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The 50 Best Music Videos of the Aughts

No one needs to tell you the sea change in the realm of music videos and how we all consume them in the 21st century.

The 50 Best Music Videos of the Aughts

No one needs to tell you the sea change in the realm of music videos and how we all consume them in the 21st century. The state of the music video post-YouTube is something like a paradox. The medium itself now operates, by and large, within a frame the size of an index card, a limitation that has tended to take the wind out of the sails of larger-than-life ’90s stylistic touchstones as Hype Williams and his embiggening fish eye lens. At the same time, the audience for music videos has arguably never been larger or more socio-economically diverse. No longer an arty, niche marketing tool consigned to the few channels available to those who subscribed to cable (channels that had, incidentally, long ago abandoned their playlists in favor of proto-reality TV), the world of music videos is now an infinite, democratic panacea.

That’s for the better and, as anyone who has dared read viewer comment threads, the worse. Standing out from the pack has perhaps never been tougher and, even now, great videos run the risk of being overshadowed by an imitator, fan vid, or even a simple, Chris Crockerian webcam rant. If the focus has shifted from the stimulus to the response (try talking about the hotness of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” with anyone, and just see if it doesn’t take the other person about three seconds to shift the conversation over to Justin “We’re the dancers” Timberlake), well, at least kit and caboodle are now instantly contextualized in a virally encyclopedic forum (and thus we have Beyoncé’s bumps and grinds immediately compared and contrasted with the choreography of Bob Fosse).

Many of the best videos of the last decade were reflections of that hyperawareness. Others skipped rope with Ted Stevens’s “series of tubes,” willingly acquiescing to the brave new world of call-and-response, self-reflectivity, and view-count canonization. And yet a few other soldiers of the analogue brigade, led by the Man in Black, stood bravely out of time, pondering the ephemerality and mortality of it all. The great thing about the 2000s is that they’re all here, and they’re all a mouse click away. Eric Henderson


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50. Björk, “Triumph of the Heart” (Spike Jonze)

A love letter from Björk and Spike Jonze to the cat ladies of the world, “Triumph of the Heart” is more than just an uproarious collection of sight gags. Making a beeline to a local bar after a fight with her significant other, Björk leaves her sanctuary in a drunken stupor, literally exploding in amorous feelings before her feline hubby picks her up in their car. Letting off steam has never felt so touchingly conveyed as it does in this quirky and unexpectedly poetic rumination on the nature of affection and dependency. Ed Gonzalez


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49. The Chemical Brothers, “Believe” (Dom and Nick)

This sweet man-versus-machine clip by vets Dom and Nick suggests a remake of The Host by Mike Leigh or Laurent Cantet, beginning unbelievably and misleadingly with a working-class bloke watching gyrating female hips off storefront tellies before one of the sweaty Jane Fondites tells him to bugger off, her face freakishly distorted. As in the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar” video, image is beautifully rhymed to sound, except in this infinitely more terrifying vision, the beats are antagonistic—almost as if they are equally to blame for its main character’s descent into madness as the dehumanizing drudgery of his workplace. EG


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48. M.I.A., “Galang” (Ruben Fleischer)

M.I.A.’s D.I.Y. ditty “Galang” may not soar to the same stratospherically blissed-out heights as MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” clip, which just missed this decade roundup, but is similarly notable for its convergence of an artist’s grandiose political preoccupations with their playfulness of spirit. Against a backdrop of graffitied third-world signifiers—tigers, cellphones, palm trees, tanks, bombs—that awesomely pulsate along to the song’s beats, M.I.A. simply, and coyly, performs a silly little-girl dance, setting up what would become her multimedia M.O. for years to come. EG


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47. Death Cab for Cutie, “Grapevine Fires” (Walter Robot)

This haunting hand-drawn triumph by Walter Robot, which perfectly—if a tad too literally—interprets Death Cab for Cutie’s lyrics, will remain relevant as long as there are forest fires. Full of strange and lovely poetic touches, as in the rain that falls like tears over a picture frame, the video captures a harrowing flashpoint in a boy’s coming of age, during which he watches families, romances, and love affairs torn apart by a horrible, unstoppable act of nature. Rather than scoff at life, accusing it of futility, the video beautifully and poignantly acknowledges the healing power and persistence of memory in the wake of tragedy. EG


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46. Queens of the Stone Age, “Go with the Flow” (Shynola)

