Kwoon - I lived on the Moon
Nizlopi - JCB Song
Not the greatest, but some of my favourite local ones:
Great White Bearby Dear Reader - love the story and how the music goes with the animation when it picks up
Doo Be Dooby Freshlyground - it’s just fun and uplifting, just like the music.
Oh, and my favourite Gondry video is Bjork’s Human Behaviour
My Machines by Battles & Gary Numan is absolutely brilliant.
“I got you Babe” with Cher and Beavis and Butthead.
And Madonna's 'Ray of Light':I have many, for many different reasons.
Just an example…
We Are Young is a song I had heard tons of times on the radio, but hadn’t actually seen the video to until only about two months ago. I didn’t expect that song to have a music video story that that one did. It was pretty cool.
The concept is: A girl causes a huge bar fight to happen using her phone and the help of another guy.
Hands by Jewel has a cool story and special effects that are heartwarming. A town coming together to save people in it after a disaster strikes (earthquake?).
Happiness is great because it’s all shot in one take and I cannot imagine how tired that guy must have gotten jumping the entire time…and fast enough to stay in tune to the beat.
Ocean Avenue is like Run, Lola, Run. It tells the same story three times…in one, the guy is a few minutes too late, in another, he’s a few minutes early…and in the last, he’s not only just right on when he arrives, but the mystery of how he starts out every time is solved too.
The Reason tells a very interesting, amusing story.
This song was shot in one take, this version doesn’t make sense because even though that’s how they shot it in the original form, it’s unedited, so it appears to sound/be all jumbled.
Then, after the parts are all edited into an order that makes sense, this is the result. Tres cool.
Alive by P.O.D. is great for its special effects, it’s about a guy hit by a bus while driving in his car and the crash happens in slow motion while the band plays a few feet in front of it. It’s intercut with what the guy did that day leading up to the accident.
Unpretty is a great tale of four stories being told at the same time. Each story–a girl whose boyfriend wants her breasts to be bigger, a girl with weight issues, a girl being harassed at school by racists, and a gang war happening–has a beginning, middle, climax, and end. At first they all unfold slowly, but as the song goes on, it’s soon switching between all four at a very rapid pace until the song and all four stories climax at the same time…and then all resolve in different ways.
Finally, REM’s Imitation of Life would have to be the one that is my favorite and the one I think is the best. It’s certainly the one I’ve been most impressed with ever since I saw it. The time and effort and patience it must have taken to edit everything just perfectly and to plan things out and make it so everything works is amazing. It’s a birthday party that has a large group shot of people doing various things. The thing is, it’s constantly going forwards and backwards for about seven seconds, those seven seconds are all we see the entire video, it goes forward, reverses, goes forward, reverses, etc…and all during this the camera zooms in on various groups or people. I swear, just when you thought you’ve seen everything, you see something new that you hadn’t seen the first time. And again, the way everything had to be timed JUST perfectly…it’s just incredible how it was pulled off.
Second Sabotage, which is amazing. I think Billy Jean and Beat It were also mentioned (No love for Thriller?!)
Just a few to add to the list:
Tom Petty always made a good video… especially:
Mary Janes Last Dance
Don’t Come Around Here No More
And of course… Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim
Which, honestly… if it wasn’t for this video… would you have heard of this group or know this song?
Yeah, that’s a good one. Fatboy Slim, though, was pretty popular in certain circles, but also fairly mainstream with a few Top 40 hits in the US and good chart success worldwide, especially in Norman Cook’s native UK. I knew of him well before Weapon of Choice. “Praise You” and “Rockafeller Skank (the Funk Soul Brother song)” were ubiquitous for me in the late 90s. “Praise You” even won three MTV video awards.
Yes.
Yeah. He was pretty big. Maybe the biggest DJ in the world at some point. Praise You is on the loop at work.
The ones I would normally list have already been listed.
Calamity Song by The Decemberists; maybe it won’t mean much if you don’t know the inspiration, but if you do it’s brilliant.
God Monkey Robot by The Apparitions; excellent use of different media and animation techniques, and a kickass song.
“The Best” is too hard to pick, but here’s a good one I bet not many here have seen: