#21. “Yonkers” / Tyler, the Creator [2011]

There’s nothing quite like a proper introduction. When done just right, they can offer up their product as an inaugural act, ripe for unsuspecting audiences, a new backdrop for outrage of all sorts—for example: eating a roach, immediately vomiting it back up, and hanging yourself with a noose on camera, all while singing about Adventure Time and stabbing Bruno Mars in his goddamn esophagus. 

This (sorta-)single-shot announces Odd Future (OFWGKTA) as the heirs of a particular moment. Tyler and co. arrive already hoarse, hollering into the burgeoning 2010s, hijacking late night shows and brandishing this brutal anthem, already soaked in their soon-to-be signature catalytic controversy. They arrive with a brand already tailor-made to offend, a mosh pit overrunning your dividers, coming for your clutched pearls. They arrive perfectly fitted to the moment, the media, the memed merchandise and meteoric virality that would balloon into a definitional early-decade zeitgeist. 

And yet, still, one decade and several fundamental artistic reinventions later, insiders refuse to disclose whether he really ate the bug. 

#20. “Toxic” / Britney Spears [2004]

To watch a Britney (bitch) video from the early naughts is to submit to a slightly different set of physics. Trying too hard to decipher them might leave you bruised, battered, suddenly bald, or worse. Try instead to take them as they are: schizophrenic but sexy, off-balance but nearly-nude, senseless but compelling; and, ultimately—as her videos romp variously through Mars, C-Suites, and high schools—still inescapable in the modern mega-pop landscape.

In this video that I have chosen, you will see: a singular achievement in airplane cinematography; four outfits, three hair colors, two modes of transportation, one murder, and countless (also somehow overly-sexualized) lazers; Britney jumping out of and then...back onto?...an in-motion jet; and a mile-high makeout session in one of the plane’s stalls between Britney and, let’s be honest, a pretty hefty middle-management type dude who okay Britney then rips his face off to reveal a substantially hunkier dude underneath, who she then robs. 

Oh, and the titular “toxicity” in question may or may not refer to a separate mysterious hunk/assassinee, “Toxic Industries” HQs, an obliquely-implicated Hollywood Complex writ-large, or even Britney herself. Or maybe you, the viewer, or something, or the very act itself of ranking such videos or overanlyzing what is basically frivolous. Who’s to say.

Think “Mission Impossible” homage, but on Britney’s bewildering terms—just don’t overthink it. 

#19. “No Handlebars” / Flobots [2007]

Just between us, I’ve ended up getting far fewer animated videos into this Objective Ranking than I anticipated; it falls to me here, then, to advocate for the form: imaginative, frequently bizarre, even less hinged than its live-action counterpart. When great, they rank among the most unbounded creations of an already-unbounded genre. Check out other offerings from Flying Lotus, or any of these by the Gorillaz, for the warped or the stoned.   

Among the millions who watched Flobots’ dystopic 2007 addition to the genre was my own dad (Paul), after inexplicably downloading five (and only five) music videos onto his iPod classic (hulking and antiquated and occasionally hijacked by his children): five radiant and random videos that worked their way into my fragile youthful psyche, for better or worse, and this one here as the twisted vanguard. 

Yes: every one of the five has made it into this list; no: I will not apologize for my childhood impressionability or the continual partiality undermining this wholly unreliable list—though I can at least bring you along to the seared creases of my way-back soft tissue onto which these meandering things are branded. Besides, your having made it this far proves that you’re at least a little willing to tolerate a casual abandonment of temperate journalism.  

In sixth grade, I submitted this video for an English class assignment intended to encourage the close-reading of song lyrics. To my great surprise, my analysis was chosen to be presented to the class, alongside its video. I can see now that the repetitive screaming of “I can end the planet in a holocaust” was, admittedly, jarring. But the blurry, low-budget tale surrounding that minor threat does much more than concern teachers, I still contend, as it follows two friends tumbling down increasingly divergent monotone lives: each trying their best to do their best but unable to pull out of their own momentum, careening towards preordained logics like a bike gone out of control and you’ve forgotten you ever had hands to steer it with at all.

The class was dead quiet after the video finished. Like, not even put together enough to mock me. We really don’t need to linger on this. 

My unflagging devotion to this video almost got me red-flagged as a psychological risk and I present it to you now without further comment.

