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The 100 Best Music Videos of the 2010s

In many ways, the rebirth of the music video set the template for streaming long-form content more broadly.

FKA twigs
Photo: YouTube

The 2010s saw the continued democratization of media: more content, more ways to access and consume it, and, as a result, a more diverse audience. In many ways, the rebirth of the music video, formerly the withering marketing tool of what Jack White might refer to as the “corporation,” set the template for streaming long-form content more broadly. Choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch, and how often. Even more so than film and TV, though, short-form videos have the potential to provide an almost real-time commentary on the politics, technologies, and even sexual mores of the times. Of course, MTV programmers have been replaced by YouTube algorithms, which, when they’re not sending you down a rabbit hole to white supremacist screeds and 9/11 conspiracy theories, force-feed us what’s already popular. The decade’s most viewed music video, Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” has been streamed 6.5 billion times in two years. In fact, none of the clips in YouTube’s Top 10 came even close to cracking our list of the 100 best music videos of the 2010s. The more things change…. Sal Cinquemani


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100. Disclosure featuring Lorde, “Magnets”

Lorde has never been anything less than uncomfortably mature for her age, but the music video for Disclosure’s “Magnets,” a standout cut from the U.K. garage duo’s Caracal, transforms the gawky teen into a bona-fide femme fatale. The clip, directed by Ryan Hope, finds Lorde cavorting with a married man while his meek, buttoned-up, and sometimes bruised wife cautiously prepares his morning coffee and stares blankly out the window of their L.A. manse. “Let’s embrace the point of no return,” Lorde urges as she zombie-struts in her usual way down a glass-encased hallway in a patent-leather trench coat and blood-red lipstick. She gives the wife a knowing glance and pushes the man, tied to a chair, into the pool. Then, of course, she sets the whole thing on fire. Cinquemani


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99. Alex Cameron, “Miami Memory”

Having met while making a mockumentary-style video for the song “Marlon Brando,” Alex Cameron and Jemima Kirke continue their fruitful collaboration with “Miami Memory,” at once a Technicolor dreamscape and a fearlessly intimate exploration of their dynamic as a real-life couple. The first third of the video seems to cast Kirke as a beautiful object—Cameron films her receiving a massage, then watches her dance—but the remaining two-thirds reset the balance. Kirke matches his gaze with hers, taking the camera over for herself, directing him, taking her turn to watch him dance. Anna Richmond


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98. Gwen Stefani, “Make Me Like You”

Target teamed up with Gwen Stefani for the first music video ever created on live TV, which aired during the Grammy Awards in 2016. The video, which opens with the No Doubt singer awakening after an ugly car crash and being primped for a first date, offers audiences the chance to bask in its creators’ virtuosity, as well as the thrill of watching them fall on their faces—figuratively and literally. In fact, Stefani and longtime collaborator Sophie Muller, who directed the clip, were clearly betting on the latter sensation. During the song’s vocal breakdown, Stefani’s glittery orange high heels are swapped for roller stakes by a stagehand whose fingers momentarily peek into frame, and Gwen is whisked off to an adjacent roller rink, where she’s cleverly swapped for a body double who takes a hard spill. It’s quickly revealed, of course, that Stefani is safe and sound in the center of the rink, preparing for the video’s impressive final aerial shot. Cinquemani


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97. Miley Cyrus, “We Can’t Stop”

If the surreal images in “We Can’t Stop” were simply a tribute to youthful hedonism, it would be among the decade’s most pupil-dilating eye candy, but deconstructed down to its macabre symbols—edible skulls, blow-up dolls, taxidermia—it’s one of the trippiest, scariest videos of the 2010s. Cinquemani

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96. Jay-Z and Kanye West, “No Church in the Wild”

Though it was filmed in the Czech Republic, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s breathtakingly shot “No Church in the Wild” plays as a broader comment on the civil unrest that’s enveloped both the Middle East and director Romain Garvas’s native Greece, as well as the violent conflict that seems to be roiling beneath the surface in places as distant as Wall Street and Madison, Wisconsin. Cinquemani


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95. Katy Perry, “Chained to the Rhythm”

The lead single from Katy Perry’s fourth album is a strikingly subtle piece of Caribbean-inflected protest pop. The breezy track isn’t just a slow burner, but its message—that we’re all living in bubbles, “happily numb”—is also decidedly bipartisan. Whether the song, co-written by Sia and produced by longtime Perry collaborator Max Martin, is an endorsement of self-care or a critique of escapism in times of political upheaval is up for interpretation. What is certain is that a track with a hook that implores listeners to “Come on, turn it up/Keep it on repeat” had better deliver the goods, and this one most definitely does. Cinquemani


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94. Tierra Whack, “Whack World”

The ambitious “Whack World” is a full-length accompaniment to Tierra Whack’s debut album of the same title. Like the album, it’s 15 minutes long, with the Philadelphia-based rapper and visual artist performing a wildly different vignette in each minute. Both album and video make for an impressive sampler of Whack’s versatility as a performer—which, in visual form, translates to her inhabiting a range of quirky and inventive characters, from a facially disfigured receptionist to a rapping corpse in a sequined coffin, a sentient house, and others that defy description. With a highlight reel like this, it’s hard to image there being anything Whack can’t do. Zachary Hoskins


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93. Chairlift, “Met Before”

Jordan Fish’s video for Chairlift’s “Met Before” gives viewers the freedom to dabble in some alternate outcomes for a trio of uncertain science grads caught in a potential love triangle. In having users act as the powerbrokers for all sorts of subtle decisions, Fish has essentially constructed a Choose Your Own Adventure for the YouTube generation. Kevin Liedel

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92. St. Vincent, “Los Ageless”

Annie Clark portrays Tinseltown as a vivid dystopia in “Los Ageless,” lampooning the superficiality of the showbiz capital as she endures a cosmetic procedure that pulls at flaps of excess facial skin, à la Brazil, or standing, Barbie-like, next to a shredder that destroys the word “No.” A woman’s legs stretch out through a TV screen and writhe before a quivering Clark; she swallows otherworldly, undulating organisms; the lime-green slime of a foot bath appears to gain sentience and climb her leg—all striking images that take to outlandish extremes the very real absurdity of adherence to oppressive beauty standards. Josh Goller


