempt to do so.
(It also pairs well with Kids Turned Out Fine as an exercise in laidback charm)
Red Velvet - Zimzalabim
Extremely satisfying as the kind of thing people let Red Velvet get away with as they keep churning out hits the rest of the time. I don't know what to say; you're either with this or you aren't. Some say it's haphazard/obnoxious, but for me the song's chaos and the MV's indelible images are a big part of what I love about Red Velvet. That they can balance their Russian Roulettes with their Zimzalabims is what makes them, still, the most essential girl group currently active.
V-Pop can be a little frustrating sometimes. While I love its sleek, crisp productions -- and am deeply thankful to it for keeping alive the maximalism that'd leeched away from K-Pop during the Bieberwave years -- the scene seems to advance in fits and starts. Tóc Tiên, its crowning gem, isn't without flaws; Bảo Thy is wonderful but prone to disappearance; and the one-hit wonders promise great things, then never follow up. With that said, Bích Phương has stealthily emerged as maybe the most dependable V-Pop purveyor. Though not as hard-edged as some of her peers, Phương's softer presence is more than capable of unifying her body of work, often allowing for a more sorrowful tone than that of the many (great) party anthems. Take this one, for example. The video commits to excess from the start and just keeps piling on, yet underneath its theatricality is a lament for something unclear, true to her downbeat style but elusive in its specifics. One of the year's subtlest enigmas.
Sampa the Great - Final Form
What could I add that isn't already in the MV? She earns that superlative and then some.
Right from the beginning, this was a powerful contender for best of '19. While there's plenty going on in this MV, its ingredients are fairly simple: spinning wheel, sunglasses, squad of dancers, speckled skirt and floor; swooping synths, soft voice, syncopation, and sublime piano melody (alliteration mostly unintended!). The relative simplicity may seem out-of-place compared to the intensive post-cinema of other MVs present. But I'm just absolutely transfixed by this one. It's a special kind of MV where every word, every note, every image and cut build into a rhythm that I come to know by heart over obsessive rewatches. Producer Kenmoshi Hidefumi strips away the fussiness of his Wednesday Campanella productions and goes straight for rave-inspired rhapsody, attaining ecstatic release in the segment running from that piano line to those yelped vocal samples. Easily Top 3 of the year for me.
Hatchie - Stay With Me
Watching and listening to this MV feels like being set head-to-toe on fire with all the love lost in your life. Scalding infernos of anguish, loneliness, and sorrow you thought had sizzled into ash long ago, the concentrated despair of all those bygone nights spent lying in pools of your own tears (I had to hold back tears just watching the MV now, months after first seeing it). A shotgun blast of every fading memory made suddenly ballistic. Bleeding desire and yearning for someone who can never know how much love you felt, blistered by the heat of it but holding on anyway, because letting go would hurt even more. A throbbing heart that beats for no one, or the shadow of someone you used to know, whose shadow you only see from the corner of your eye, hiding in the back of your mind, years/miles/lifetimes away but momentarily close, closer than the people you know best, perhaps better even than you know yourself, there in all your most precious remembrances, in all your bottomless regrets, impossible then as now to turn away from, a face more familiar than your own, where all the world's magic and mystery once seemed to reside, whose smiles and giggles and whispers of love have outlasted near every image and word and sound that you've come across in your life before and since. And you the frozen planet slipped out of orbit from this beautiful shining star.
Where does our love go when we're no longer here to hold onto it? Does it fall away into entropy, like stardust clusters in zero gravity? Or will it keep flickering in obsidian blackness, light-years away but still visible to other galaxies across time and space, illusions of past realities yet to dissipate? Will anyone remember, or care? At least we remembered, and we cared.
Tierra Whack - Unemployed
I think Whack World is another example of something I missed or didn't process fully enough for last year's list. It's a lot to take in, and repeat viewings have helped, so mea culpa on neglecting that in '18. Well it's '19 now, and Tierra Whack returns with another disturbingly visualized rap experiment. Švankmajer feels like the operative influence here with its LITTLE OTIK couch potato, and the commingling of domestic and reproductive labor feels simpatico with OTIK's surreal portrait of motherhood. It seems like every year reveals startling new dimensions to Whack's artistry, so I greatly anticipate seeing what she has in store for 2020.