#18. “PYNK” / Janelle Monáe [2018]

Where were you in 2018, Dear Reader, when Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer” briefly stalled the earth’s rotation? How severe was your whiplash? And what position exactly did you assume on the edge of your seat to witness the rest of Janelle’s “dirty, world-dominating” year? 

Wherever you were, in whatever condition you survived the impact, its aftermath went on to overwhelm innocent onlookers and dominate charts and can be pretty well approximated by the glitter-throttled emotional experience of watching this video.

Sometimes, every part of an ensemble aligns just right in order to drive home a unifying point. In this case, actors, director, wardrobe, casting, choreography, production, and oh my god the saturation team are here to tell you: Janelle doesn’t care about your comfort. This is bare (!) defiance, told in shades of… well. 

In this desert, no pink is turned away as too pink. No metaphor is avoided as too heavy-handed; each hand is just given extra nail polish and made to slap an ass or two. I only wish that O’Keefe had survived to see it—though it probably would have killed her on the spot and we’d be right back where we started. We’ll just have to make do.

#17. “Sicko Mode feat. Drake” / Travis Scott [2018]

The quintessential rap video consists of the following: three to five interchangeable shots of a rapper lip-syncing their way through different arrangements of jewelry, cars, and women, each treated as equally fungible objects of display; a deck of shots that it shows within thirty seconds but continues cycling through for a few more excessive minutes; and finally a few shots of Beats headphones and Cristal champagne to cover the overhead.

This selection joins the ranks of standouts that define themselves in opposition to that mold. Its bravado runs curiously deep, like an undertone of a much more expensive champagne that someone had slipped in with the promo stuff, its innocuous creativity tucked under the trappings of a typical Drake-headed blockbuster.

Memes aside, try watching this video and “I Get The Bag feat. Migos” / Gucci Mane [2017] back to back. Compare, contrast, etc; notice that while both bedeck themselves in in A-List rappers and scantily-clad setpieces, both purport to be legitimate rap videos as we have come to expect, the divergence becomes clear as you turn away from Takeoff flaccidly tossing some fake c-notes around as he tries to jump-cut enough times to make it through his ghostwritten verse.

You, the esteemed viewer, take note as dozens of unique shots regenerate throughout Travis Scott’s phantasmic Houston, hardly ever repeating in their haste to warp into the next. You can tell that there is more to stuntin’ than meets the eye, and—crucially—that the best music videos understand themselves to be the perfect medium to demonstrate this.

And it goes without saying that Xanax should never be recreationally abused under any circumstances, pre-flight or otherwise.

#16. “Work It” / Missy Elliott [2002]

Hip-hop just cannot be traced with any seriousness through our ongoing 21st century without barreling headfirst into Missy Elliott. She drips from the club-pops and baggy jeans, percolates along with the (equally ongoing) ascent of femme rap, and blankets the early 2000s and all that emerged from them with industry-etching videography. 

Missy approaches her videos with a blatant disregard—even contempt—for your sensibilities and precedents. This particular offering takes it even further than most in alchemizing the feel of rap at that moment, warping it, turbocharging it, putting its thang down and flipping and reversing it. 

Sweatsuits and breakdancing may never have regained the heights they reached here; perhaps for the best. 

Either way: all hip-hop videos since have flowed through the ruts made by Missy’s seismic intent. In tracing these hallowed steps, you author has walked with her through pink fuzzy kangols and inflatable trashbags and has at last been baptized in the church of Missy, Most Holy. So together, in her name, let us pray: ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup I. And also with you.  

#15. “Don’t Touch My Hair” feat. Sampha / Solange [2016]

Someone more clever than I am once said that Solange was the proverbial moon to her sister’s star, the leafy nights at home to the chromatic nights downtown: two undulating tones, rhyming with one another, both sounding an indelibly Texan twang. Or something like that, a few revisions ago. 

Solange is also just about as consummate a coordinator of ensembles as anyone currently working, familial or otherwise. See any of her performance art that isn’t set to music, all vast arrangements of color and space bent to her intent. She seems to use music as an excuse for what she’s really interested in—to name a few: shadows, symmetry, burnished Southern cityscapes, rippling fields, rugged vectors, yawning spaces made integrated, elemental tensions made legible, etc. 

Luckily, we might stand by as she works through her impressions: of growth (“Cranes in the Sky”), of space (“Things I Imagined / Down with the Clique”), of joy (“Binz”), and of rage (sorry).

This video carves out a sink of what makes Solange spectacular. Soak yourself her eddies and reemerge, different. And stick with the list for much more of the family.