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91. Grimes featuring Janelle Monáe, “Venus Fly”

Adorned in some sequences in regalia that appears paradoxically both indigenous and extraterrestrial, while dressed as a steampunk-meets-Soul-Train getup in others, Janelle Monáe joins Grimes, who feverishly hammers away on drums, dons black angel wings, and bathes in crude oil in this slow-motion-heavy video for “Venus Fly.” Both directed and edited by Grimes, the video subverts fairy-tale princess tropes with the two artists cast as fierce warriors who shatter mirrors, devour apples, stomp roses, rip apart pearl necklaces, and wield flaming swords. Goller


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90. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “In Good Faith”

A simple song for dark times, “In Good Faith” is nothing short of a secular hymn. Will Oldham sings about small moments of grace and nature: rocks being shaped into diamonds, people helping one another through each day. The accompanying video is similarly gentle, with a documentary-style look at a group of people making their way through the world. We see them in homes, tending crops, generally filling their time with the tasks that constitute the bulk of life on Earth. The climax shows most of the characters singing in Sacred Harp choirs, joyfully joining voices to celebrate the possibility one finds in the sacred and infinite. At a time when religion divides people as much as any other force on the planet, the song and the video gesture to a world where our shared humanity joins us more than our ideas divide. You can’t go five minutes on the internet without seeing someone accused of lacking it, but “In Good Faith” celebrates the possibility that we might all make it out alive. Seth Wilson


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89. Jennifer Lopez featuring Cardi B and DJ Khaled, “Dinero”

The music video for Jennifer Lopez’s “Dinero” is as over the top as the song itself, which finds J. Lo alternately singing over a tropical rhythm and rapping atop a trap beat—sometimes both—while fellow Bronx upstart Cardi B boasts of their borough-based bona fides. Directed by Joseph Kahn, the black-and-white clip brazenly takes the piss out of Lopez’s dubious Jenny from the Block persona—and she’s clearly in on the joke, bowling with a diamond-covered ball, barbecuing in lingerie and pearls while sipping a crystal-encrusted Slurpee, toasting marshmallows over a burning pile of cash, and walking a preening pet ostrich on a leash. The video also features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by a Casino-era Robert De Niro. Alexa Camp

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88. 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. Steve Macfarlane


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87. Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment, “Sunday Candy”

Chance the Rapper may have come up as the acid-addled suspended school kid, but at heart he’s the coolest nerd in the drama program. The homespun stage sets of “Sunday Candy” pair with daring juke choreography for a heartwarming performance of the endearingly welcoming song. The fact that it was all done in one take gives it the exhilarating thrill of a barely rehearsed school play, executed perfectly just in time for opening night. James Rainis


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86. Destroyer, “Kaputt”

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. Liedel


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85. Earl Sweatshirt featuring Vince Staples & Casey Veggies, “Hive”

If Tyler, the Creator’s videos are all about overblown, colorful images in line with OFWGKTA’s Loiter Squad aesthetic, Earl’s “Hive” acts as a counterbalance, more in touch with the menacing Odd Future of a few years ago. The minimalistic, barely lit setting presents Earl and his crew as a hooded force lurking in the shadows, and suggests that Odd Future—and rap music—doesn’t have to be loud and abrasive to be threatening. Kyle Fowle

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84. 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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83. Grimes, “Flesh Without Blood”

Claire Boucher’s video for “Flesh Without Blood” doubles as an ambitious look-book, a compendium of Grimes’s many sides: blood-stained 19th-century socialite, brooding gamer goth, high-fashion lounge lizard. Boucher manages to look devastatingly badass in every getup, reflecting her gleeful ability to integrate disparate pieces into an alluring, unprecedented whole. Rainis


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82. 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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81. Tyler, the Creator, “Who Dat Boy”

Flower Boy may have been Tyler, the Creator’s “mature” album, but his self-directed music video for “Who Dat Boy” is proof that he still hasn’t lost his demented touch. Over the song’s horror-movie beat, Tyler disfigures himself in a mad-science experiment gone wrong, gets guest A$AP Rocky to “fix” him by replacing his face with white rapper Action Bronson’s, and hits the road. But as arresting as those visuals are, the cherry on top is the non-sequitur closing sequence, in which four multi-exposed Tylers show up to croon “911” like a one-man New Edition. The whole thing crackles with manic energy. Hoskins

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80. 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. Eric Henderson


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79. Run the Jewels, “Don’t Get Captured”

Director Chris Hopewell puts the underground rap duo of Killer Mike and El-P on a stop-motion agitprop carnival ride from hell, with Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons taking on the roles of top-hatted capitalists, the downtrodden people they exploit, and the corrupt justice system that enforces their interests. Think Corpse Bride but woke—and with much better music. Hoskins


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78. Janelle Monáe, “Make Me Feel”

Every segment of the “emotion picture” released by Janelle Monáe to accompany her third album Dirty Computer is visually striking and thematically rich in its own way. But it’s the segment for lead single “Make Me Feel” that arguably stands best on its own. Directed by Monáe’s longtime collaborator Alan Ferguson, the video features the singer and 2018 It-girl Tessa Thompson at what may be one of the coolest parties captured on screen. Widely viewed as a coming-out moment for Monáe—her pansexuality is dramatized in her interactions with both Thompson and co-star Jayson Aaron—the clip is rife with references to two recently canonized icons of sexual fluidity, Prince and David Bowie. Monáe’s choreography with Thompson and Aaron echoes Prince’s with dancer Monique Mannen in the video for “Kiss,” while the dynamic of a bold, flamboyant alter ego performing for the singer’s more reserved self is borrowed from Bowie’s “Blue Jean.” As with her music, however, Monáe is capable of wearing these influences on her sleeve (and her silver bikini top) while still making them wholly her own. Hoskins


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77. Die Antwoord, “Baby’s on Fire”

