Often part of the appeal of a particular song is the music video – a medium that has now been evolving in ever more complicated ways for over thirty years. Often, though, it isn’t always the really technically advanced – and expensive – videos that are the best. Sometimes all it takes is some lateral thinking and a great video will come out of not too much.
Anyway, here are ten of my favourite videos, with a video playlist, of course, to accompany.
This was my entry point into alternative music, hence it’s inclusion here, discovered on MTV back in, oh, 1989? At the time it was a really rather striking video, nowadays it is notable more than anything for how young Mike Patton looks!
There are so many of this band’s videos I could pick (almost all of their videos are really rather spectacular, although not quite to the level of the live show!), but this is probably the best-looking of them all, and certainly my favourite, anyway. Some clever use of colour, even if the effects are a tiny bit dated now.
This truly barking (arf) Spike Jonze video was many people’s – including mine – first hearing of Daft Punk. A wierd, funky throwback turned into something of a dancefloor smash at the time, as I recall…
Talking of the dancefloor, this storming Chemical Brothers track needed no great video to promote more, but it got one anyway. God knows what the video is on about, but the spectacular skeletal dancefloor sequence is worth it alone.
This gleeful pastiche of 70s cop shows was bang-on with every little detail – and the fact that the song has become a true classic hasn’t hurt, either…
A thumping track, this, that the sound on Youtube really doesn’t do justice to. Still, the video is fanastic, and more than a little creepy.
The only really recent video on the list, this: an incessant, twitching pulse of a track that somehow fuses post-rock and electronics. A simple, brightly coloured video that probably cost an awful lot more to make than it looks…
Where my favourite comic artist Jhonen Vasquez gets unleashed on a video…and the results are really rather odd. Kinda matches the band, really…
This sneering, wonderfully bitchy single was the song that made this band indie-stars for at least a while, and this video is simply crackers. Look out for the, er, dancing needles…
I’ve always wondered whether this track would have been quite as freaky without the terrifying video. Yeah, it probably would…
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