The 5 Best Videos Of The Week
The greatest and most consequential piece of music-related video this week wasn’t a music video. It was the image of Justin Timberlake and longtime insider-outsider Nashville journeyman songwriter Chris Stapleton tearing it the fuck up at the CMA Awards on Wednesday night. The whole show turned out to be a serious coronation for Stapleton, the sort of artist who deserves one. But it also gave us a better glimpse of Timberlake’s raw talent than Timberlake himself has seen fit to grant us in the past few years. I don’t think a performance like that will change country music or anything, but I do think that it turned a deserving artist into a star. But since that wasn’t a proper music video, it’s not on this list. Five good ones are, and they’re all below.
5. Pill – “Hot Glue” (Dir. Lazy Mom NYC)
Someone (I forget who) already pointed this out somewhere, but this video is basically the banana-chopping scene from Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video, stretched out to three and a half minutes and turned into a vivid fever-dream hallucination.
4. Sia – “Alive” (Dir. Sia & Daniel Askill)
Every video for Sia’s last album starred Maddie Ziegler, a little kid from Dance Moms, and all those videos turned out to be amazing. So if Sia’s new album-cycle video-muse turns out to be this tiny, adorable child with the slick kung-fu skills, I will be very, very happy. Can we maybe get this kid to kick Shia LaBoeuf’s head off his shoulders in the next video?
3. Carly Rae Jepsen – “Your Type” (Dir. Gia Coppola)
A dank, depressing video for a glossy, streamlined pop song that works as an argument for why glossy, streamlined pop music needs to exist.
2. The 1975 – “Love Me” (Dir. Diane Martel)
Shout out to any 2015 boy band willing to present itself like 1985 Duran Duran.
1. Oneohtrix Point Never – “Sticky Drama” (Dir. Daniel Lopatin & Jon Rafman)
Bless all these little kids for damaging their fragile psyches so that we could have this demented vision of a music video.