The music-video event of 2016 was easily the HBO premiere of Beyoncé's Lemonade -- inarguably one of the best albums of the year, and maybe one of the best movies, too. Lemonade was a leap -- an indulgent artistic vision that could've easily fallen flat on its face and somehow instead transcended the music-video form, becoming something personal and moving and cohesive. It succeeded so completely that I didn't include any of the component parts from Lemonade on this list, with one big standalone exception. Nobody else could've pulled off a stunt like Lemonade, and plenty of others tried.
With streaming-service money flying around and artistic ambitions going unchecked, 2016 was the year of the surprise album and also, for many of the same reasons, the long-form video. After Beyoncé's watershed, big stars like Drake and the Weeknd attempted to make their own short films -- long-form music videos that stretched four minutes' worth of ideas across 14 and included as many songs as possible. They didn't work. The only non-Beyoncé person who did make that concept work was Vince Staples, who is emerging as one of the great music-video artists of our time. And on the other end, there was Frank Ocean, who got revenge for record-label woes by forcing the world to watch a fascinatingly boring video of himself constructing some stairs. This was artistic iconoclasm at work, but it did not make for good viewing.
The best music videos of the year were, by and large, the short ones -- the ones with ideas but without the drive to force you to contemplate the grandeur of those ideas. And while music videos have often been a great incubator for cinematic talent -- directors like David Fincher, Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry all come from the medium -- this was the year that some of the great ones moved into television, with Hiro Murai working on Atlanta and Melina Matsoukas working on Insecure. Both are represented on this list.
While some directors, like Maegan Houang and (weirdly) Harmony Korine, did great work this year, the real standouts were the artists who pursued their own visions over multiple videos. Oftentimes, that meant artist/director pairings that will hopefully continue to do great work in the years ahead: PUP/Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux, Slayer/BJ McDonnell, Grimes/Grimes.
But really, there aren't too many overarching trends evident in the list below. Instead, there are just a whole lot of great videos -- videos with different tones, that express different things in different ways. Things within the medium may have gotten a little stranger this year, but the medium itself remains healthy.
50. CL - "Lifted" (Dir. Dave Meyers)
So much corporate brainstorming and focus-grouping must be going into the attempt to make K-pop queen CL into a Western pop star, and yet it still comes up with something as deliriously silly as this. Credit Method Man for being a good enough sport to mug his way through a video that absolutely cheese-ifies his greatest solo single.
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49. Mount Moriah - "Precita" (Dir. Fidel Ruiz-Healy)
An entire imaginary bank-robbery movie -- and a pretty good one, I'd imagine -- boiled down to one ecstatically ridiculous slow-motion escape scene.
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48. D.R.A.M. - "Cash Machine" (Dir. Lacey Duke)
Sometimes, you just want to watch things that are going to make you feel good. This video is for those times.
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47. Chance The Rapper - "Angels" (Feat. Saba) (Dir. Austin Vesely)
Some of us have long thought of Chance as a superhero, and so this video just confirms what we already knew.
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46. Tegan And Sara - "Faint Of Heart" (Dir. Devon Kirkpatrick)
A lovely little statement about the way we use pop icons to define ourselves, and the way music can be an escape from whatever boundaries the world might try to impose on us.
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45. Kero Kero Bonito - "Break" (Dir. Kero Kero Bonito)
Sarah Midori Perry beat the rest of the world to the Mannequin Challenge by months, and she actually had a narrative reason for it.
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44. PWR BTTM - "I Wanna Boi" (Dir. Liv Bruce & Anneliese Cooper)
There is such a thing as music-video acting. At its peak, it's completely its own form, one that's divorced from other ideas about acting. I don't know if I could come up with a workable definition, but if you want a good example, watch Liv Bruce in this.
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43. Skrillex & Rick Ross - "Purple Lamborghini" (Dir. Colin Tilley)
The best crass commercial tie-ins are the ones that go all the way in. And when you're shameless enough to put the Jared Leto Joker on the hood of a speedboat with Skrillex and Rick Ross, you're doing it right.
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42. Mykki Blanco - "High School Never Ends" (Feat. Woodkid) (Dir. Matt Lambert)
In the category of contemporary reimaginings of Romeo And Juliet, I'll take this over West Side Story or Baz Luhrmann.
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41. Massive Attack - "Voodoo In My Blood" (Feat. Young Fathers) (Dir. Ringan Ledwidge)
This year, Angus Scrimm, the actor who has played the villainous and otherworldly Tall Man in every Phantasm movie since 1979, starred in the fifth and final installment in the series, shortly before dying. Also, Rosamund Pike starred in a Massive Attack video that basically served as a Phantasm tribute, so that was cool, too.