Die Antwoord’s Yo-Landi Vi$$er is a modern-day Carrie in this pastel-colored visual feast, only her oppressor isn’t a Christian fundamentalist mother or a bunch of abusive classmates, but her sexist, hypocrite brother (played by the South African group’s other vocalist, Ninja). And while Yo-Landi’s revenge isn’t as preternaturally fiery as Carrie’s, it’s every bit as sweet. Cinquemani

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76. Youth Lagoon, “Montana”

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. Kevin Liedel


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75. Sigur Rós, “Ég Anda”

Both of Sigur Rós’s official videos for “Ég Anda” are advertisements for the pleasures of breathing. One, directed by Ramin Bahrani, expresses without heavy-handedness its reverence for the air through its gorgeously mysterious collaging of animal and mechanical bodies and industrial surfaces. The other, a dry heave in the style of Peter Greenaway, mostly attests to chocking as hazard that spares no one and uses humor as a reason to get your Heimlich on. Editor’s Note: Watch Ragnar Kjaransson’s video here. Ed Gonzalez


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74. Gotye featuring Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know”

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. Gonzalez


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73. Danny Brown, “Dirty Laundry”

A hallmark of Danny Brown’s style is his ability to drop a punchline, and he’s described uknowwhatimsayin¿ as his stand-up comedy album. No surprise, then, that the video for lead single “Dirty Laundry” has him duded up like a Rupert Pupkin-ish lounge lizard zipping around on a gonzo tour of New York. In a mustard-yellow tuxedo and ruffled shirt, wearing a fake gut, Brown tools around the city in a yellow cab, wreaking havoc and generally having a great time. Hanging his head out of the cab like Heath Ledger’s Joker, Brown raps his gloriously filthy travelogue as he fights and seduces his way around town. The video’s multiple laugh-out-loud gags include him scream-laughing through the taxi divider at a terrified passenger and chilling on the bench at a laundromat in his underwear. The deranged protagonist matches the song’s manic tale of sexual depravity and takes the venom out of what could be a truly nasty song. Instead, the clip makes the song function more as a commentary on machismo than a celebration of sexual conquest. Wilson

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72. Oneohtrix Point Never, “Sticky Drama”

Oneohtrix Point Never’s spazzy, oozing electronics could easily soundtrack many of the apocalyptic futures popular culture has plotted out for us, but the video for “Sticky Drama” creates a singularly bizarre dystopia steeped in childhood nostalgia: LARPing, Japanese RPGs, Tamagotchis, slime, and CD dresses feature heavily in the video’s epic playground battle. Rainis


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71. Chaka Khan, “Like Sugar”

The music video for R&B legend Chaka Khan’s first single in five years giddily foregrounds a multiplicity of black bodies via vibrant, kinetic montage. The joyous clip represents a celebration of identity and persistence in the face of adversity, a thread that shoots through many of the decade’s best videos. Camp


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70. Flying Lotus, “Until the Quiet Comes”

Water is used as a metaphor for both death and resurrection in Kahlil Joseph’s stirring, Sundance-approved depiction of life in Los Angeles’s Nickerson Gardens housing projects. A black teenager rises from the sidewalk after being gunned down, his peculiar dance moves celebrating the joy and sorrow of his community as well as his escape from it. Cinquemani


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69. Earl Sweatshirt, “Chum”

What the fuck is going on, his shirt reads, which isn’t only a response to the something-sinister-to-it frogs sitting on top of one another. People and animals have no faces, and through this carnival of souls a somnambulistic Earl Sweatshirt floats through, chill, almost detached, forward but sometimes upside down, the whole world a fugue state that hauntingly expresses the agony of fatherlessness and feeling rootless. Gonzalez

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68. Duck Sauce, “It’s You”

This predictably goofball video from Duck Sauce sweetly tributes the barbershop as a nexus of African-American experience. More slyly, it reckons with and celebrates identity as cultural costuming. What’s hair got to do with it? Everything if it can give you a beat. Gonzalez


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67. 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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66. Leonard Cohen, “Leaving the Table”

Released weeks before the singer-songwriter’s death, Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker was as purposeful and poignant a goodbye as David Bowie’s similarly timed Blackstar. With his posthumous video for “Leaving the Table,” Canadian animator Christopher Mills doesn’t avoid the inevitable Blackstar comparisons, dramatizing Cohen’s passing just as Bowie did his own in the video for “Lazarus.” But where Bowie was the engineer and star of his own cinematic funeral, Mills uses Cohen’s absence to the video’s advantage, depicting the artist as a two-dimensional, occasionally transparent figure drifting above the rooftops of Montreal, through his own psychic geography (note the literal bird on the wire, among other references), and finally “out of the game.” At once moving and whimsical, it’s a tribute worthy of Cohen’s idiosyncratic legacy. Hoskins


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65. Thom Yorke, “Anima”

“Anima” matches a stylistically gifted director with one of rock’s most singular voices. The short film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, takes three songs from Anima—“Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus”—and weaves them together to form a narrative that subverts the crushing doom evoked by Thom Yorke’s lyrics. Perhaps the most prescient futurist in rock, the singer-songwriter has been railing about the existential threat to human civilization posed by technology and creeping authoritarianism for two decades. The film is set in a world overwhelmed by both, where Yorke is one among a group of uniformed, automaton-like workers when a chance encounter with a woman (played by his partner, Dajana Roncione) jolts him out of his forced stupor. The film’s visual style is heavily influenced by early German expressionist cinema, with bodies casting long shadows against impossible architecture, while the figures surrounding Yorke move with the precision of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The singer himself has an out-of-sync physicality reminiscent of silent film comedians like Buster Keaton. The climactic interaction between Roncione and Yorke leads to a moment of redemptive grace that belies the crushing sadness of “Dawn Chorus.” “Anima”—which is available exclusively on Netflix—is one of the most ambitious music videos of the decade, and an indelible companion piece to the album. Wilson

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64. Anderson .Paak, “Til It’s Over”