Inspired by the bold comic book images of Frank Miller’s Sin City, “Go with the Flow” is a combination of live action and rotoscopic animation (the kind made famous in a-Ha’s “Take on Me”). Silhouettes of the band barreling down a desert highway in the back of a pickup truck toward a rival gang of “skulls” are juxtaposed with a blood-red sky and not-so-subtle but still exhilarating sexual metaphors, including a slow-motion collision that results in an explosion of animated sperm cells and a squirting Slurpee. Sal Cinquemani


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45. Fionn Regan, “Be Good or Be Gone” (Si & Ad)

Hard to believe anyone in this day and age can still be thrilled by the concept of synchronized sound and image, but Fionn Regan’s unplugged video coasts gently on this fundamental concept. By simply playing his song in myriad different settings and splicing the footage together, preserving the natural audio instead of syncing it up to a studio track, Regan’s video becomes a moving study on the acoustics of acoustic. EH


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44. Benny Benassi, “Satisfaction” (Dougal Wilson)

This video, like the girls it features, goes down easy. EH


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43. Weezer, “Island in the Sun” (Spike Jonze)

“Island in the Sun” was cute before the cute-animals meme became noxious. It starts with a shot of bucolic hills that look startlingly like the island in director Spike Jonze’s own Where the Wild Things Are, where bears and monkeys frolic with the bandmates in naturalistic splendor. Paul Schrodt


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42. Bright Eyes, “First Day of My Life” (John Cameron Mitchell)

Am I a fan of this song? Not particularly. But watching everyone else in this video take in Conor Oberst’s lilting, acoustic ballad on headphones (apparently for the first time) and observing the range of reactions (pensive, playful, indifferent, unborn, canine) makes be a believer anyway. Music does this. EH


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41. Justin Timberlake, “Cry Me a River” (Francis Lawrence)

The plot more or less amounts to a TV-PG wash of an episode of Law & Order: Perverts Unit, as Justin Timberlake breaks into his ex’s home, records video of himself and another woman in said ex’s bed, then stalks and leers at the ex as she takes a shower and looks like a dead ringer for Britney Spears. But simply having the means to stage a juvenile— if gorgeously lensed—revenge-prank fantasy isn’t a crime. Jonathan Keefe


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40. OutKast, “B.O.B.” (Dave Meyers)

Twenty-some-odd years of hip-hop video clichés are creepily distilled into this apocalyptic ghetto foot-stomper, in which the streets are green, the sidewalks yellow, the grass purple, the beats insanely propulsive, the message soulful. Where are André 3000 and Big Boi off to in such a panic? A titty bar, perhaps, given the mood inside the souped-up cars, but this subversive vision essentially boils down to a celebration of community, like a Tyler Perried version of 28 Days Later, in which blacks young and old are united in their desire to get to church, where rumps shake as emphatically as arms reach for the heavens. The hunger of sexual and spiritual worship has never been so provocatively conflated. EG


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39. Sigur Rós, “Glosoli” (Arni & Kinski)

Throw in a couple of giant plush monsters, and “Glosoli” could pass for Where the Wild Things Are. As is, the video casts Sigur Rós’s evocative, sweeping pop within a framework that’s equal parts Peter Pan-style children’s escapist fantasy and Mulholland Drive dream narrative. A critical element of the band’s appeal is that their music is open to interpretation, and the final image of “Glosoli,” of a child performing a cannonball off a steep cliff as his friends swim away through the sky, is wondrous in its ambiguity. JK


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38. OK Go, “Here It Goes Again” (Trish Sie)

With all due apologies to Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” and Alanis Morissette’s “My Humps,” OK Go’s clip for “Here It Goes Again” stands as the definitive example of how viral marketing and the DIYouTube accessibility of media have changed the way that people view music videos over the course of the last decade. JK


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37. The Knife, “Pass This On” (Johan Renck)

Or “Sympathy for the Tranny.” The Knife’s 8-bit calypso number is the appropriately fragile/brazen soundtrack for this video’s simple but elegant moment out of time. A flaxen haired, spider-limbed female impersonator takes the mic in a rustic chalet. A woman in the small audience gets up out of her seat. Is she leaving? A glaring thug approaches the stage. Is he going to end her song by force? No, they’re both moved by the music, and soon everyone is dancing. Except for one young woman, whose blank stare closes out the video on a question mark. EH


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36. Kanye West f/ Syleena Johnson, “All Falls Down” (Chris Milk)