#14. “The Real Slim Shady” / Eminem [2000]

I am an admitted lover of alter egos. This video takes Eminem’s particularly notorious one and weaponizes such a prolific number of his bleached body-doubles (shadygängers?) that one is left squinting, trying to discern who is who, where Marshall has gotten to, wondering, eventually—who is the real Slim Shady?

“You think I give a f*ck about a Grammy?”—no Slim, I don’t, and it turned out to be mutual. While this video careened up charts and shook down little old ladies on the street and won Video of the Year at the 2000 MTV Music Video Awards, the equivalent 2000s Grammy went to Korn. Korn, for “Freak on a Leash,” which I am intentionally not linking. What praise could I possibly heap on this video that would exceed that? 

This relentless fuck-you of a video will make you miss a time, a sound, and a bleach-blond sociopath reverberating throughout his song like a hall of x-rated mirrors, each one just refracting you blonder and more vulgar. Twenty years later it remains both insane and compulsively rewatchable and I’d recommend you do so immediately. 

And I will watch the Korn video the day hell freezes over and Eminem endorses Tr*mp.

#13. “Apesh*t” / The Carters [2018]

Ask yourself: who else could stand beside Mona Lisa and upstage her? Who else do reclamation like this, juxtapose in multi-tones like this, nearly re-canonize the book of Western Art like this? The answer is to be found in a rap video yanked towards High Art by the only one who could, like this. The answer is as much treatise as entertainment. 

Certain ponderous motifs of art history that I don’t understand and head-wringing bodacity that I really really do each spend four panting minutes herein thrumming through the Louvre (yes, that one): rented, backlit, and refilled as a testament to black excellence and superb booking agents. Perhaps Beyoncé (oh, and Jay-Z is here also) couldn’t think of anywhere else to unveil this iteration of a vision, a marriage, a sovereignty over a chosen dominion. The resulting product culminates in an assertion, no oxygen left for dissent: past is prologue; this one’s ours.

#12. “Chop Suey” / System of a Down [2001]

True: this video technically fails a central tenet of my Unified Theory of a Good Music Video (which I should probably get around to specifying at some point), the one that every band with a guitar seems intent on violating—namely, don’t spend your video standing on a stage performing the song. That’s what your shows already are! I can schlep into any stale tavern in any washed-up bar district and see the same; that’s the thing that happens when you pick up instruments in a garage and start wailing. Why would it also be what you choose to do with such an unbounded media? Why the lazy repackaging, why the rigidity? Don’t you know we know you’re lip-syncing? Why, Weezer, why?

False: this video is limited by its decision to stick, ostensibly, to the experience of one live show. 

True: Chop Suey takes the confines so many (Weezer) have been chained by and instead weaves together an electric spectacle splayed across a dozen brilliant camera contortions warping the video in on itself, torquing through undulating performers and manic lyrics and madly moshing masses all hollering and sweat. 

False: this video leaves you something less than steaming in the ambient heat. 

See: the swooping shots underfoot, around guitarists, over the crushing crowds; the superimposed singers bobbing in and out of one another; the fixed camera, pre-GoPro party shots like Project X scenes strung with electric guitars; and the frenzy of the thing, most of all—can you resist? Can you fight the gravity seeming to erase the lines between you and the crowd, the sinking immersion of this new form?

This video wraps itself into itself like a well-folded meteor. How could any future punk, metal, or rock-adjacent video hope to avoid the fallout? It does all this and just happens to be another of Paul Stone’s Five, easily the angriest, and definitely not listened to thoroughly enough for lyrical analysis before being downloaded.

#11. “Never Catch Me” feat. Kendrick Lamar / Flying Lotus [2014]

In the past, when cornered, I have told people that this music video was my Favorite Music Video. I had not yet had the privilege to waste all this time for You The Reader in order to get things settled, but I think I was on the right track at this point.

This world of ours is far too short and largely meaningless and you are basically just sitting there watching as the world turns. You are reading my letters with a certain voice in your head — tell me about it. You are making each successive second, just for yourself. You are storing them up one after the other like an accordion folder out of Bruce Almighty, your life is nothing but these accretive consecutive slices. You are a series of overhead projector slides stacked one atop another for roughly eighty years before summarily being swept aside off of the lighted table.

Turn this video on and choose instead, for just a passing moment, to watch a mourning monument to joy, to all matters temporary and radiant; a dance of defiance backlit by the knowledge of its absolute end. Its instants and their upcast eyes and buoyant totality are beautiful, simply and completely. 