The music video has always sat at an awkward intersection of art and commerce, having originated as short film clips serving quite literally as “promos” for new singles. It’s thus only a little strange that Spike Jonze’s video for Anderson .Paak’s “Til It’s Over” isn’t a conventional one at all, but rather an extended commercial for Apple’s HomePod smart device. In the short vignette, FKA Twigs comes home from a long work day and asks Siri to play something she’d like. After a few seconds of .Paak’s voice coming out of her HomePod speakers, she discovers that her dancing can make the physical properties of her apartment stretch and shift. Both the simple, human joy of Twigs’s movements and the technical wizardry of the expanding room are so arresting that you’ll almost forget you’re being sold something. Hoskins


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63. Manchester Orchestra, “Simple Math”

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. Gonzalez


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62. Lana Del Rey, “National Anthem”

The quintessential music video for the supposedly post-racial Instagram era, Lana Del Rey’s Super 8-style tale of innocence lost takes the singer’s (and our) nostalgia fetish to its logical conclusion, reimagining John F. Kennedy as a blinged-out, cigar-smoking lothario and Lizzie Grant as the Madonna/whore hybrid who watches in horror as her American Dream comes tumbling down. Cinquemani


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60. Chance the Rapper, “Everybody’s Something”

Using the simplest of superimposition techniques, director Austin Vesely profoundly articulates how the “Chicago blues,” all of the city’s joys and demons, past and present, not only perpetually seethe inside Chance the Rapper, but define him as a man and give his music its unique fire. Gonzalez

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60. 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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59. Travis Scott featuring Drake, “Sicko Mode”

The album cover for Travis Scott’s Astroworld painted a vivid picture of the eponymous theme park as a psychedelic, vaguely sinister landscape, dominated by a giant inflatable model of Scott’s head and decidedly not to be confused with the real-life (and long-defunct) Six Flags AstroWorld. But it’s the video for single “Sicko Mode,” directed by Dave Meyers, that really brings the place to life, turning the bleak landscape of Houston’s inner city into a post-apocalyptic playground of talking train graffiti and video vixens on bicycles while Scott rides past a prowling police cruiser on horseback. Much like the multi-part song, the clip isn’t cohesive, as the scenes during Drake’s guest verse almost seem to be cut in from an entirely different video. But the abundance of bizarre imagery, both menacing and absurd, ensures that it’s never boring. Hoskins


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58. R.E.M., “ÜBerlin”

Starring Aaron Johnson and helmed by the actor’s Nowhere Boy director, Sam-Taylor Wood, the video for R.E.M.’s “ÜBerlin” perfectly captures the optimistic spirit of what may be the band’s last great song, a lush, euphoric, and, most important of all, irony-free celebration of street and life. Gonzalez


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57. Kesha, “Praying”

The video for Kesha’s comeback single, “Praying,” features the bright, glittery neon colors we’ve come to expect from the former queen of party anthems, but it’s in service of an entirely new sonic palette—and mission. The clip predates the #MeToo movement, but it dovetails serendipitously with the current mood of the country. Directed by Jonas Akuerlund, the video opens with a shot of the singer lying in a makeshift coffin, flanked by two suited men wearing pig masks, saliva dripping from their mouth-holes, a neon cross glowing overhead. Messianic imagery abounds throughout, including a striking black-and-white shot of Kesha stranded at sea on a wooden raft, arms outstretched. In the end, Kesha emerges reborn, escaping her swine-faced tormentors, breaking free from a tangle of fishing nets (pun intended), and, in a triumphant final image, walking on water. Cinquemani

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56. Lana Del Rey, “High by the Beach”

“The truth is I never bought into your bullshit when you would pay tribute to me,” Lana Del Rey sings on “High by the Beach.” The lead single from her third album, Honeymoon, is a love song of sorts, but it doubles as a rebuke to a fickle press, represented in the Jake Nava-directed video by a paparazzo stalking Del Rey at a seaside rental. Dressed in a sheer nightgown and robe, the singer wanders through the notably empty beach house, wallowing in her ennui and evading the black chopper hovering just outside. When the shutterbug is out of sight, she runs down to the beach, grabs a guitar case hidden between the rocks, pulls out a grenade launcher, takes aim at her tabloid tormentor, and blows him—not to mention the myriad anti-media screeds that came before this one—away. Cinquemani


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55. Radiohead, “Daydreaming”

In this video for 2016’s “Daydreaming,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s camera follows Thom Yorke through numerous locales, from hotel hallways to laundromats. The images, lucid and confrontational, exude an almost gestural quality as they cut from interior and exterior spaces, with Yorke waltzing in a sleep-like torpor toward a hole—or spacious studio igloo?—somewhere on a snow-capped mountain. The world here appears at once real and imagined, and by the time the fire within the hole lights Yorke’s face and the song grinds to a halt, Anderson dramatically reaffirms most of our beliefs about Radiohead’s music as, above all else, the prettiest soundtrack in the world to one man’s devotion to his own alienation. Gonzalez


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54. 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 the 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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53. Gesaffelstein, “Pursuit”

With equal amounts fascination and repulsion, this gorgeously constructed whatsit perpetually pulls away from a series of ostentatious tableaus that evoke aristocratic authority, surveillance, sex, and military might. Fittingly, no expense seems to have been spared in the desire to convey humankind’s pursuit of power since time immemorial. Gonzalez

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52. Tove Lo, “Glad He’s Gone”

Directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, “Glad He’s Gone” takes both female solidarity and device dependence to absurd lengths, as Tove Lo steps outside a diner to take a call from an inconsolable friend, comically traveling the Earth, thwarting an armed robbery, getting arrested, changing her identity, and going on the lam—all while her date sits patiently at the table watching his meal get cold. Maybe chivalry isn’t dead after all. Cinquemani


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51. The Chemical Brothers, “We’ve Got to Try”

Music videos didn’t have so much of a headline-making year in 2019 as in years past, but they came with plenty of merciful laughs. The Chemical Brothers returned with the polished cinematic sheen of “We’ve Got to Try,” which follows a group of scientists-cum-hooligans who train an adorable pooch to race cars (with prosthetic arms, natch) then launch into outer space where the animal finds self-actualization. Whatever has you down, this doggie dream will make you believe. Paul Schrodt


