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The 25 Best Music Videos of 2011

I can recall a time when music videos were all but doomed to certain extinction.

The 25 Best Music Videos of 2011
Photo: Warp Records

I can recall a time when music videos were all but doomed to certain extinction. In the dark days leading up to Internet supremacy, MTV regulated videos to brief cushions between mass doses of Carson Daly, while VH1 decided it would rather gorge itself on the sideshow of (sur)reality television than offer the “V” in its name. Add the anonymity and budgetary limitations of do-it-yourself indie bands, and music videos suddenly appeared to be an unnecessary pastiche. Unlikely hero though it may be, thank God for YouTube. The age of viral content has done more than just invigorate the music video format though—it’s freed it. From the sneakily graphic and flippant kids-killing-kids horror of Is Tropical’s “The Greeks,” to the bug-eating suicidal odyssey that is Tyler, the Creator’s “Yonkers,” to the Jonestown-conjuring aesthetic of Cults’ “Go Outside,” to the homicidal tendencies of St. Vincent’s “Cruel,” viewers can be thankful that music videos weren’t just alive and well in 2011, but also completely uninhibited. Kevin Liedel


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25. Ke$ha, “Blow” (Director: Chris Marrs Piliero)

Ke$ha’s “Blow” held the title for the year’s best video featuring unicorns for two whole days—until the premiere of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” But in addition to Dawson Leery and “edible lactose gold,” the one thing Ke$ha’s got that Gaga seems to have lost is the ability not to take herself too seriously. Sal Cinquemani


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24. Times New Viking, “Ever Falling In Love” (Director: Brandon Reichard)

In a place called New Cleveland in 2031, people have no faces, Hummers are still fashionable, and a king has outlawed images of all kinds. Brandon Reichard’s video for Times New Viking’s “Ever Falling In Love” is a moving yet unsentimental reminder of the impact visual media has on our collective memories. SC


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23. St. Vincent, “Cruel” (Director: Terri Timely)

An awkwardly shot video of an awkward tale, made all the more awkward by the discordant chemistry between Annie Clark and her surrogate family when, exasperated, they finally put her out of her non-motherly misery. Strange mercy, indeed. KL


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22. Bon Iver, “Holocene” (Director: Nabil)

Justin Vernon’s humble realization of his non-magnificence is perfectly visualized here: a wandering youth immersed in the cold allure of rural Iceland as he chases an elusive bird of prey. Bon Iver’s sophomore album has an innate wintry beauty all its own, making “Holocene” one of those few entries where a single video captures the total spirit of its source material. KL

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21. Lykke Li, “Sadness Is a Blessing” (Director: Tarik Saleh)

Though it originates from Germany, Ed Gonzalez called Kai Stänicke’s visual interpretation of Din [A] Tod’s 2009 track “Cold Star” “too Swedish” for his taste. The music video cum short film was ultimately deemed ineligible for this list anyway, but Swedish melancholia triumphed in the end, in the form of director Tarik Saleh’s gorgeously lensed clip for Lykke Li’s “Sadness Is a Blessing.” The pop singer displays surprisingly nuanced acting chops as the obstinate younger half of an ostensible May-December romance, while co-star Stellan Skarsgård turns in a characteristically understated performance as the stoic lover who watches her come apart at the seams. SC


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20. Living Sisters, “How Are You Doing?” (Director: Michel Gondry)

Michel Gondry is essentially recycling the same concept he used for Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” except there are three panels now, one for each of Living Sisters’ members, who race toward each other—and through various catastrophes—after one goes into labor. Gondry conveys the women’s devotion to each other not just via the triple split-screen, but also through a lovely series of visual juxtapositions, the best being its very first: a soon-to-be-botched sunny-side-up egg, an engorged belly, and a plane that carries—no, delivers—one of the sisters toward the group’s date with destiny. Ed Gonzalez


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19. Twin Sister, “Kimmi in a Rice Field” (Directors: Bryan Ujueta & Dan Devine)