And I will not waste time defending beauty today, no sir. 

#10. “L$D (LOVE x $EX x DREAMS)” / A$AP Rocky [2015]

Here we find a glorified excuse for the self-proclaimed prettiest rapier alive (which, I mean) to traipse through the plasma haze of an unnamed city’s neon night, on-again-off-again semi-conscious and certainly operating under the kaleidoscopic influence of serious psychedelics.  

Here, A$AP Rocky takes us on a (literal) trip into a space and mind gleefully addled by drugs and bass and bravado, all of which Flacko manages to maintain ultimate control over; kind of like yes well while this is unexpected it is also now part of the plan and here we go. It eventually forays into the frequently ineffectual territory of videos attempting to depict the extrasensory experience of a proper bender (which so often take painfully liberal license, as if some of them were made by people who have never themselves been high but are being talked through it by someone themselves too high to be making much sense)—and succeeds.  

This video may also have single-handedly convinced a suburban youth to drop acid and then later wax overly lyrical about it while professing the influential video to be daring and ego-bending and thinking himself quite insightful for it. 

While maybe or maybe not being any of that, it at least adds to a profligate portfolio of brilliant videos that span the length of Flacko’s endlessly experimental career—“A$AP Forever” and “Kids Turned Out Fine” being essential next viewings. 

#9. “Bad Romance” / Lady Gaga [2009]

One could be forgiven for letting her recent and precipitous movie-stardom blunt Lady Gaga’s essential insanity from their fresh memory. One might even see her, at a glance, as an idiosyncratic but somewhat familiar renaissance celebrity burnished into a palatable red carpet type. 

One must acknowledge that these individuals simply blocked out the entirety of the mid-2000s, perhaps for good reasons. 

This selection should serve as a reminder. Think “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but kinkier. Think “Stranger Things” in latex but the very opposite of eighties sentimentality, like the thing is trying to be so shocking that you can only fully exist in the moment you’re sharing with it. Think disco but in a parallel reality where humans pivoted to cannibalism. 

Like Gaga herself and every production she’s ever touched, this video warrants and demands your fascination. 

#8. “This is America” / Childish Gambino [2018]

Sometimes that certain something will come along that seems tailor-made to your specifications, spread over every quadrant of your particular internal Venn diagram. Sometimes the stars align, or go into retrograde, or something. Sometimes one video does it all, furiously filling out an overambitious vision without seeming frantic, entering every scene like each consecutive moment should be a reintroduction, a flourish, insisting you not miss a second of it. 

Taking up all of itself, in other words.

On the week of this video’s release, I didn’t know yet that it was the one for me—that me, then—just that I seemed to be binge-watching it over and over again as deadlines for finals week piled up. I inhaled every thought piece on every metaphorical layer lacquered onto every frame of the thing—did you catch the white horse? The cell phones? I seemed to be riding a groundswell of viral frenzy, grappling for a handhold on a ballooning phenomenon. 

The video would go on to soaring accolades and frantic enshrinements of Childish Gambino’s genius. It would become overwatched and overdone and beaten to death by collegiate pretension; it would become iconic by any definition—and I still love it like day one, before anyone else stepped into the conversation it and I were having. 

Acknowledge all this, account for it in your subjective internal discernments—but first, switch off intellect and let it wash over you, again and again. Pressing “0” in YouTube will replay videos from the beginning. 

#7. “Fergalicious” feat. will.i.am / Fergie [2009]

What if Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was rated PG-13 on account of excessive cleavage and flagrantly misappropriated frosting?

What if you watched one hypnotically sucrosed video on a family road trip so many times in a row that you could still recite the signature Fergalicious definition rap when pressured into it at your first college party a decade later? In order to impress a girl you would never speak to again? 

What if Will.i.Am narrated? A question we should all be asking more often. 

What if I’m being totally redundant because obviously you already know what I’m talking about and have been dutifully watching each helpfully linked video before reading the article, obviously. What if I’m underhanding these stale hypotheticals through yet another repeat-the-first-word-of-each-paragraph conceit? Would you still be compelled by lollipop forests and milk-chocolate industrialism?

Either way, remember to floss, kids.

#6. “Hey Ya!” / Outkast [2003]

Three thousand! For the sake of everybody in the band: act like you’ve got some sense. 