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50. 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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49. Lady Gaga, “Alejandro”

Fascism, religious oppression, and sexual aggression—if not violence—aren’t juxtaposed so much as fascinatingly intertwined in Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro.” Director Steven Klein’s aesthetic is propagandistic, inspired by German expressionism and, of course, the work of his other frequent collaborator, Madonna. Gaga’s assault-rifle brassiere is a literalized version of the conical bra the queen of pop donned in her video for “Vogue,” but it’s another David Fincher-helmed clip that looms large here: “Express Yourself,” itself inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Steven Klein is no Fritz Lang or David Fincher, but with “Alejandro,” he and Gaga come mightily close to channeling the spirit of the gender-fucked revolution Madonna began in the ’80s. Unlike countless pretenders before her, Gaga understood that man’s controlling mechanisms are no match for a woman who harnesses her sexual agency. It can topple regimes. Cinquemani

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48. Stormzy, “Vossi Bop”

Stormzy’s “Vossi Bop” is a testament to unfussy, low-budget ingenuity that fuels some of the most sneakily brilliant music videos. The British rapper appears on seemingly desolate streets of London with a lively crew of sportswear-clad youngsters who dance alongside him and disrupt the action in the frame. Every frenetic whip pan and circular tracking shot mirrors Stormzy’s immaculate bars and muscular grime beat. Neither the words nor the visuals, with a cheeky parliamentary wig snatch, miss a chance for a forceful punch back at the U.K. government that’s dishonored its people. Schrodt


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47. Kendrick Lamar, “DNA”

“Kendrick Lamar. Two first names, huh? What the fuck is up with that?” Don Cheadle’s sneering interrogator lays into the handcuffed, Compton-born rapper before sitting down, punching a button on a polygraph machine, and suffering a violent seizure as a sample plays of Fox News hosts deriding Kendrick’s lyrics about police brutality. When Cheadle snaps back to functionality, he’s possessed by Kendrick, looking around warily before rising and laying down bars that are equal parts braggadocio and an exploration of the duality of human nature, which is full of “power, poison, pain, and joy.” It’s a visual rendering of the internal struggle the artist wages with himself about both the oppressive forces he’s overcome and his own internal darkness. In a frenzied climax, the swaggering side of his psyche wins out and Kendrick, now filmed in black and white, frantically gestures at the camera and directly refutes the notion that anyone else should dictate how he lives his life. Goller


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46. HAIM, “Want You Back”

In the single-take video for their single “Want You Back,” the Haim sisters make Ventura Boulevard their runway, strutting in time to the beat of the song and endearingly acting out their respective parts (a solitary kick drum here, an isolated backing vocal there—the little moments you might not have even noticed until now) like ardent fans pantomiming their favorite pop song on the radio. Cinquemani


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45. FKA Twigs, “Papi Pacify”

Only the cinematography is strictly black and white in this clip, as inscrutable, disturbingly shaded dynamics of a possibly unwanted and uninvited sexual encounter play out in forward and reverse, like a nightmare counterpart to Bruce Conner’s Breakaway with an insistent oral fixation. Henderson

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44. The Shins, “Simple Song”

In Daniels’s funny but poignant video for the Shins’ “Simple Song,” a bat to the foot and a cake to the face is apparently enough to inspire an elderly James Mercer to play one last game with his children following his death: Find the Deed to the House. As they elbow their way past each other to rummage through the house, they unearth injuries, heartache, and other painful memories, but also small moments of kindness and love. In the end, it takes a wrecking crew to bring them back together. Cinquemani


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43. Disclosure featuring Alunageorge, “White Noise”

To a pair of outsiders like Howard and Guy Lawrence, Detroit is likely known for two things: its history as the birthplace of techno and dramatic scenes of urban decay. With help from director Luke Monaghan, they manage to unite the two with “White Noise,” and if there’s a more appropriate metaphor for our age than dancing through ruins, I don’t know what it is. Chase Woodruff


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42. FKA Twigs, “Glass & Patron”

That FKA twigs can out-vogue Channing Tatum has been out there for a while, but it took “Glass & Patron” to underline the point: “Am I dancing sexy yet?…Now hold that pose for me.” She couldn’t do a thing by the book if she were surrounded by highlighters, but even someone as willfully herself as twigs can’t resist the siren song of the catwalk in the end. Henderson


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41. Battles featuring Gary Numan, “My Machines”

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

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40. A$AP Rocky featuring Moby, “A$AP Forever”

The camera is the star of Dexter Navy’s video for “A$AP Forever”: whirling in dizzy circles above A$AP Rocky’s head and pulling in and out of a seemingly endless series of television monitors, street signs, smartphone screens, and other images within images. In the final sequence, the camera moves one last time into Rocky’s eyeball, revealing a reflected image of the rapper rotating in an anti-gravity chamber. Also, Moby is there. What it all means is anyone’s guess, but the trippy effect is a perfect complement to the strain of 21st-century psychedelia in Rocky’s music. Hoskins


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39. Danny Brown, “Grown Up”

Danny Brown’s playful reflection on growing up hinges on a key line from the song’s hook: “Whoever thought I’d be the greatest growing up” By having a shorty lip-sync the lyrics to his song, Brown makes banal experience—riding bikes through broke-down streets, getting hauled by Moms to the store in a laundry cart, causing trouble in school—seem extraordinary: the building blocks of greatness. Gonzalez


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38. Missy Elliott featuring Pharrell Williams, “WTF (Where They From)”

You can spit just one clause out to justify Missy Elliott’s placement on this list. Simply, “breakin’ marionettes.” Or “disco-ball tracksuit.” Or “hoverboard handstands.” Or “lens flare.” Or “that Biggie cap.” Or “hip-hop Shiva moves.” Or “two-faced pirouettes.” Or “funky crump of the living dead.” If just one of those things were all you could say, it would be a return to form for the woman who, a decade ago, seemed like she was on track to have as many classic videos as anyone else in the business. That all of those things can be said ensures that she still has a shot at fulfilling that goal. Henderson


