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The 25 Best Music Videos of 2014

This year’s great music videos often offered a behind-the-scenes, sometimes meta, look at image-making.

The 25 Best Music Videos of 2014

Trendspotting is a tricky enterprise. Styles, gimmicks, and pop formulas quickly come and go; it’s more about finding patterns. One theme that emerged over and over this year was the music video that offered a behind-the-scenes, sometimes meta, look at image-making. Beyond the clips that made our list, like Cashmere Cat’s “Wedding Bells” and Odesza’s “Say My Name,” which cleverly underlined the function of the single as an album trailer and examined the line between fiction and reality, respectively, runners up Philip Segway’s “Coming Up for Air” and Hawk House’s “Chill Pill (Experiment 2)” provided literal glimpses into how moving images are shaped, while OK Go’s “I Won’t Let You Down” and Clipping’s “Work Work” made it impossible to ignore the technical agility with which they were created. The practical ins and out of cinema, however, weren’t the only topics deconstructed by artists and video directors this year: DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” explored the unexplained impetus behind the urge to move, Vic Mensa’s “Down on My Luck” dissected the consequences of impulse, and material girl Brooke Candy’s “Opulence” spotlighted the obscenity of excess. And while we’d be remiss not to mention 2014’s other “big” trend (on proud display in Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Mastodon’s “The Motherload,” Arca’s “Thievery,” Kylie Minogue’s “Sexercise,” and of course, Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty”), there just wasn’t room for all that donk on our list. Sal Cinquemani

Editor’s Note: Watch the full playlist at The House Next Door.


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25. They Might Be Giants, “Am I Awake?”

Director Alex Italics, who won They Might Be Giants’ music-video contest for “Am I Awake?”—describes his clip for the band’s 2004 song as “Narcoleptic existentialism meets broadcast journalism and the assassination of an American president.” To wit, the video skillfully recreates TV footage revolving around John F. Kennedy’s murder, including the iconic CBS News bulletin wherein Walter Cronkite informed the nation that the president had been shot. They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh and John Linnell were barely teens when JFK was assassinated, and whether or not lyrics like “When I get through this day/Can someone tell me how/And how much longer now/Am I awake?” relate directly to the fall of Camelot, Italics’s video further venerates the sense of stunned disbelief Americans felt on that tragic day. Cinquemani


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24. Blood Orange, “You’re Not Good Enough”

Tim and Eric having raised the bar considerably for faux-vintage, the message of Gia Coppola’s video for “You’re Not Good Enough” video would appear to be that practice makes gloriously imperfect. As scores of scrubby dancers thrust it and do their pique turns, their would-be lothario sneaks off to the side room to run the moves again and collect some flowers. The clip lets you linger in the low-contrast video sheen just long enough to set up the kicker: It’s all more or less a ploy to get you to shop Urban Outfitters. Nostalgia always comes with a price. Eric Henderson


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23. Ten Ven & Ripley X Zebra Katz, “1 Bad B*tch”

This latest from the House of Zebra Katz does not mince words like “Ima Read.” Katz sashays into a moneyed abode and, one by one, transforms four giddy white women into literal trophies. It’s a perverse wish-fulfillment fantasy that satisfies nothing more than making transparent the antagonism that underlies even the most symbiotic-seeming social spectacles between races. Ed Gonzalez

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22. Odesza ft/ Zyra, “Say My Name”

By playing on the concept of both the actor who is perpetually trapped in a state of performance and scene partners’ projection of their characters’ emotions, Seattle electronic duo Odesza’s “Say My Name,” starring Stephanie Hunt, quickly morphs from what seems like one of the most trite, commercial music videos of 2014, blatantly and methodically hitting all its marks (slick production values, crass product placement, low-stakes love story), into one of the year’s saddest and most unexpected. Cinquemani


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21. Cashmere Cat, “Wedding Bells”

It was a good year for credits. Norway’s Cashmere Cat turns “Wedding Bells” into the soundtrack for a preview of…well, itself. Disguising his EP as a crazy/stupid love epic between two hopelessly volatile youths, the video also keeps its tongue firmly planted in cheek with every “LOL this sux” comment in place of more legitimate critical blurbs. A helpful palate cleanser during yet another eye-rolling awards season. Henderson


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20. Alt-J,” “Hunger of the Pine”

Love’s a bitch and then it dies. The great music videos have a knack for delivering this sort of aphorism in such a way that makes you hungry to experience it yourself all over again. The most unsettlingly sexy video of the year. Henderson


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19. Röyksopp & Robyn, “Monument”

Max Vitali’s magisterial “Monument” plops Röyksopp and Robyn down within the confines of a slowly revolving white disc, nothing below it but whirring celestial bodies. They slide and squirm as the camera levitates from one of the circle’s edges over to the other, but it’s only when Vitali reveals what Robyn has been singing about this entire time—hovering just above her—that the clip lives up to its title. Abridging Mandelbrot zooms with the kind of CGI rococo dungeons typically reserved for Ridley Scott films, Vitali takes six minutes to paint an illustration of human finitude both poignantly empty and sweepingly evocative. Steve Macfarlane