The House-inspired visuals of Twin Sisters’ “Kimmi in a Rice Field” result in one of the most disquieting conclusions in recent memory: human and ghost, melded together in horror and wonder. KL


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18. Friendly Fires, “Hurting” (Director: David Lewandowski)

Friendly Fires’ Pala always seemed to brandish a kind of blockheaded charm along with its tropical beats, and the music video for “Hurting” provides visual confirmation of that fact, not to mention the greatest Hawaiian shirt ever put to video. KL

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17. Beyoncé, “Countdown” (Director: Adria Petty)

Not exactly a history of dance on film, or a particularly heady act of appropriation, just a dazzling homage to some of Beyoncé’s favorite influences. Using jolts of pop-art colors, virtuosic editing, and a smile that spans from one tip of her bob cut to the other, Beyoncé pilfers through a very specific musical past—one that begins with Funny Face and ends with Flashdance—with her customarily giddy and sincere sense of spirit. EG


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16. Das Racist, “Michael Jackson” (Directed by Weird Days)

Das Racist’s video for “Michael Jackson” is both a send-up and tribute to the Gloved One’s self-indulgent “Black or White,” not to mention everything else that made the early ’90s memorable—namely, The Simpsons and that Swayze vs. Farley Chippendales sketch from Saturday Night Live. KL


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15. Robyn, “Call Your Girlfriend” (Director: Max Vitali)

Single-take videos are old hat, but Robyn never fails to inject a sense of spirited, infectious enthusiasm into whatever pop formula she touches, and the ecstatic video for “Call Your Girlfriend” is no exception. [Note: The inclusion of this video on this list is in no way an endorsement of the artist’s wardrobe.] SC


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14. Cults, “Go Outside” (Director: Isaiah Seret)

Beginning with a news report announcing the 1978 Jonestown catastrophe, this wry nugget of revisionist history seamlessly splices the members of one of indie music’s airiest-sounding acts into footage of the Peoples Temple. The band creepily syncs the worship of Jim Jones’s flock to their own verses, shrewdly conveying how music, like religion, is a seduction that can make people sometimes do the strangest things. EG

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13. Battles f/ Matias Aguayo, “Ice Cream” (Director: Canada)

That there isn’t one specific image that seems to justify Battles’ “Ice Cream” being flagged on YouTube as potentially “inappropriate for some users” speaks to the overall suggestiveness of the entire clip. The video’s libidinous panorama of sexually charged images is the perfect complement to Battles’ creamy, grunt-filled prog-pop single, a triumph in both editing and the objectification of inanimate objects. SC


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12. Beyoncé, “Run the World (Girls)” (Director: Francis Lawrence)

The lead single from Beyoncé’s latest album was a commercial flop, but the track was a grower thanks in part to its audacious video, which finds the singer armed with giant spotted hyenas and a harem of Saharan warriors (okay, a dance troupe), not to mention the best gams in the “bidness.” SC


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11. Destroyer, “Kaputt” (Director: Dawn Garcia)

In capturing the playful spirit of Dan Bejar’s air-rock odyssey, director Dawn Garcia has rewritten the manual. Clearly, if you want to make a good music video nowadays, it needs to include soft erotica, greasy teenagers, false oases, and flying whales. KL


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10. Gotye f/ Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know” (Director: Natasha Pincus)

A passionate pas de deux in which Gotye and Kimbra passionately hurl misgivings at each other for what they once had is accompanied by an equally remarkable video, a work of lovely simplicity that expresses the coming together of two lovers as a literally prismatic tug of war. As naked as their emotions, Gotye and Kimbra suck each other in with their embittered recollections of happiness and sadness before one of them, sadly but wisely, chooses to move on. EG

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9. Youth Lagoon, “Montana” (Director: Tyler T. Williams)

In which director Tyler T. Williams channels Terrence Malick to depict a depleted man-child escaping (however poorly) the shadow of childhood tragedy. A familiar, heavy hand with the Americana, yes, but gorgeous all the same. KL


