Slant Magazine

10. Sigur Rós, "untitled #1 (Vaka)" (Floria Sigismondi)
To say that the MTV Video Music Awards lost all credibility during the last decade wouldn't be hyperbolic. While MTV was awarding pieces of crap like Britney Spears's "Piece of Me," however, MTV Europe was showering accolades on acts like the Avalanches, Röyksopp, and Sigur Rós, whose "untitled #1 (Vaka)" won Best Video in 2003. The Floria Sigismondi-directed clip opens with the sullen faces of grade school children being inspected before rushing outside for recess donning gas masks (a post-9/11 pop-culture fixture). Disease (and dis-ease) is rampant in this post-apocalyptic future where ash falls like snow from scorched skies, and peace, like a white dove shown decaying on the ground, is dead. SC

9. Christina Aguilera featuring Redman, "Dirrty" (David LaChapelle)
Aguilera commissioned photographer David LaChapelle to direct "Dirrty," a not-so-subtle fuck-you to her innocent teeny-bopper image, resulting in one of the director's more heady mainstream collaborations, not to mention a strange queering of the booty-shaking genre. The singer descends into a lovingly art-directed boxing ring surrounded by muscle-bound men seemingly borrowed from a Bruce Weber shoot, and later gets hosed down in a men's bathroom. LaChapelle's high-gloss, fetishized aesthetic is uniquely suited to a video about, well, fetish—an underground meat locker where pop music's subconscious resides. PS

8. Madonna, "Hung Up" (Johan Renck)
Madonna may be wearing Karen Lynn Gorney's thrift store hand-me-downs and dancing for her own sake, but I'd like to see John Travolta or anyone else dare to ask her if she's in training to be anything other than the yoga-flexible, parkour-and-krump co-opting, ass-cleave-baring, DDR-oblivious, beatbox-humping trooper she is and always will be. EH

7. The Chemical Brothers, "Star Guitar" (Michel Gondry)
The Chemical Brothers's song offers only raw undulating sensation, and Michel Gondry responds accordingly, with a bullet train trip through a countryside enchanted by landscape choreography. With each beat, each synth effect, each dynamic shift, Gondry's window-gazing camera picks up a new bit of beat-wise serendipity. The entire world appears to be humming along. EH

6. Johnny Cash, "Hurt" (Mark Romanek)
Country music videos have a tradition of literal-mindedness that rarely involves them in any discussion of the music video as a legitimate art form, but Johnny Cash has rarely adhered to the conventions of country music. The vulnerability and frailty Cash puts on naked display throughout his video for "Hurt" transforms his somber, melancholy Nine Inch Nails cover into an evocative meditation on mortality that found the Man in Black exploring his iconic image literally into his last days. JK

5. Sigur Rós, "Vidrar Vel Til Loftárása" (Arni and Kinski)
Sigur Rós's longing masterpiece is the zero-gravity tone poem of adolescent gender identity Billy Elliot only pretended to be. With langorous, De Palma-worthy slow motion visuals and an insistent sensitivity about not only two schoolyard boyfriends but the community that will likely choose not to suffer their burgeoning love, "Vidrar" stands shoulder with the absolute best feature-length gay movies the decade had to offer. EH

4. R.E.M., "Imitation of Life" (Garth Jennings)
Using a pan-and-scan technique, director Garth Jennings zooms in on different corners of a looped video of a suburban pool party. This painterly mosaic reorients the way we normally watch videos and interrogates the sunny, feel-good surface of his crowded frame: A man lights himself on a barbecue pit fire, a woman throws a glass of water in someone's face, and a couple leaves the festivities to screw in the backyard. PS

3. The White Stripes, "The Hardest Button to Button" (Michel Gondry)
Michel Gondry's videos are often reducible to mathematical equations, a metaphor for his complicated filmmaking process. In "The Hardest Button to Button," the drum sets and amps multiply in sync with the song's bassline. Filmed in New York City with a digital camera, it looks like a dirt-cheap student art project, which is part of its charm. PS

2. Jay-Z, "99 Problems" (Mark Romanek)
Mark Romanek's best music videos are montages of found socio-cultural artifacts, like a black boy's head jutting from behind his father's penniless pockets in Janet Jackson's "Got 'Til It's Gone," suspending a community's images of itself in time. For "99 Problems," Jay-Z collaborated with Romanek on a video shot near the Bed-Study housing projects where the rapper grew up, and for each man, it seems like the work he was born to make. Jay-Z is hassled by cops who want to look inside his trunk, a day-in-the-hard-knock-life that he narrates while walking along the Brooklyn Bridge, intercut with a rapid-fire succession of scenes from the neighborhood: drooling fight dogs, prisoners being hosed down, motorcyclists doing wheelies in slow-motion. In the end, Jay-Z is shot full of bullet holes as a group of hoochie mamas soap up their bare legs, a bold critique of hip-hop culture, but Romanek's ecstatic black-and-white images are ultimately life-affirming—a record of street life as it's really lived. PS

1. Kylie Minogue, "Come Into My World" (Michel Gondry)
Ballsily referencing Zbigniew Rybczynski's Oscar-winning masterpiece Tango, Michel Gondry's equally fantastic clip for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" is an invitation to existential discourse. Not quite as slapsticky, I think, as Armond White has heralded, it is most definitely a remarkable deconstruction of artistic identity and technique. The choreographic precision of the clip is dazzling, with Kylie multiplying on screen in unison as one more buttery, Minnie Moused version of herself springs forth from her being on the song's seductive chorus. As in Rybczynski's innovative short film, the subject is the negotiation of space but also a consideration of how the self is refracted through media. EG