As usual, music videos remain stalwart at the front lines of audiovisual innovation. And while P.T. Anderson may’ve directed the shit out of that no-nonsense, edit portal sequence in Radiohead’s “Daydreaming” video, we were more interested in the enduring and ever-refined tradition of classical presentation. The vocalist addresses the audience in a fetching mise en scène, and we are made to understand how inextricable a performer’s visual flair and body language is from their sound. While our list is rife with vids celebrating novel facade, there is also the unceremonious dropping of facade in evidence (along with the inevitable free choreographies of corporeal denial).
Whether it was slo-mo rogue-opulent smoke-and-mirrors extravagance, porno tweaked to our dementedly exacting aesthetic imperatives, perspective tangents off of our point-and-shoot bloodlust, the famous sleeping soundly while an unseen intruder watches and waits, brutal brushes with destabilizing awarenesses splitting your head open and leaving nothing to the godforsaken imagination, or just Yung Lean playing pretend Kurt Cobain in the woods, 2016’s best videos had everything and nothing to say. There was an odd, in-the-moment-infallible sanctuary to even the most passive of these diversions. Flaccid slings and broken arrows, spilled from on high with drooling confidence. Steep grades and stiff grips fronted at our mangy corner of stinking heat, roundly searing us raw-eyed, hazy hellevision junkies. All the while, a reflecting skin of imperceptibly expanding circumference has lapped at our proud, idle, and yet radiant flirtations with disassociation and pulse-pounding antipathies unknown.
We shut our solemn mouths and tubed our stupid time away. Together. As ‘twas and ever shall be.
テレヴァペ
永
Director: Televape
Released to instant infamy (even when the video only starred one President), “Famous” got the people going in an ethically bankrupt, especially Kanye West fashion: its demolition of intimacy, the triggering juxtaposition of abusers and victims, a precisely inflammatory body-cast. A live-mural of elision and capture, “breathing and imagining,” before the #MannequinChallenge, before Kim was attacked. Fame is a panoply of gazes, never neutral, never pure, but “Famous” bookends its overdetermined slumber party with pastoral imagery, a foil for the semiopolitics beading at the video’s every pore. When Kanye meets our gaze, near the video’s end, his eyes seem to repeat his earlier quote, “We culture.” His bootleg iconogasm was exploitative, disturbing, transfixing, provocative. Liberated? Not like this, no matter what Kanye wants (us) to feel.