Kanye West is now so far up his own ass as to be lost forever, but this video, a touching stolen moment in which Kanye’s POV tries to make a moment last forever before his girl just barely catches her flight out, stands as a testament to the moment in his career when his focus could be believably trained on something other than his own legacy. EH


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35. Sigur Rós, “Hoppípolla” (Arni & Kinski)

A twist on Arni and Kinski’s previous videos for the band, the innocence of youth and the cruel cyclical nature of aging are highlighted in Sigur Rós’s “Hoppípolla,” in which a group of elderly pranksters ring doorbells and run, shoplift, and pick a fight with a rival gang in a graveyard. Sweethearts steal a kiss. An old man gets his nosed bloodied. The pranksters claim victory. The clip’s sole flaw is, perhaps, that there are a few too many shots of the old folks jumping into puddles, but after all, the song’s title is Icelandic for—you guessed it—“jumping into puddles.” SC


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34. Justice, “DVNO” (So-Me, Yorgo Tloupas, and Machine Molle)

I’m sorry I ever accused Justice of being a thinly disguised Threadless.com ad. Though their video for “D.A.N.C.E.” indeed revealed an unhealthy obsession with graphic design, at least the Scanimation delight “DVNO” reveals the breadth of that obsession. Serious eye candy for anyone who watches old VHS tapes and gets nostalgic at the bumper animations. EH


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33. Erykah Badu, “Honey” (Erykah Badu and Chris Robinson)

Who else but the “analogue girl in a digital world” could pull this off so comfortably? Erykah Badu’s tribute to the physical artifacts of old school music—in which she establishes roll call by jumping into the cover art of Honey, Paid in Full, Perfect Angel, and Maggot Brain—is Sherlock Jr. for the bin-scanning set. Other artists made iTunes playlists available for you to download. Erykah made this video and told you to get your ass down to the record store. EH


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32. Fatboy Slim, “Weapon of Choice” (Spike Jonze)

An unresolved question from the aughts: Was it the video for “Weapon of Choice,” in which he dances quite nimbly around a hotel lobby, or the Blue Oyster Cult sketch on Saturday Night Live, in which he thrust the phrase “More cowbell!” into the lexicon, that Christopher Walken turned into the Christopher Walken of today? JK


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31. Scarface, “On My Block” (Marc Klasfeld)

A baby is born on a front lawn and we’re taken on a tour of several decades on the South side of Houston, through the civil rights movement, block parties, poverty, gang violence, and police brutality. Hip-hop was Brad Jordan a.k.a. Scarface’s meal ticket out of this ghetto, but he returns to witness the cycle of violence, life, and love continue through another generation. SC


30. Robbie Williams, “Rock DJ” (Vaughan Arnell)

It isn’t hard to figure out why Robbie Williams, one of the decade’s biggest international stars, never caught on in the United States, where people prefer their pop stars to seem grateful for their celebrity until they’re inevitably crucified or cast aside. The video for “Rock DJ,” however, reveals Williams’s complicated relationship with his fame in both a figurative and hilariously literal manner, as he flashes a Cheshire grin, strips naked, and then flings his skin and viscera at a battalion of disinterested models. Justin Timberlake and John Mayer simply don’t have anything this subversive in them. JK


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29. Battles, “Atlas” (Timothy Saccenti)

Distilled down to roughly five minutes, Cube might have made for a nifty short film instead of an original premise squandered on unspeakable acting and misapplications of B-movie tropes. Battles finally made good on that trapped-in-a-Skinner-Box premise in their video for “Atlas,” a single that sounds, appropriately, like it was recorded only after its individual parts had echoed and ricocheted around a glass box for a few laps. JK


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28. Snoop Dogg, “Sensual Seduction” (Melina and Steve Johnson)

Big Boi and André 3000 were cute and energetic in 1962, but I’ll take Snoop’s chill 1981 model any day. From the moment the VCR dub’s “Play” pops in the upper corner, “Sensual Seduction” is the best kind of pastiche: the kind that respects but doesn’t lionize its source material. Snoop’s Roger Troutman lovefest, complete with star wipes and a color scheme that’s just starting to shake off the ’70s, is rendered with the sort of attention one would had to have lived through to replicate. EH


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27. The Chemical Brothers, “Galvanize” (Adam Smith)