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18. Arca, “Now You Know”

Arca’s video collaborations with Jesse Kanda pushed the envelope a number of discomfiting ways this year (see: gyrating naked humanoid CGI mannequin in “Xen”), but “Now You Know” re-canvases the young producer’s tremulous synthscapes for the biggest possible screen. Starting with what appears to be drone footage of a city at night, Kanda’s “camera” exists in a state of restless, permanent spin, branching from one distorted panoramic bricolage to the next, slowing down long enough to make its frames shiver with wobbly instability. The warped nocturnal cityscape gives way to a cascading avalanche of fireworks with a bottomless fuse—a light show of churning, pixelated endorphins as majestic on the first go-round as it is nauseating on the last. Macfarlane


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17. Taylor Swift, “Blank Space”

As if the threat of having a scathing pop song written about them weren’t enough to make the world’s eligible young bachelors think twice about shacking up with the country starlet turned pop star, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” portrays the singer-songwriter as, to quote the song’s lyrics, “a nightmare dressed like a daydream.” In the clip, directed by Joseph Kahn, Swift and model Sean O’Pry spend a romantic weekend at the former’s lavish mansion. When she suspects him of texting another woman, she flies into a mascara-streaked fit, taking a switchblade to his portrait, a torch to his clothes, and a golf club to his sports car. By the time Sean discovers a hallway lined with the defaced paintings of Swift’s former suitors, it’s obvious Swift has also taken a skewer to her (perhaps unjustified) reputation. Cinquemani


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16. SZA, “Babylon”

Somewhere, FKA twigs is kicking herself that she didn’t think to breed Stranger by the Lake with the final reel of Mouchette. But SZA got there first, and invited Kendrick Lamar to the hypnotic pity party. Henderson


15. 2 Many DJs, “As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2”

These 60 minutes of visual mayhem literalize the harmony on display throughout Radio Soulwax’s iconic As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2. The seemingly countless covers from which the remix album’s tracks were culled converse with each other in ways that are wry, heady, poignant, or haunting, though sometimes all at once. As sculpted as this anarchy may be, it glides with a nimbleness that ultimately attests to the way the best DJs in the world are able to feel a crowd and intuitively play, scratch, and remix accordingly. Gonzalez

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14. Rick Ross ft/ Kanye West & Big Sean, “Sanctified”

With his emoji translation of Rick Ross’s Sanctified,” video artist Jesse Hill managed to peel the texting electronic ideograms back to their basest possible implications, tying a sophisticated, almost Godfrey Reggio-esque thematic flow to the song’s typically opulent, narrow-minded verses. While the cutesy proposition of “Sanctified” is easy to laugh at, the video’s coarseness makes it an indictment of what modern language does and doesn’t hide so well—and Hill’s attenuation, as editor, to the rappers’ varying speeds is freakishly on-point. Macfarlane


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13. Sia,” “chandelier”

Sia and director Daniel Askill’s already-legendary video is like the Raid of dancing, with 11-year-old Maddie Ziegler scaling the walls of a decrepit apartment in pirouettes. Ziegler’s casting keeps the routine relatively androgynous even as the song explodes into the operatic; what’s left, embodied in one small person (as opposed to the usual legions of leg-kicking backup dancers) is the entire range of bodily expression, made unnerving, and ultimately sad, by Ziegler’s repeated, dead-eyed bows to the audience, however well-earned they are. Macfarlane


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12. St. Vincent, “Digital Witness”

Director Chino Moya paints a vibrant but empty portrait of a techno dystopia filled with clean lines, monotone colors, and dull, repetitive tasks to complement Annie Clark’s ambivalent reflection on our digitally consumed lives. Donning a dress that pointedly resembles a straitjacket, Clark’s mindless drone warns of a future where TV replaces windows and, in turn, windows become mere objects over which to hang venetian blinds. Cinquemani


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11. Scott Walker & Sunn O))), “Brando”

In her video for “Brando,” filmmaker Gisèle Vienne isolates a child’s glimpse of a disturbing image and lingers on it, suspended in perilous motion—a cinematic motif comparable to Scott Walker & Sunn O)))’s knack for stretching a single reverbed-out twang to a repetitive standstill. This is a story of trauma told with the fewest possible strokes, wherein the dew in the mountain air feels fresh even as you realize you’re witnessing a long-buried memory play out for what must be the hundredth time. Vienne closes with an isolated, insinuating close-up that silently tells you everything you need to know. Macfarlane

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10. Jamie XX, “Sleep Sound”

The best moment ever from the entire Quantum Leap TV series involved a deaf aspiring ballerina, moonlighting as a bartender for Chippendales dancers, taking to the stage after hours and cranking the bass to Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” so that she could feel the beat and dance privately. The elegantly moving slow-mo music video for “Sleep Sound” takes a cue from that very same Land of Silence and Darkness concept, inviting deaf people to translate Jamie xx’s dance music in exuberantly visual terms. Henderson


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9. Goldfrapp, “Stranger”