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37. Mykki Blanco, “Coke White, Starlight”

Taking its cues from the works of João Pedro Rodrigues, in particular his extraordinary 2011 film To Die Like a Man, Tristan Patterson’s odyssey of a woman in trouble finds its protagonist (Blanco) leaving behind a life of drugs and depressing politics (television broadcast footage of Greece’s despicable, neo-fascist Golden Dawn party) for the lush forests and restorative waters of the coastline. Like the heroine of Rodrigues’s film, this decisive break from society affords the opportunity to completely reconstruct one’s gender identity, or to disregard it altogether, burdened less by the need to keep up an appearance than more practical concerns, like hunting for octopus on the ocean floor with a bowie knife. It’s a beautiful, strange, and ultimately very moving clip from one of rap’s true progressives. Mac

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36. 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. Macfarlane


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35. Lana Del Rey, “Video Games”

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. Gonzalez


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34. Angel Olsen, “Lark”

The video for Angel Olsen’s “Lark” operates according to a dream logic that underscores the song’s intensity, with locales and emotions changing on a dime. The song is about the moment a troubled relationship detonates with force of a supernova, unable to bear the strain of equal parts love, hate, recrimination, and guilt. The video makes “Lark” seem like a dream that’s just on the cusp of a nightmare. It begins with Olsen storming out of a house in obvious distress, then follows her through a quick succession of locations. The colors of the forest and the bonfire, and particularly the water ballet, are eye-poppingly gorgeous. But in the clip’s final moments, as she walks down a beach alongside some horses, we see a close-up of Olsen’s face, wracked with sorrow as her soaring voice fades. Wilson


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33. 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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32. Bicep, “Glue”

This is one for the motherfucking club heads of yesteryear, to leave them misty-eyed for those long-gone temples where the rave was the occasion for an act of near-spiritual communion. The video assembles images of the places where these sites once existed, of some of the roads that took you there, with text-on-screen remembrances from revelers who worshipped at the altar of the DJ. These missives, about days being off one’s box, laughing with friends, and coming down in ways like never before, suggest messages in a bottle: “It’s so hard to describe the feeling/25,000 people one with each other/No hassle/Just pure ecstasy.” Somehow, almost miraculously, the video captures the fullness of that sense of feeling by way of visions of places long abandoned by pleasure. Gonzalez


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31. Vince Staples, “Fun!”

Directed by Calmatic, the video for Vince Staples’s “Fun!” is both an astute condemnation of racial tourism and a (perhaps unintentional) auto-critique of hip-hop’s exportation of the black experience to middle America. Like Flasher’s “Material,” it’s also a bleak commentary on the ways technology—in this case, satellite mapping—has simultaneously united and divided the human race. Cinquemani


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30. Jack White, “Corporation”

Jack White’s “Corporation” is just as oblique, ambitious, and political as the artist himself. Over the course of seven minutes, a series of surreal, seemingly disjointed events occur: a cowboy puts on lipstick, a rave starts in a diner, a little boy steals a car. By the end, you learn that all of the characters are simply different manifestations of White himself, revealing the alt-blues pioneer as someone we already knew him to be: a complex, multifaceted artist whose neuroses are intimately tied to his genius. Pryor Stroud


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29. Grimes, “Oblivion”

Part of Claire Boucher’s charm is her inherent lonerism. It’s easy to imagine her writing and recording in some dank, dark basement, alone but for a litany of stuffed animals, dated twee trinkets, and other odd miscellany surrounding her laptop studio. “Oblivion” plays on that impression—and the capriciousness of Grimes’s music—by thrusting a girlish, headphone-donned Boucher into the public, male-dominated arena of various sporting events. Caught between varying levels of camaraderie and disconnect with passers by, Boucher is both humanized and alienated as she dances to the beat of her own drumpad. Liedel

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28. Lorde, “Royals”

Though additional footage of New Zealand pop singer Lorde was added to the U.S. edit of “Royals” for American consumption, her absence for most of the original international version speaks to both the 16-year-old’s “postcode” shame and her friends’ suburban-teen ennui. Cinquemani


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27. 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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26. Solange, “Losing You”

Inspired by Daniele Tamagni’s photography of the Congo’s elegant street style, Solange’s “Losing You” is a kaleidoscopic, doc-style portrait of Cape Town, South Africa. The dapper denizens of a colorful shantytown strut through the dusty streets donning ’70s leisure suits while the singer alternately strikes cool poses and dances exuberantly in front of a hair salon and tailor’s shop, all captured though director Melina Matsoukas’s signature hazy lens. Cinquemani


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25. The Blaze, “Territory”

The opening of the Blaze’s poignant video for “Territory” parallels the trail of water churned by a ship that takes a man to Algiers with the tears that roil on the man’s face upon his homecoming. From there, the video proceeds as a symphony of movement, intimate grace notes that attest to how our memories are so often tied to our proximity to the people and places we love. Inside a medina, the man repeatedly jabs the air in perfect lockstep with the track’s synths. Throughout, the intensity of the beat is likened to the desperation of desire and the intensity of the bond between men, a story of kinship that’s subsequently passed on to the younger generation during an act of soul-giving playtime that sees the man surreally charged with the animating spirit that is home and tradition. Gonzalez

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24. Rihanna, “We Found Love”

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. Cinquemani


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23. Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”

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. Gonzalez


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22. Kali Uchis featuring Tyler, the Creator and Bootsy Collins, “After the Storm”

Like the contemporary surrealist photos of its director, Nadia Lee Cohen, the video for “After the Storm” pairs a rich Technicolor palette with a playfully elastic approach to everyday banality: bringing P-Funk icon Bootsy Collins to (animated) life as a cereal box mascot and making rapper Tyler, the Creator grow from a garden like a literal “Flower Boy.” That these whimsical images appear alongside shots of singer Kali Uchis, dolled up in mid-century attire and staring blankly into the distance, suggest that they’re meant to dramatize the daydreams of a bored 1950s suburbanite. This makes the video’s final image, of Uchis and a fully sprouted Tyler acting out an idyllic nuclear family scene while their own disembodied Chia-pet heads look on from the window, as vaguely disquieting as it is humorous. Hoskins