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40. Phantogram - "You Don't Get Me High Anymore" (Dir. Grant Singer)
In the video for the best song Phantogram have ever recorded, Grant Singer essentially distilled an entire season of American Horror Story into one burst of glamorously morbid narrative-free imagery. This was the right decision. That CGI tidal wave is so beautiful.
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39. Bruno Mars - "24K Magic" (Dir. Bruno Mars & Cameron Duddy)
This isn't as fresh and iconic as its obvious predecessor, Mars and Duddy's "Uptown Funk!" video. It can't be; it didn't come first, and it's more concerned with being a butt-centric rap video. It's still a whole hell of a lot of fun, though.
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38. Skylar Spence - "I Can't Be Your Superman" (Dir. Maegan Houang)
This starts as a gritty and riveting crime story, and it ends up as a surreal pop-music fantasia. I wish more things played out on that sort of arc.
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37. The Weeknd - "Starboy" (Feat. Daft Punk) (Dir. Grant Singer)
The whole Michael Mann glowing-dashboard-light aesthetic is great in any circumstance, and it's not like it gets any less great when you add theatrical self-murder and glowing pink cross-swords to the equation.
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36. Massive Attack - "Come Near Me" (Feat. Ghostpoet) (Dir. Ed Morris)
An almost unbearably tense piece of filmmaking, and even when Massive Attack's decades-old masterpiece "Unfinished Sympathy" suddenly shows up like a ray of sunlight, you know the brightness it brings isn't going to linger.
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35. Rihanna - "Work" (Feat. Drake) (Dir. Director X & Tim Erem)
A goofy, silly, expertly crafted celebration of sex and dance and chemistry and charisma, from two people who, at least for the seven and a half minutes that these two videos take up, seem to really love being sexy and famous.
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34. Clams Casino - "All Nite" (Feat. Vince Staples) (Dir. Ryan Staake)
The "how the fuck did they do that?" reaction is rare in the CGI era, but this hypnotic, riveting, impressive video brings it back.
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33. Miike Snow - "Genghis Khan" (Dir. Ninian Doff)
I don't know if this is necessarily the subtext at the heart of every James Bond movie, but you could make the argument. And anyway, it's a blast to see it transformed into Broadway-musical euphoria.
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32. Shura - "What's It Gonna Be?" (Dir. Chloe Wallace)
A classically romantic high-school movie narrative, updated for an era when gender is on its way out and told with utmost sincerity.
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31. Charli XCX - "Vroom Vroom" (Dir. Bradley & Pablo)
At this point, I don't know whether Charli XCX's videos are straight-up pop videos or whether they're commentaries on pop videos. I don't think she knows either. And, to her credit, I don't think she cares.
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30. Jeff Rosenstock - "Blast Damage Days" (Dir. Clay Tatum)
Shitty friends and Mountain Dew are two things that can affect your life in similar ways, and now we finally have a video that makes that connection literal.
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29. Grimes - "World Princess Part II" (Dir. Grimes)
Usually, with life-on-tour videos, pop stars manage to make their fantastical lives seem quotidian and workaday and boring, at least except for the parts where they're onstage. With her AC!D Reign Chronicles videos, Grimes took her fantastical life and made it look even more fantastical. This is the best of those.
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28. Dessert - "Back Around, Devil" (Dir. Alex Lill)
A gory and surreal but ultimately humane tribute to the life of Emmanuel Yarbrough, the 700-pound sumo wrestler and MMA fighter who was once the world's largest athlete and who died shortly after shooting this video.
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27. Kaytranada - "Lite Spots" (Dir. Martin C. Pariseau)
HBO should've canceled Westworld before a single episode even ran. We already had the definitive 2016 visual narrative of robot/human interaction.
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26. PUP - "If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will" (Dir. Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux)
If you're in a band and you're getting ready to head out on your first tour, you might want to spend a little quality time with this video first.
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25. AJJ - "Goodbye, Oh Goodbye" (Dir. Joe Stakun)
OK Go videos are ridiculous, beautiful human achievements, and they really deserve all the hundreds of millions of hits that they seem to get instantly, the very second they appear online. (See below.) But they are also stupid, and they deserve to be mocked. This is fantastic mockery.
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24. YG - "Why You Always Hatin'?" (Feat. Drake & Kamaiyah) (Dir. Psycho Films)
Someone, somewhere, has probably looked cooler and more casual while hanging out of a helicopter than YG looks in the beginning of this videos. I've just never seen it.