The final chapter of a 30-minute film directed by Lisa Gunning that weaves disparate tales of love, loss, madness, and identity, “Stranger” is shot in the same gauzy, low-contrast black and white as “Drew” and “Annabel.” Like the latter, which also cleverly featured singer Alison Goldfrapp in a minimal role, the video focuses on a queer character (played by Irish actress Laura Donnelly) who revisits the seaside location of a Sapphic tryst with a married stranger. While the earlier clip told the tale of a young child coming to terms with her gender, “Stranger” seems to perpetuate a much thornier concept: that of the homosexual as a lethal predator. It’s one that’s been explored to varying degrees of success, from the divisive 1980 film Cruising to last year’s acclaimed Stranger by the Lake. Here, what at first seems like a symbol of remorse, her dead lover’s wedding band still hanging from her neck years later, turns out to be not a memento for what could have been, but one of many that will never be. Cinquemani


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8. Paolo Nutini, “Iron Sky”

Photographed, and rather pointedly, in the Ukraine by director Daniel Wolfe, this video’s strikingly lucid images constitute a tone poem of contradictions, a ballet of hope and despair. Though the iron curtain may be rising, the iron sky above has yet to entirely dissipate. Gonzalez


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7. Shabazz Palaces, “Motion Sickness”

With dizzying narrative elasticity, Shabazz Palaces’s “Motion Sickness” traces the way a single mother’s moment-to-moment decisions seep into a much broader consequence—a cautionary tale in a poetic mode. While the video can be broken down as a sociopolitical critique, its most urgent asset is its quotidian vibrancy, the way moments pass just a hair too fast for comfort, and none of the players know what they stood to win until they’ve lost. Macfarlane

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6. Chet Faker, “Gold”

In my perfect world, it’s this frontal-axis music video, and not Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” that has a 24-hour version. And instead of passing the baton like “Happy” does, the full day’s worth of “Gold” features only April Corley, Candice Heiden, and Appleusa McGlynn. As it is, their Destiny’s Child fierce midnight rollerskating excursion seems to emerge from some deep subconscious personal need to see Xanadu mashed up with Lost Highway. Elsewhere, Chet Faker covered “No Diggity,” but this trio’s seductive talent is no doubt. Henderson


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5. Brooke Candy, “Opulence”

A jumping-off point for Brooke Candy’s song “Opulence” is a famous line from Paris Is Burning about owning everything, and its video begins tellingly with an incredible reference to Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss. Given director Steven Klein’s past work with Madonna and Lady Gaga, and the unmistakable references to the former’s Erotica period (like the Queen of Pop, Brooke is on a collision course to destroy beauty—and not just her own), the video is unmistakable as a simulacrum of a pop star rising. Or Lucifer, if the YouTube commentator who (not unfairly) calls the imagery a form of “trauma-based mind control.” Which is the point, as the subject here is the allure of fame and how its acquisition precipitates the splintering of the self. Gonzalez


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4. FKA Twigs, “Video Girl”

Filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s work here courts obvious controversy: FKA twigs appears as a kind of death-sprite for a condemned man during a lethal injection. But the video is so well choreographed, its political torque comes second to twigs’s showstopping turn under the glaring, fluorescent spotlight. This macabre collaboration bears traces of both George Hurrell and ’90s-era Mark Romanek, wherein the chanteuse’s pleading/accusing yelps are expertly timed to every camera movement, making for a video as bleak as it is weirdly glamorous. The year’s thorniest (and therefore best) exorcism. Macfarlane


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3. Vic” mensa, “down on my luck”

The similarities between “Down on My Luck” and Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day are unavoidable, but the video’s edge is in its sense of sprawling, almost oppressive temptation. While Mensa’s hero, bored at a party, susses out his next move, every option is played out to reveal its fullest (and often worst) potential, making “Down on My Luck” a breathless piece of filmmaking. It’s also hilarious, disarming, and melancholic, using repetition to actually up its dramatic stakes while mapping out the collision of new technology and good, old-fashioned bad decisions. Macfarlane

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2. DJ Snake & Lil Jon, “Turn Down for What”

There’s a reason why it’s called “gettin’ ugly” on the dance floor. Like Chris Cunningham chasing Adderall cookies with a Red Bull reduction, “Turn Down for What” inflates the breasts, spooks the horses, and blasts grindy hedonism into satiric abstraction. Insofar as a breakin’ boner with a blast radius of at least 200 yards can be said to be an “abstraction.” Say, is that choreography in your pocket? Henderson


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1. Flying Lotus ft/ Kendrick Lamar, “Never Catch Me”

Released on the eve of a urgent cultural American moment that, while certainly enriching its pedagogic potential, nonetheless can’t help but detract from the video’s central life-affirming message, director Hiro Murai’s “Never Catch Me” distills Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar’s ruminations on mortality into one single, potent visual metaphor—pop culture’s most cathartically powerful funeral sequence since Imitation of Life. The finality of death, especially those taken before their time, stings those left behind enough that being haunted by their life spirit comes as a sweet reward. Henderson

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