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21. Goldfrapp,” “Annabel”

Part of a larger film designed to accompany Goldfrapp’s Tales of Us, the Tomboy-esque “Annabel” is dreamy folk tale inspired by Kathleen Winter’s novel of the same name about a young hermaphrodite forced to take on the identity of a boy in the 1960s, gorgeously capturing the isolation and fantasies of its androgynous title character. Cinquemani

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20. Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

Nearly a half-century later, one of the most iconic songs ever recorded finally received a video treatment worthy of its epic scope, in the form of this interactive project from director Vania Heymann, digital media firm Interlude, and an all-star cast including Danny Brown, Marc Maron, and Drew Carey. Even in an increasingly fractured, media-drunk culture, a classic is still a classic. Woodruff


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19. Hot Chip, “Hungry Child”

The inventive clip for Hot Chip’s “Hungry Child” reveals how a relationship’s irreconcilable fault lines surface as petty grievances, utilizing the song itself as a plot device. In the midst of a couple’s argument, a house groove mysteriously begins to emanate from somewhere inside the house, following them into the street, and into an Uber ride and therapy session. Only when they resolve to break up does the song stop plaguing them. Sophia Ordaz


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18. Mitski, “Pearl”

At an astounding 1,480 individual frames, “Pearl” is a marvel of digital animation. Rendered to produce a dreamlike effect, the soft-hued stills—composed of ink, charcoal, pastel, and color pencil—depict a lone woman walking into a spacious mansion that falls to pieces at the strum of a guitar. Surrounded by a whirlwind of flying furniture, dishes, and paintings, the woman free-falls, becoming smaller and smaller in the immensity of an endless expanse of sky. Below, the bottomless abyss of an ocean awaits, reinforcing the song’s overwhelming sense of uncertainty. Ordaz


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17. Björk, “The Gate”

Björk has leaned in extra hard on the talking point about Utopia being her Tinder album. But there’s nothing so remotely or summarily brief as a swipe in either direction from the video for the album’s lead single, though it certainly finds her reasserting her essential energy. Balanced between hardness and softness, light and dark, introspection and performance, it’s a celestial come-hither. In the same sense that Stéphane Sednaoui’s interpretation of “Big Time Sensuality” stripped away everything extemporaneous to find more than enough in that essential Björkish energy, director Andrew Thomas Huang sees the spectrum of life itself within his muse and assigns it the only appropriate visual analogue. Dressed in a corrugated prism, Björk gets her groove back in a spasmic frenzy of pure, OLED fireworks. In “All Neon Like,” she promised to weave a “marvelous web of glow-in-the-dark threads,” and with “The Gate,” she’s delivered. Henderson

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16. Danny Brown, “Ain’t It Funny”

It’s tempting, at first glance, to dismiss the concept for “Ain’t It Funny” as hackneyed and banal: Introduce Detroit hip-hop wildman Danny Brown into a lily-white, Growing Pains-via-Too Many Cooks ’80s sitcom family and watch as hilarity ensues. Once the jokey opening credits are over, however, it becomes clear that Brown and director Jonah Hill are doing more than just taking cheap shots at old trash-culture clichés. “I’m fucked up and everyone thinks it’s a joke,” says Uncle Danny between swigs of his 40-ounce; “I have a serious problem,” he declares to the camera like a beloved TV character delivering his catchphrase. By the end of the video, Brown is lying on the soundstage floor bleeding out while the studio audience leaps to their feet in applause. “Ain’t It Funny” may not be subtle, but its dramatization of the ways pop culture encourages and exploits self-destruction—especially in African-American entertainers—is damning and incisive. Hoskins


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15. Beyoncé, “Formation”

Beyoncé is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. “Stop shooting us,” reads graffiti on a wall in the music video for 2016’s “Formation,” intercut with scenes of a boy in a black hoodie facing off against a line of riot police with nothing but his dance moves. But the clip, directed by Melina Matsoukas, is much more than simply an audio-visual manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Doubling as a tribute to New Orleans, the video opens with a pointed shot of Beyoncé standing atop a New Orleans Police Department car submerged in floodwater, and it dips even further back into our country’s racially charged history to ask, via a fake newspaper titled The Truth, “What is the real legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and why was a revolutionary recast as an acceptable Negro leader?” Cinquemani


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14. Explosions in the Sky, “Postcards from 1952”

As time passes, photographs inevitably become artifacts stranded in time, their context a fading memory. “Postcards from 1952” seeks to reimagine those lost details, focusing an excruciatingly slow eye on the beauty of the moments leading up to the flash. Seeing as how Explosions in the Sky’s post-rock has always worn its pensive heart on its sleeve, the sentimental exploration doesn’t quite come as a shock. What does surprise, however, is the video’s disregard for cheap nostalgia. It would be rather easy to pair EITS’s towering guitars with some heavy-handed Kodak moments, but “Postcard from 1952” eschews schmaltz for something far more captivating: The beautifully fragile details that never make it into the photo album, but are just as important as what does. Liedel


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13. Lady Gaga featuring Beyoncé, “Telephone”

“Telephone” is full of obvious nods to Quentin Tarantino: the self-conscious dialogue laden with knowing winks to the audience; the fascination with the muddy waters of exploitation, of which the women-in-prison film is a genre favorite; and of course, the infamous Kill Bill Pussy Wagon. The video flirts with the edges of coherence, crossing the line a few times. It’s full of random references (including nods to sci-fi works like Dune), product placement, and interesting but strange visual tics like Gaga displaying her thoughts in German right before she commits murder. Like “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi,” the themes in “Telephone” revolve around control. Who’s in control of the narrative, of the image, and of the music? The way Gaga and Beyoncé stutter-stop to the beat of the track and the editor’s cutting turns the pair into marionettes, their heads bobbing up and down in time. Gaga starts off in prison, behind bars and bound by chains, before escaping to the expansive freedom of the desert. And the pair’s act of mass murder? It’s about seizing control: of their work, their art, and whatever piece of the culture they can claim as their own. Oscar Moralde

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12. Jay-Z, “The Story of O.J.”