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8. Lana Del Rey, “Video Games” (Director: Lana Del Rey)

This is a song about sacrifice, the things a girl will do for the love of a boy, and Lana Del Rey uses its dreamy video not just to sell her brand of Hollywood sadcore, but to provocatively ruminate on the Dream Factory’s callous exploitation of aspiring starlets, even expert self-promoters like herself and the hot mess that is Paz de la Huerta. No wonder David Lynch fell in love with Del Rey. EG


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7. Manchester Orchestra, “Simple Math” (Director: Daniels)

The only video on this list that breaks my heart, a poignant, almost Gondrian conceptualization of a man’s life flashing before his eyes that articulates its ideas of love, anger, regret, and disappointment sans the quirkiness that typifies Gondry’s signature surrealism. After swerving his van to avoid a deer, a man spirals toward death, remembering his contentious relationship to his father, even the deer he once shot and whose head he awkwardly gifted to a girl who didn’t return his affections. Through its appropriately blunt use symbols, of objects fusing different planes of reality into one, this Daniels-directed clip sadly, almost disturbingly equates dying to dreaming. EG


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6. Rihanna, “We Found Love” (Director: Melina Matsoukas)

Calvin Harris’s Ibiza beats are enhanced by a series of striking, hazily filtered Technicolor images of his Barbadian muse and her fictional boy toy frolicking in a bathtub, popping pills, smoking rainbows, and vomiting streamers. Melina Matsoukas’s video projects (literally and figuratively) the fleeting rush of both young love and drugs—and the often fatal cocktail that’s produced when the two are combined. SC

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5. R.E.M., “ÜBerlin” (Director: Sam Taylor-Wood)

An unsurprising omission from Pitchfork’s embarrassing “Top Music Videos [That Caught Our Eye]” and NME’s more respectable but equally single-minded “50 Best Music Videos of 2011 [w/ Hot Girls, Read: Not Lady Gaga, in Them],” R.E.M.’s “ÜBerlin” easily wrestles the Best Dancing By Yourself Video of 2011 prize from Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” Starring Aaron Johnson and helmed by the actor’s Nowhere Boy director, Sam-Taylor Wood, the video perfectly captures the optimistic spirit of what may be R.E.M.’s last great song, a lush, euphoric, and, most important of all, irony-free celebration of street and life. EG


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4. Battles f/ Gary Numan, “My Machines” (Director: Daniels)

Common symptoms of Escalaphobia include nausea, increased heart rate, dizziness, visible trembling, and an overwhelming compulsion to listen to math rock. SC


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3. Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers” (Director: Wolf Haley)

With typical I-don’t-give-a-shit-ness, Tyler makes himself the target of this particular litany of gripes, essentially a series of paradoxes so Joycean in their density they could stand to have their own set of Cliffs Notes. Take this black-and-white clip as an expression of how Tyler sees himself in constant war with himself, or as a wry, perverse acknowledgement on his part that the best, maybe only, way of making sense of his sick rhymes is by overdosing on bug juice. EG


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2. Lady Gaga, “Born This Way” (Director: Nick Knight)

You won’t see a more striking visual this year than the first 30 seconds of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” where a sparkly unicorn and hot-pink laser triangles give way to the artist’s 21st-century portrayal of Metropolis’s Maschinenmensch. Perhaps more impressive, however, is that the video’s ensuing shots manage to be just as provocative: glistening kaleidoscope gore, hermaphroditic machine-gun phalluses, black-tie zombies, and a literal human melting pot that plays out like something dreamed up by a gloriously unholy matrimony of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zack Snyder, and H.R. Giger. KL

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1. Is Tropical, “The Greeks” (Director: Megaforce)

Satirical commentary on society’s obsession with gratuitous violence, or child exploitation in the form of reverse infantilism? Either way, French collective Megaforce’s clip for Is Tropicals’s “The Greeks” is both the funniest and most explosive music video of the year, a celebration of the imaginations of boys who only slow down for a rotisserie chicken and some mashed potatoes. SC

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