An uncannily realistic video for the duo, “Galvanize” follows three would-be krumping Spanish kids who put on their clown makeup and sneak out of their parents’ apartments late at night. Director Adam Smith subversively toys with the viewer’s assumptions: The black-and-white intro has all the trappings of a youth-violence PSA (when the kids board a bus, a nearby couple looks on apprehensively), but when they sneak into a nightclub, the image rapturously turns to color. Following the lead of the song, “Don’t hold back,” Smith suggests that it’s when these kids are dancing that they get to show the world who they really are. PS


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26. Gary Jules, “Mad World” (Clive Richardson)

Unlike Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, which popularized Gary Jules’s lovely cover of a 1983 Tears for Fears song, this video clip by Michel Gondry actually holds up after repeat viewings. While Jules drones the lyrics of his song from a school roof, a group of black-clad performance artists—the glee club, no doubt—create very distinct shapes with their moving bodies: a face, car, boat, bird, dog, a person running. The sadness is earnest to an almost grotesque fault, but Jules and Gondry’s artistry perfectly harmonize, and what emerges is a dreamy ode to that distinctly frustrated adolescent desire for escape—to be anywhere in the world but here. EG


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25. Goldfrapp, “Happiness” (Dougal Wilson)

We’ve all seen that person walking down the street with a wide grin on her face or a bounce in his step and wondered what he or she was so damn happy about. Goldfrapp’s “Happiness” takes that premise to the extreme, as a floppy-haired young man in a white suit literally bounces through the streets to the bemusement and annoyance of passersby. Inspired by the “Street Scene” number from the musical Small Town Girl, the clip is stitched together like one long take, with Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory making various cameos throughout. The bouncing man possesses a childlike whimsy with which everyone else in town—save for the children, some teenage bikers, and a jumping dog—seems to have tragically lost touch. SC


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24. Kenna, “Hell Bent” (Mark Osborne)

What ever happened to Kenna? When New Sacred Cow came out, the artist was bold enough to do something like use the stop-motion short More as the video for his first single, “Hell Bent,” a mini narrative epic in which a dejected laborer turns his dreams into mass-market “Bliss” goggles, only to find his soul missing as a result. Judging by the more mainstream sound of his follow-up album, it’s a Faustian bargain with which Kenna is all too familiar. PS


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23. Vitalic, “Poney Part 1” (Pleix)

I’ve always wondered why man chose to domesticate the canine. That is, until I saw this half-cute, half-unnerving mutt (er, hybrid) which suggests Chris Cunningham remaking BBC’s Planet Earth as a Revlon commercial for flea collars circa 1983. These bitches’ coats bounce and behave in extreme slow motion, the poodle remains nature’s most terrifying beast, and the physical act of shaking off the rain finds the common ground between 2001 and Flashdance. EH


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22. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps” (Patrick Daughters)

In a meta music-video-inside-the-music-video, Karen O is the lead singer of a band playing in front of a camera and a small crew. Studio lights cast her lipstick-smudged face in a neon flow, a garish pop-art flourish that evokes Godard and does justice to her ridiculous over-performance, which includes a dramatic “Stop!” hand gesture to the audience. If nothing else, she should be cast in a Dario Argento film. PS


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21. Björk, “Wanderlust” (Encyclopedia Pictura)

Sometimes you have to worry about Björk’s sanity. Other times you just have to enjoy the ride. “Wanderlust” could be an art installation inspired by the immersive power of video games, which is to say it’s whacked-out and stunning. She travels on a Nintendo dragon’s back and down a hyper-CGI waterfall abyss. I’m just going to say it: It’s better than Avatar. PS


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20. Björk, “Declare Independence” (Michel Gondry)

Michel Gondry’s videos come in two subtly distinct flavors: strictly arithmetical but nevertheless breathtaking in their mind-boggling execution (think “The Hardest Button to Button”) and arithmetical but inextricably bound to the human condition via narrative or allegory. Björk’s “Declare Independence” falls into the latter category, the singer’s kaleidoscopic rage coloring the threads of a giant bass guitar via a megaphone while soldiers with the flags of Greenland and the Faroe Islands emblazoned on their shoulders declare their independence via rainbow-colored graffiti. SC


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19. Madonna, “American Life (Director’s Cut)” (Jonas Akerlund)