At a time when emboldened, torch-carrying white supremacists march the streets, the burning crosses, slave ships, cotton fields, and white hoods portrayed in “The Story of O.J.” don’t seem nearly as antiquated as the animation, created in the style of Looney Tunes and Disney circa the 1930s. Jay-Z is portrayed here as Jaybo—a riff on the Sambo caricature—and he eats watermelon and sips orange drink as he runs through various stereotypical categorizations of African-Americans in a cartoon that’s both visually powerful in its 20th-century style and frightening in its 21st-century relevance. Goller


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11. Kendrick Lamar, “Alright”

It takes some gall to stage a #BlackLivesMatter block party and cast yourself as the messianic force floating above it all. But the immense, vibrantly photographed hubris of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” is, in itself, a galvanizing fulfillment of that same political concept, and a stern rebuke of the insidious #AllLivesMatter backlash. Whereas #BlackLivesMatter confirms the individuality of each person as self-evident and something to be celebrated, #AllLivesMatter insists on shutting down the conversation and stripping everyone of what makes them unique. The iconography of “Alright” is frequently contradictory and inscrutable. But it’s alive, and that’s all that matters. Henderson


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10. The Carters, “Apeshit”

The Carters’s Everything Is Love may not have achieved the same cultural ubiquity as Beyoncé’s Lemonade, or Jay-Z’s 4:44, but it spawned one of 2018’s most poignant videos. In “Apeshit,” the power couple performs in a vacant Louvre, commandeering the world’s most famous museum without breaking a sweat. It’s a radical testament to their influence as artists, business people, and political players, as well as a bold statement about the overlooked primacy of blackness in the Western canon. Stroud


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9. M.I.A., “Borders”

With its soft, flattering cinematography and dazzling, kaleidoscopic set pieces, M.I.A.’s music video for her pointedly titled single “Borders” risks turning the life-or-death plight of refugees into a fashion runway for her decidedly understated duds: A jersey she sports reads, “fly pirates,” and at one point she literally walks on water. But the image of the artist as the fearless leader of an army of émigrés, trudging forward across land and water, is a simple, potent, and timely one. M.I.A. has often used her early life as a political refugee to highlight and subvert common perceptions of the immigrant experience, but perhaps never as bluntly, accessibly, or—yes—beautifully as she does here. Cinquemani

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8. 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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7. Janelle Monaé featuring Erykah Badu, “Q.U.E.E.N.”

Despite a seemingly playful plotline involving ’60s girl group-inspired rebels breaking into a living museum to free their notorious time-traveling leader and her dangerous accomplice (played by Erykah Badu), the futuristic, sci-fi visuals of “Q.U.E.E.N.” teem with political purpose. The video’s expertly crafted edits and jump cuts make it impossible to turn away from Monaé’s nearly minute-long closing sermon on racial and economic inequality and, most importantly, the virtues of “getting down.” Fowle


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6. Run the Jewels, “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)”

Truthful, direct, impossible to misinterpret. Run the Jewels’s roaring “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” is granted a stark counterpoint, as a white cop and a black youth struggle in a seemingly unwinnable battle pitched somewhere between DashCam video, the cover of Time magazine’s May 11, 2015 issue, and Dr. Seuss’s metaphorical butter battle. Killer Mike’s furious “We killin’ them for freedom ‘cause they tortured us for boredom” plays out in grim real time as the dueling figureheads wear each other down. In the video’s pointed punchline, it seems that neither side fully knows why they’re out for blood. But only one side represents the system that knows damn well why they are. Henderson


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5. FKA twigs, “Cellophane”

The voyeuristic introduction to FKA twigs’s “Cellophane” is, perhaps, symbolic of the public scrutiny the singer endured in the wake of her split with actor Robert Pattinson. Her graceful flight up and down a stripper pole is vulnerable and wounded, far from the sensuality typically associated with the dance form. She abandons her performance, climbing the pole to a heavenly realm that opens up above her, where she contemplates a mechanical, insect-like creature that bears her face. Director Andrew Thomas Huang interweaves shots of twigs’s pole dancing and of her falling helplessly as she comes to grips with her deepest insecurities. twigs is covered head to foot in the brown clay that breaks her fall, as if she were settling in her insecurities rather than running away from them. Ordaz

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4. Is Tropical, “The Greeks”

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 decade, a celebration of the imaginations of boys who only slow down for a rotisserie chicken and some mashed potatoes. Cinquemani


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3. MS MR, “Hurricane”

They say every image you’ve ever seen is subliminally catalogued in your brain forever, like a super-computer storing files until they’re called up again for recognition. “Welcome to the inner workings of my mind,” the anonymous female half of MS MR sings on the duo’s debut single, “Hurricane,” as an exhilarating montage of every pop culture image she’s absorbed in her life speeds by in a collage of memories, like time snowballing faster and faster until it reaches an old movie title card that reads, “The End.” Cinquemani


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2. Flying Lotus featuring 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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1. Childish Gambino, “This Is America”

Surprise-released to coincide with Donald Glover’s double duty as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live in May, the provocative video for “This Is America” was already inspiring breathless think pieces by the following morning. Directed by Hiro Murai, Glover’s principal collaborator on FX’s Atlanta, “This Is America” shares with many of that show’s best episodes a knack for getting under viewers’ skins, presenting highly charged images with just enough ambiguity to encourage social media reactions of the “WTF did I just watch” variety. But if the last seven months of critical dissection and memetic recycling have inevitably dulled some of its shock value—and, by extension, its power as a political statement—the video remains an astounding artistic achievement. In a series of long shots cleverly disguised as one uninterrupted take, Glover pulls dances and faces from the intertwined traditions of pop culture and minstrelsy, seamlessly juxtaposed with eruptions of sudden, graphic gun violence. In both extremes, it’s impossible to take your eyes off of him—which is, of course, the point. Like the never-ending train wreck that is American history itself, “This is America” offers entertainment and grotesquerie in equal measure. Hoskins

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