The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

straight2video

The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

straight2video

This column is a weird one because the quality of music videos tends to vacillate wildly from week to week. Some weeks, there are just no motherfucking good ones, so I have to go hunting through K-pop blogs to find something to fill out the list, or where I consider throwing a late-night performance into the mix because everything else is just Super-8 footages of meadows or no-budget CGI landscapes or whatever. Then, sometimes we have weeks like this one. There are videos that would’ve been #1 in previous weeks that didn’t make it into this week’s column at all. Even more impressive, the five videos on this list have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They all do their respective specific things remarkably well, and those things are all wildly distinct. Check them all out below.

5. The Coathangers – “Follow Me” (Dir. Newmerica)

For a long time, this one seems like a low-budget one-joke video: The members of Mastodon dress in drag and act like ladies. As one-joke videos go, that’s not bad, especially since the members of Mastodon are so unbelievably terrible at acting like ladies and also at lip-syncing this song. But the final punchline here had me chuckling for longer than I really want to admit. Make sure you keep watching until the end.

4. Xiu Xiu – “El Naco” (Extremely NSFW) (Dir. John Clark)

The “Thriller” of castration anxiety. Crazy effective, and I plan on living a long and happy life without ever watching this again.

3. YG – “My Nigga (Remix)” (Feat. Lil Wayne, Rich Homie Quan, Meek Mill & Nicki Minaj) (Dir. Motion Family)

Rap music is the best thing.

2. FKA twigs & inc. – “FKA x inc.”(Dir. FKA twigs & Nick Walker)

If Peter Bogdanovich had made The Last Picture Show during the era of freaky, stoned Tumblr-soul, it might’ve looked something like this. Just an unbelievably gorgeous piece of work.

1. HAIM – “If I Could Change Your Mind”(Dir. Warren Fu)

There are two ways you could look at this video. You could wonder about the imaginary continuum between pop and indie rock, where HAIM fit into it, where a heavily choreographed video like this says about where they think they should fit into it. Or you could just receive it as four minutes of pure, dizzy joy. I recommend the second option.

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