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: my cardinal sin of an uninspiring music video is a band, on a stage, singing a song just like they would at any other time on any other stage, the only appreciable variation being an unconvincing lip sync.

Well, if you’re going to set out to fuck up that rule entirely, something between Chop Suey’s approach (above) and an all-green André-3000-clone bonanza is a good place to start.

Now I wanna see y’all on y’alls baddest behavior. Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbor! 

This production is genetically engineered to maximize The Funk. The Funk positively oozes from every drop of every increasingly funky clone of Andre 3000 in every ever-green frame; every successive shake of the polaroid stirs The Funk further into frenzy. 

I would love to see the sales trends for Polaroids in 2003. Andre should have gotten a cut of the profits.. 

Shake it, sh- shake it, shake it, sh- shake it, shake it— 

It’s all there for your enjoyment, be thee neighbor or fella or lady or other, transcending the stage it occupies and the varied fists clutching posters, polaroids, and outdated iPods swiped from parents and watched on repeat; or however you prefer to consume. It exceeds and subverts its stage. Its tune may be stuck in your head already. The Funk may have taken you, too. 

Act like you got some sense.

#5. “Gangnam Style” / Psy [2012]

Oh yeah? Oh yeah. We’re doing this.

The ascent of the modern music video cannot be told without mentioning the parallel rise of a plucky video-sharing website from San Bruno, CA. The scope, reach, and social impact of both have collided, ballooned, and eventually birthed the largest music streaming service of all time. 

YouTube is the single largest streamer of music in the world and, since Gaga's "Bad Romance" in 2009, every video that has reached the top of the "most-viewed YouTube videos" list has been a music video.

Come with me. The year is 2012; the platform is established but still rising, increasingly towed along by the virality of this weird format we’re sixteen entries into overanalyzing. Enter Psy, and with him K-Pop (in its infancy, in terms of Twitter fandom), tuxedoed gyrations, a lot of horses, and one inexplicable dance in which I guess maybe he’s meant to be riding a horse.

I legitimately could not tell you if I think this music video is Good or not, not with a gun to my head or loved ones on the line. Its true nature lingers just out of your reach: a dream, fading with the morning’s light, still as haunting today as when it was storming every corner of 2012 culture. Maybe this was what the Mayans were talking about. 

I can at least hold up as true that this amorphous Korean thing redefined virality, international pop, and the upper limits of what we know a short video to be capable of. Just watch the thrilling history of its arrival into the horserace of most-watched Youtube rankings—and tremble. Watch as I did in middle school, pubescent and awed and insistent that I first discovered it when it was still at ten million views, op-op-opping all the cringey way.

#4. “This Too Shall Pass” / OK Go [2010]

OK Go has dominated by finding brilliance in density and niche: like a puddle you fall into up to your neck, or some crop circle with concentric layers of complexity and dazzle. Picking one video by these maximalist music-videographic auteurs masquerading as musicians feels insufficient. Please seek out their entire videographic discography (videography?), from treadmilling intros to massive overhead choreography to… musical cars? An obstacle chord? Whatever this is. 

Perhaps no other band views the ceiling of the music video as optimistically, as close to totally unbounded as this one. They don’t make music videos so much as events, jubilees that a camera happened to be there for. They probe the potential of spectacle, the occupation of every viable crevice of a space, constantly asking themselves why not. Theirs is a constant fingerprint: indelible, irreplicable. And oh, they play a song in the background of the whole thing so it qualifies. 

Everything they make is excellent, please watch it now. However, I have chosen “This Too Shall Pass”, because when else would I have a chance to feature a single-shot Rube Goldberg machine? Consider it less music video and more carnival. Just be glad they got the shot.

#3. “Formation” / Beyonce [2016]

I suppose I should get around to defining some kind of rubric for what I’m looking for in a Good Music Video. 

I know this process is baseless, or based only on fleeting impressions, a concoction of the particulars that have lingered with me for one reason or another. I know there are endless possible matrices to choose from: technological advancement, virality, artistic technique, iconicicism, performance, musicality, irreverence, sheer spectacular exploration. I know that the very best ones stay with you like late-dream afterthoughts, like a room where a candle was just snuffed out.

I know that none of this matters when you hear the opening bars of “Formation” echoing like synthetic rubber bands across the opening to this HoustoBamaN’awlean spectacle. It’s Beyonce. Don’t overthink this. 

#2. “Weapon of Choice” / Fat Boy Slim [2000]

Peanut butter and jelly. Yin and yang. Song and dance. Christopher Walken and Fatboy Slim. Empty hotels and beige. 

Dance routines and supporting music have come to be an archetypal pair. Probably ever since campfires burned on some neolithic plain has the urge to stamp feet to vibration been with us. Think of ye olde dance halls, of Superbowl half times, of “La La Land.” Music videos are not immune, and this is one piece of a larger homage to the magnetism and possibilities of this combination. 

Oh, and of course you knew that Christopher Walken is a formerly professional dancer. You knew that all he needed was an empty hotel, a Fatboy Slim beat and a couple of escalators. 

Oh, and wouldn’t you almost believe that Christopher Walken really could fly as you hunched over his funk as it poured forth through the pre-touchscreen plastic screen muddied by pubescent fingers? Wondering how someone in that color suit could move like that? 

Oh, just abandon yourself to the rhythm—cause if you walk without rhythm, you’ll never learn.

#1. “Humble” / Kendrick Lamar [2017]

Kendrick Lamar, the greatest rapper alive, has never stopped evolving. 

For the video to Humble—the flagship single off of his triple-platinum coronation album, DAMN—he turned to Dave Meyers and the Little Homies. The former: one of the most highly-lauded music video directors ever; the latter: a front consisting of Dave Free—president of Kendrick’s Top Dawg Entertainment label—and Kendrick himself. Occasionally, they make videos. 

Kendrick Lamar, the greatest rapper alive, takes this opportunity to throttle you into acquiescence: through staggering set pieces, bald and peeled back and pulsing; in majesty and grey poupon; in shuddering shots shaking you dazed and credulous—a trick of tricamera oscillation, among others. 

Kendrick stitches his deification onto our rapturous retinas. 

Somewhere in this half-sonic half-visual format we’ve spent all this time in, on some day and some set, the music video most personally perfect to me was made. And why not, maybe it’s this one: here, total, all at once. 

For further research: “King’s Dead”, “DNA”, anything in the last five years from Schoolboy Q. 

This video is compulsively watchable in any and every reality, to any and every solipsistic palate, to the point of my near-dehydration the week of its release. It tops a staggering (Pulitzer-winning) album, only the second ever with every one of its songs certified platinum, a dizzying jewel adding to an already shameless display of abundance, and atop it all: Kendrick, the greatest rapper alive, able to remind us of that whenever he bothers, shimmering through these shuffling setpieces like settling into a throne he’s already becoming bored with, already figuring out a way to pimp anew, as somewhere in Rome white smoke begins to stream.

It is the greatest music video of the century. Bitch, be humble.

“Enter the Ninja” / Die Antwoord [2010]

I find myself in the unenviable position of having to pick just one video out of the sprawling Die Antwoord canon to highlight for you. I have again gone with a debut, an entrance pitched at a bellow from introduction to end, all the way down to the schizophrenic cartoons and alien mini-mes. 

With this band and brand I can guarantee: if you like this video, you will like every single one of them, probably more and more as they bore themselves further into your neural pathways (epilepsy risk ever-present). I recommend rolling into “I FINK U FREEKY” and “Ugly Boy” from here for burgeoning directorial budgets and exactly the same amount of chromatic lunacy.

Die Antwoord is Ninja and Yolandi Visser’s Capetown-based hip hop group, heavily influenced by the South African countercultural movement zef and none of that really matters because they are basically inexplicable. Categorizations and clever exegeses crumble under the weight of their blazing idiosyncrasies. None of my synonyms will do them justice. Which could also be the subtitle of this article.

“EARL” / Earl Sweatshirt [2010]

Despite the antics displayed in this fish-eyed frenzy of an early GOLFWANG spectacle—a meaningful rival to YONKERS’ video, by some takes—including but not limited to Odd Future ingesting a cocktail of various drugs and illicit materials before skating around puking blood all over Los Angeles before Tyler potential drowns (results unclear), Earl’s bars are never overwhelmed. Their chaos is mutual, symbiotic; Earl’s control is unhalting. 

Knowing how much Earl would only ascend from here lends the viewing a sense of documentary, or anthropology, or maybe even hagiography. Strap in, if you’re ready, and watch a seventeen-year-old tell you things like “I’m a hot and bothered astronaut crashing while jacking off to buffering vids of Asher Roth eating applesauce.” 

“Hollaback Girl” / Gwen Stefani [2004]

There is something inchoate and elemental within me, Reader—gnawing and unnamed and present since before I had the words to pin it. 