YG - Stop Snitchin
Big CW for anti-black slavery and violence...this is one of the year's more challenging works, I'd argue moreso than clipping's entry below. That one at least directs righteous anger toward white oppressors, an understandable target. Stop Snitchin articulates a miserable congruence between snitching, weakness, and lack of masculinity, drawing a line all the way back to enslaved Africans who informed on their peers. I'm unsure whether or how often that happened, but YG's video depicts it like an original sin still manifesting itself today, the most contemptible betrayal he can imagine. There's not much more I can say, other than describing the troubled currents that course through this MV. It's pretty clear as is.
Björk - tabula rasa
I've yet to really get into Björk. I listened to her first album a while ago and found some songs I liked there -- Crying, There's More to Life Than This -- but there's a lot more about her that I don't know. What I do admire is that she's managed to become an artist with few limits, so committed to evolution that a grassroots following will treasure (and subsidize!) all her audio and visual experiments. It's only right that she end up on this list with this post-cinematic self-portrait. Yet the MV's CGI isn't its sole noteworthy element. Behind the graphics, Björk vocalizes a moving and fairly direct plea to end the patriarchal drama of sons and fathers so that women can build something new instead. I don't think it's hyperbolic to suggest that, through her art, she's shown us how wonderful that could be.
Björk - losss
Two disembodied faces circle each other in constant metamorphosis, voices overlapping, singing a dialogue in the dark chamber that surrounds them. It's mesmeric where tabula rasa was outward-directed, and while there's no need to determine the "better" MV, I'm won over by losss' intimate beauty.
Don Toliver - No Idea
Doon Kanda - Polycephaly (EPILEPSY WARNING)
It's 2019, and therefore quite a while since Young Thug broke out onto the US rap scene with his eccentric and varied vocal style. And though his stardom remains an interesting development in and of itself, I believe we've reached a point of oversaturation, both in Thugger's own prolificacy and his string of imitators. I clearly remember the day I first listened to Skepta's 2019 album, heard a stateside rapper guest on one of the tracks, and thought to myself, "This sounds like any-and-every other late-10s US rapper." Skepta's voice and flow are instantly recognizable on any song featuring him; the guest sounded like his main two influences were Young Thug and Migos, two of this decade's biggest and most influential rap acts.
If I were more familiar with US rap, perhaps I'd have a more nuanced understanding of how it's evolved over the past 10 years, helping me to better contextualize that juxtaposition. But to my untrained ear, I could only hear a style I've grown to like less and less by the year. No disrespect to the rapper himself, of course. I just have my own particular biases in this area. So, wrapping up this preamble, I was quite surprised to find how much I responded to Don Toliver's No Idea. Toliver's falsetto is especially beautiful, but I really like the R&B psychedelia enlivening his raps, all fluidly layered over a beat that's both flighty and rhythmic. Jesse Kanda's woozy video draws on Toliver's heavy-lidded, barely-there, stumbling presence to suggest a whirlwind of mixed emotions, smartly realizing there can be as much expressive value in fluorescent lighting as trendy neon. An attractive package that's familiar enough in broad strokes yet well above-average in its stylistic choices.
Doon Kanda - Polycephaly (EPILEPSY WARNING)
SECOND WARNING: EPILEPSY RISK: A nice song by a music act that features Jesse Kanda, accomplished director of many great MVs. The video gives a partially-submerged view of the sun, rippling like the song it visualizes. I didn't find the flickering light too unbearable myself, but obviously that's not my call.
Chung Ha - Gotta Go
Lovely follow-up to the unbeatable Roller Coaster. The video's pleasant if unremarkable, but it's just so nice to see Chung Ha again. If later single Snapping is any indication, there still exists a real risk of a prolonged sophomore slump, everything falling far short of the early peak...I hope she continues in this vein instead.
Normani - Motivation
An ideal pairing of director and star. Dave Meyers'* camera is matched beat for beat by Normani's inexhaustible charisma, their interplay choreographed to perfection as if this all were just another day in the big city. I missed what looks like a small fatphobic joke the first time around, but otherwise this MV is about as faultless as they come.
