But wait! Ari herself has been taken captive! Will she… break free?! Yes, and then she will board a spaceship where Zedd is both captain and DJ.
“Brace yourself for something so fantastically fantastical that you’ll soil yourself from intergalactic excitement” reads part of the tongue-in-cheek Star Wars-style scroll that introduces Ariana Grande’s video for “Break Free.” The stakes in this outer space-based video are as high as Grande’s ponytail, as she uses her blaster to shoot down guards and free prisoners. The Australian electronic group’s mishmash of vocal samples is acted out as theater, with dueling therapists, chattering dentures, an old guy with a turtle body, and a ghost chorus comprising a visual representation both surreal and enduring.
Music videos can sometimes feel unimaginative when they simply translate a song’s lyrics into a four-minute clip, but for the Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist,” the literal approach also happened to be the wildest one. The Avalanches, “Frontier Psychiatrist” (dir.
Landing somewhere between Lost Highway and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “Pyramids” is a dusty, neon-drenched vision quest that’s hard to shake. Opening with color bars, liquor shots, and gun blasts, this Nabil-directed 8-minute odyssey follows a zonked-out Frank Ocean as he zips across the desert on a motorcycle, giggles his way through a strip club, and runs into John Mayer in the middle of nowhere for a woozy, bluesy guitar solo. It all starts here: Director Sam Brown capturing the once-in-a-generation vocalist at simultaneously her most vulnerable and her most powerful, unclear if the wreckage surrounding her is representative of her internal turmoil, or a direct result of it.
The room full of glasses of water gently quaking to the bass drum heartbeat of “Rolling in the Deep,” like Jurassic Park to the tenth power, was appropriately foreboding for what Adele’s 21 ended up being, a commercial behemoth the likes of which was supposed to have long gone extinct. The smartly staged and creatively choreographed one-take clip is as unpolished, campy, and full of energy as the Scissors themselves. Vern Moen, 2012)Īna Matronic, Jake Shears, and the rest of the crew served up a brilliant DIY instructional dance video for their unlikely viral hit, which became their third No. Scissor Sisters, “Let’s Have a Kiki” (dir. The minimalist production, which memorably featured Shakira dancing alone without props, musicians or other dancers, was enough to catapult her to international stardom. The video for Shakira’s first English-language hit is not her most seen those honor belong to the Maluma-featuring “Chantaje” and World Cup anthem “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” both with around two billion YouTube views. But “Whenever, Wherever” was the video that introduced Shakira’s swiveling hips to the world, as well as her “small and humble” breasts. His love interest’s shotgun-wielding father doesn’t approve, but in the end, let’s just say he’s behooved to sympathize. Our small town teenaged protagonist is a sort of Napoleon Dynamite with - get this! - deer-like antlers, an effective stand-in for just about any condition that could have left a young Fall Out Boy feeling socially alienated. Matt Lenski, 2005)įrom Under the Cork Tree’s lead single was much of the world’s introduction to these former hardcore punks from the Chicago burbs, and for their first video with a big ol’ Island Records budget, they indulged their mission statement: a full-on underdog’s folk tale.
Fall Out Boy, “Sugar We’re Goin Down” (dir. See our staff favorites below, with a YouTube playlist of all available clips at the bottom, and get lost in the recent greatest hits of an artform that continues to be among popular culture’s most vital.ġ00. This week, Billboard is reflecting on the evolution of the music video with a week’s worth of content about the form’s past, present and future - starting, today, with a list of our staff picks for the 100 greatest music videos of the century so far, essentially telling the story of the form during its middle-age period, and a potential crisis ultimately averted. This Is a New Golden Age for Music Videosīut of course, it’s been an interesting ride for the music video to get to this point: From the tail end of MTV’s peak to the introduction of YouTube and the minting of the viral star to the rise of social media and the countless different forms the video can now take in 2018.