Imagine my relief upon realizing that, all along, it had been a cerebral splinter lodged into some deep lobe and bearing the memory of Gwen Stefani leading a full marching band through the halls of a very weird highschool on her way to a climactic jubilee atop an inexplicably backlit “final countdown” type stage, all while wearing booty shorts and a shoulder-padded marching jacket with B A N A N A S plastered across the back.

Super kawaii! 

“Hurt” / Johnny Cash [2002]

Okay. I understand why this is so high on so many lists and I enjoy Johnny Cash’s music very much. I’ve also actually watched the video, sat and watched Johnny, nearly on death’s doorstep, point his way earnestly around the room at large as he warbles through some vaguely maudlin curtains while sitting before what appears to be a feast of wax food. It’s worth watching, at least in order to get a temperature on other listmakers’ priorities, and I’ll concede that it was certainly a stalwart piece of country music-videoing doing its best to wrest back the genre from trends like this. Which I accidentally rewatched when getting that link and: Jesus Christ.

“Bad and Boujee” / Migos [2017]

This video succeeds by strength of sheer clout—the sort rolling off of this song in clouds as it impacted itself upon the zeitgeist in mid-2017. It landed in a moment terraformed for its arrival, the perfect thing for the perfect time and why is Lil Uzi Vert riding a four-wheeler, what street in Atlanta did they overwhelm for this? 

It presents a two-part thesis in its title and spends the rest of the video adhering, at all times, to one or both of those parts—designer champagne and Cup of Noodles, diamond rings and chicken grease, Chanel boxes of Chinese takeout. Quavo reminds you to always overdress for the liquor store.

Is it the most experimental or genreless video featured here? No. Is it meant for you if you prefer independent films and intricate metaphors? Absolutely not. But, furthermore, YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH… 

“Runaway” (full-length) / Kanye West [2010]

After much deliberation, I’ve concluded that a thirty-minute conceptual visual album cannot, in its totality, conscionably be called a “music video.” Allowing this exception would open up this list to the likes of “Endless,” “Lemonade,” and other titanic self-professed “visual albums,” and I just don’t think I could help myself. 

Nevertheless, this full-length project included here is as spectacular as it is utterly Kanyesque; a dedication to the church of ‘Ye; an epic of Yandhi, a carnival of the Yeezy; and I couldn’t resist linking the unabridged version. If you simply don’t have time left after the several hours of content you have, of course, consumed in full up to this point, you might also sample the shortened version, the four and a half minutes of the full film actually dedicated to “Runaway,” the titural and far-and-away most iconic segment.

“Hotline Bling” / Drake [2014]

Let us dispel with the notion that Drake doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. What is he doing? Self-meme-ifying. Hagiograph-meme-ing (memeographing?). Tailoring what is ostensibly a music product to the landscape he finds himself releasing it into: one built on virality, burgeoned by TikTok, and—by no accident—dominated by Drake for a decade and counting.

“Nobody Speak feat. Run the Jewels” / DJ Shadow [2016]

In this video a UN-style caucus is thrown into disarray as two opposing politicians, collectively rapping along to the Run the Jewels lyrics, eventually fall to fisticuffs, incite a diplomatic crisis turned multinational brawl, and only reach a resolution when one nearly impales the other with an American flag.

It’s nice to reminisce about times like those featured here, back when civility was still in politics.

“Like Sugar” / Chaka Khan [2018]

A classic dancing video, never featuring the artists, with a single looping feature enabled and exploded by a small amount of cheaply available technology. Chef kiss.

“JoHn Muir” / ScHoolboy Q [2016]

I’m a sucker for a fixed camera and a bounded narrative—say, the side of a car over the course of one Compton day; a splice of brutal banality and vice versa.

“The Hills” / The Weeknd [2015]

Maybe we are the real us when f*cked up. Maybe the Weeknd was the real him with his old, significantly taller haircut. Maybe he and his coif have tapped into something essential, in the first-person haze of this hauntingly contained video—and who among us hasn’t staggered away from the burning wreckage of our car, our former selves, our fading sobriety? Maybe I’m in too deep, but you decide.

“Lydia” / Highly Suspect [2015]

Metaphor: drowning as a proxy for the suffocations of the consumptive-addicted world. Ropes, thrashing, etc. This video headbangs as hard as it meditates on these claustrophobic themes, and nothing ends up happily. Enjoy!