When announcing her decision not to release director Jonas Akerlund’s original cut of the “American Life” video, Madonna claimed that she did not “want to risk offending anyone who might misinterpret” its meaning. It seemed like spin control back in 2003, but that statement reads today like a damning indictment of the reactionary groupthink that gripped the nation in the early days of the Iraq War. It isn’t like either the video’s message about viewing war as a form of popular entertainment or its striking, loaded images leave much room for misinterpretation. Prescient? Yes. Relevant? Surely. Subtle? Not so much. JK


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18. D’Angelo, “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” (Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier)

Not unlike Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” made its star an unwitting sex icon. It’s also aesthetically liberating—an unabashed attempt to inverse MTV’s erotic gaze, turning it on a ripped black man. The single, continuous shot travels up and down the contours of D’Angelo’s body, doing for the artist what he does for his music: stripping it bare. PS


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17. Kanye West, “Flashing Lights” (Spike Jonze and Kanye West)

“Flashing Lights” could be Spike Jonze’s letter to Quentin Tarantino: “Hey, I can do that too.” In a glorious, slow-motion tracking shot, a Jackie Brown-like buxom woman strips to her lingerie, bludgeons her captive to death with a shovel, and burns the evidence. His fetishized violence is also shot better than anything Tarantino has done. (Watch as a double bill with Beyoncé’s “Diva,” which puts everything into delirious post-feminist context.) PS


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16. The Avalanches, “Frontier Psychiatrist” (Kuntz & Maguire)

The Avalanches’s music is a dizzying cavalcade of obscure samples. Their videos are in a more blissfully retarded vein, with their “Frontier Psychiatrist” essentially reinventing Hee Haw for fans of ’50s educational films, Sonny and Cher, The Gong Show, John Waters, Blake Edwards, and the Kuchar brothers, featuring a drum-playing granny, a chorus of ghosts, some donkey ass-slapping, music-playing skeletons, kazoo-wielding black cowboys, and people in chicken and monkey suits. The comically literal interpretation of the song deepens one’s understanding of the Avalanches’s approach, though mostly the clip is best appreciated as—to quote iAMtheWALRUS6 from YouTube—“the tweakest thing ever while stoned.” EG


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15. Röyksopp, “Remind Me” (H5)

The Norweigan duo’s electronic music may err on the synthetic side, but at least they appreciate good design. The brilliantly schematic video for “Remind Me” diagrams a city’s everyday workings, from the banal (a woman eats a burger) to the environmental (the meat manufacturing plant where it was made), a meticulously aestheticized Sim City unfolding before our eyes. PS


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14. Beyoncé, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (Jake Nava)

Sure, it’s the decade’s Ground Zero for YouTube imitations. But if on-point choreography and hotness were the only qualifying factors here, “Single Ladies” would only be running a close second to this among distaff trio production numbers. What makes Beyoncé’s Three Leotards one for the ages is the fact that there’s actually a fourth dancer running rings around everyone: the flawlessly pirouetting camera. “Single Ladies” is Max Ophüls funkily reincarnated. EH


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13. Kelly Osbourne, “One Word” (Chris Applebaum)

This surprisingly good dance single didn’t do much for Osbourne’s singing career stateside, but in the elegantly shot black-and-white video she fulfills a precocious childhood fantasy of starring in Godard’s Alphaville. As an undercover operative, Osbourne sashays fiercely through a narrow hallway and lies on a silk-covered bed, taunting the camera, “One lie tells a thousand stories/The greatest stories that were ever told.” PS


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12. Bat for Lashes, “What’s a Girl to Do?” (Dougal Wilson)

Natasha Kahn convincingly apes a David Lynch film by way of Sleepaway Camp in “What’s a Girl to Do,” in which she rides her bike down an empty stretch of highway, where funny things go bump in the night, including BMX riders in bunny masks. PS


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11. The White Stripes, “Fell in Love with a Girl” (Michel Gondry)

It isn’t just that the animation in “Fell In Love with a Girl” makes for a jaw-dropping stunt (particularly impressive to those of us who were never able to get their Lego constructions to turn out quite right), but it’s that the use of Legos is an inspired choice of medium, in that their primary colors and sharp lines find a contemporary analogue for the De Stijl art movement that has been an influence on the White Stripes’s image and aesthetic from the very beginning. It’s a triumph of form-meets-function in every sense. JK


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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


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9. Christina Aguilera f/ 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


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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


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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


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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


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5. Sigur Rós, “Viðrar vel til loftárása” (Arni & 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


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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


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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


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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


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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

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