*I'm unfamiliar with co-director Daniel Russell, so I'm writing about the video in the context of the director whose work I know better. But I also don't want to write him out of his own work, so let this stand as an acknowledgement that he was surely a big part of this tremendous success.
Perfume - Future Pop
I downloaded Perfume's newest album to take with me to Japan this summer and, regrettably, fell asleep the only time I listened to it there. I've loved this group since a transformative experience with their song GLITTER in 2012, one which was instrumental in winning me over to the poptimist cause. They've only gotten better with each successive release; 2016's COSMIC EXPLORER has an incredible string of hits lasting almost the entire album, about as consistently great as pop albums can be. I'll be sure to check out Future Pop more closely sometime soon. Until then, there's this excellent video, which lightly animates the Perfume trio into a digitized world befitting the title. It was hard to pick just four frames from this one! The whole MV is meticulously designed, a near-future (2030) speculative diagram of what Japan could someday become, all straight lines, hard edges, and gadget-saturated. The (p)optimism is notable in a time when trite dystopias have degraded the very idea of future-oriented thinking, taking perverse comfort that things will always be as bad as they are now, our present misery just slightly enhanced by new technology. Leave it to Japan to actually find the joy of living in an advanced urban environment, for remembering the future as a place in constant, active construction (neatly visualized in Future Pop's evolving digital landscapes). Buoyed by Yasutaka Nakata's pop-DnB production, this MV charms me more and more every time I return to it.
James Massiah - Natural Born Killers (Ride for Me)
On the flipside, there is one future dystopia that can't be imagined thoroughly enough: climate change. I'm fond of using Tim Morton's term 'hyperobject' in my writing as an evocative, poetic way to describe things larger than words really capture. But returning it to its place of origin for a moment, the hyperobject rightly belongs to climate change, or global warming specifically. There are so many people who have no idea how bad things are going to get -- including me, and I consider myself more-than-usually concerned with this unavoidable future. Climate change is perhaps the fullest expression of my negative outlook on life. Conditions are actively being worsened by people with power, against all noble ideas of collective responsibility and human goodwill. There is no reason to think that this will stop, or even that things won't get worse than they already are. It's a rapidly cascading disaster that will unspool itself with gargantuan pressure in wave after wave (literally, probably) upon the face of a collapsing planet. Denial is ubiquitous, but not in the sense of denying that catastrophes are imminent. People know this, they expect the worst, yet they don't act, because a hyperobject is too enormous to confront through individual action, and thus it demobilizes the supposedly rational actor. Climate change outscales the human imagination by multiple orders of magnitude, the proverbial elephant that can only be measured through one's tiny hands. Again, I say this not to exempt myself as the lone observer who truly understands the severity, but to implicate myself in a species-wide complacency that seems impossible to shake off. While the onus is not on people without power to make structural changes far exceeding their abilities, changes in consciousness must also occur if an existential threat of this nature is to be somehow faced.
James Massiah's Natural Born Killers MV speculates about a future already lost to humankind. The tipping point has been passed, and life is melting away into nothingness. A blazing white sun radiates its heat onto a city filled, pointedly, by people of color, who will be the real victims of the capitalist West's predatory delay. Sweat drips off flaccid bodies in desperate need of relief, but indoors is only a smaller chamber of the furnace. Like in some cursed Tsai Ming-Liang film, the city's rusted infrastructure acts as a relic of a disappeared civilization. We follow one man's stumbling progress through this hell as a hypnotic groove gives illusory momentum. James Massiah's echoing verses drift through the haze and back out again, leaving us in thrall to a looping instrumental as insistent as the sun's rays. The tone is almost wistful, perhaps memorializing these last stragglers and their futile struggle, perhaps acknowledging a better world that never arrived. We only have this one now, and everything's dissolving into a hot primordial sludge. We won't even have ourselves anymore by the time the sun's through with us.
Clipping - Blood of the Fang
This feels like the only possible follow-up to the terror evoked by James Massiah's. Densely allusive, Blood of the Fang takes on a painful legacy of black suffering and rebellion, calling on names of leaders past to give fierce urgency to the present. Some of the citations invite scrutiny -- Eldridge Cleaver feels like an odd inclusion on a list featuring Angela Davis -- but the volley has an aesthetic force that's hard to deny in the moment. Over thumping beats and roiling waves of low-end, Daveed Diggs raps to establish a hard-won clarity under the looming threat of bloody darkness. His commanding presence recalls the force and focus of his superb contributions in BLINDSPOTTING, a film made in tandem with Clipping collaborator and MV champion Carlos Lopez Estrada. I was a big fan of that one last year, and the Clipping project has produced some outstanding music videos as well. Maybe 2020's the year I start exploring their discography more seriously.
Travis Scott - Highest in the Room
Travis Scott's low-key persona meshes interestingly with the tripped-out MVs for which he's become famous. Here as in Goosebumps, Scott seems like a mere observer to the hallucinations happening around him, drifting through a series of strange visions that feel as if they've come from unknown corners of his mind, perhaps even a reality altogether different from our own. As good as the song was, much of Goosebump's success owes to BRTHR's direction, which proved to be more than a one-trick feat in Kali Uchis' Like a Stranger. But it would be a mistake to write Travis Scott out of his own aesthetic predilections. None of his MVs would exist without his input and approval, and this is most evident with Highest in the Room, co-directed by Scott himself with the seemingly infallible Dave Meyers. If not quite as inspired as Goosebumps, Highest in the Room still offers an engaging variety of digital trickery for fans of Scott who've come to expect nothing less from the dazed, recessive affect created by his music and MV forays.
Ross from Friends - Epiphany
Wiley - My One (feat. Tory Lanez, Kranium, Dappy)
One of this year's great musical pleasures was catching up with one of last year's: Ross from Friends, a producer whose ironic moniker belies the vast wells of feeling summoned up by his music. 2018's Family Portrait, Ross' debut studio album, is just one miracle after another of warm, rhythmic, reverberating production that lights the listener up from inside. He has some kind of preternatural skill at making electronic music organic, at making complexity intuitive, at distilling emotion from stray snippets of sound, melody, and vocal samples. Listen to the voice billowing through Epiphany and feel how it hints at some nameless, mystical state of being for just one example among many. The MV itself is an accomplishment of extreme subtlety, built out of realistic environments just a bit too perfect, a bit too smooth to exist in our world. The camera charts a course through Epiphany's mysterious complex on an unknown mission, arriving at last in a glowing, forested mountainside that's also just too beautiful to be real. It's telling that this deceptive MV is more attuned to the post-cinematic present than most 2019 feature films; for those paying attention, the reward is a delicate sublimity that seems impossible to describe, but sweetly enveloping all who are open to it.
Wiley - My One (feat. Tory Lanez, Kranium, Dappy)
I feel like ending this big long post on a high note. Not out of any reflexive need for positivity or Christian-derived uplift, but just because I want something thrilling to round out everything I've rounded up here. I'm also disappointed this is the only showing grime has on this list, and not even a proper grime song at that! But Wiley's earned enough grime cred to last several lifetimes, and I can't argue when the results are so wonderful. It took me a few watches of this joyous video to realize the second guest artist isn't actually in it, that his verses are artfully supplemented by shots of that great dance crew. More conspicuous is the title credit absence of the female vocalist singing My One's chorus, as the Jukebox writers pointed out a while back. She's the secret weapon who shouldn't be secret, the jubilant center that holds all the other parts together. But taken as it is, My One is still a welcome gift from Wiley, even if the Caribbean-styled album it seemed to be announcing hasn't yet materialized. He can take his time though. I'll be happy whenever it gets here.
(Little personal sidenote: in the MV, Wiley looks as if he's at the indoor waterfall in Singapore I visited this summer! I can't guess where this place actually is, especially if it's somehow in the UK, so I like to just project my memory and imagine it is Singapore after all.)
But wait! There might be more! Not only has the Jukebox brought out a big batch of new year-end entries, but Shaviro has also posted a list of his favorite '19 MVs, including a bunch I haven't seen. Already my primary sources when it comes to finding current MVs, I thought I'd try to scan those new arrivals for any late contenders worth adding to my own list, but time's running out, and the prospect is rather daunting. So let's consider this one a wrap, and I'll put up a place-holder post where I can add any new discoveries if I feel the motivation. For now, enjoy! By the time another year passes, so too will an entire decade have ended, with another well underway; see you then and there!!
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