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23. Schoolboy Q - "Black Thoughts" (Dir. Jack Begert & Dave Free)
Around the same time he released Blank Face LP, Schoolboy Q strung together a powerful trilogy of videos, one that concerned friendship and poverty and crime and loss and imprisonment, and he ended it with a fever-dream fantasy of himself in a prison mansion, waiting with his daughter for her schoolbus. Part three was the best part.
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22. ABRA - "Pull Up" (Dir. ABRA)
A wild night on the town, rendered in vivid, lush neon-lit extravagance that reminds me of Wong Kar-Wai movies. ABRA is great at making spaced-out goth-soul, but if she quit music and got into making movies, I would not complain.
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21. Honeyblood - "Sea Hearts" (Dir. Thomas James)
This video came out just before Halloween, and it served as a valuable reminder that, while carnivorous man-eating sea-demons disguised as humans might be the most interesting people at the party, it's probably still a good idea not to leave with them.
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20. Massive Attack - "Take It There" (Feat. Tricky) (Dir. Hiro Murai)
John Hawkes played Sol Star in Deadwood and Teardrop in Winter's Bone and a shambling drunk wandering through town with a group of zombie dream-dancers in this Massive Attack video. He gets all the good roles.
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19. Japanese Breakfast - "Everybody Wants To Love You" (Dir. Adam Kolodny & Michelle Zauner)
When Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner got married, her mother wore that amazing dress to her wedding. It must've made an impression there. It sure as hell did in this video.
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18. High On Fire - "The Black Plot" (NSFW-ish) (Dir. Skinner & Hey Beautiful Jerk)
I like to imagine that this one went through about 50 different drafts, and that it was always sent back, its creators told to make it "more metal" -- all so that this, the final version, would represent the most metal shit that human eyes had ever seen.
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17. OK Go - "Upside Down And Inside Out" (Dir. Damian Kulash & Trish Sie)
The members of OK Go and their collaborators were willing to go through zero-gravity free-fall to make this goofy video, so the least I could do is put it on this list.
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16. Slayer - "Pride In Prejudice" (NSFW) (Dir. BJ McDonnell)
Last year, Slayer and horror-movie director McDonnell made a cartoonishly gory, fun-as-hell video set entirely during a prison riot. This year, they made a trilogy out of that video. With this, the final chapter, they ended things by filling in the blanks of the one-eyed mass-murderer hero's backstory and by having Danny Trejo stab a neo-Nazi gang leader in front of his family during Christmas dinner.
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15. Grimes - "Kill V. Maim" (Dir. Grimes & Mac Boucher)
This was a glorious blast of neon-goth absurdity even before the gold vampire fangs and black angels' wings showed up, and long before it restaged the blood-rave from Blade at a hardcore show. I don't exactly know what Grimes is doing here, but she does.
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14. Kanye West - "Fade" (Dir. Eli Linnetz)
Dance becomes sex becomes power becomes surrealism, and a crass promotional stunt becomes a cultural moment. And Teyana Taylor becomes a superhero.
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13. Mitski - "Happy" (Dir. Maegan Houang)
Rapturously photographed Douglas Sirk-style period melodrama takes a turn and becomes something awesomely nightmarish. This is just masterful wordless storytelling, and it would be that even without a (great) song attached.
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12. The Avalanches - "Because I'm Me" (Dir. Greg Brunkalla)
Using a boringly average location as a setting for something sudden and joyous and absurd and emotional to happen: This is the point of music videos, yes? It's why we're all here.
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11. Radiohead - "Daydreaming" (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
There's a joke in the new season of Gilmore Girls about how the Thirtysomething Gang -- the crew of directionless youngish folks who can't seem to get out of their parents' houses -- are all obsessed with Paul Thomas Anderson. I laughed, hard, but there's something there. They're probably all obsessed with Radiohead, too.
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10. Slayer - "You Against You" (NSFW) (Dir. BJ McDonnell)
The second installment of BJ McDonnell's hyperviolent Slayer-video trilogy is pretty much one extended, extreme action scene, in which our one-eyed hero shoots and stabs his way through dozens of anonymous attackers, no context given or needed. There are so many dick stabbings. It's so awesome.
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9. Moses Sumney - "Worth It" (Dir. Allie Avital)
What could've been a piece of effective Chris Cunningham-style post-human body-horror turns affecting and loving and even romantic the way Sumney and Avital do it. A deeply strange and deeply moving little vision.
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8. Mai Lan - "Technique" (Dir. PANAMÆRA)
A frantic meditation on internet life that, perversely enough, is way more entertaining than almost anything you'll find on the internet. The part where she eats the arm is the best part.
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7. Vince Staples - Prima Donna (Dir. Nabil)
Longform artistic indulgence done right, by one of the best music-video directors of all time and one rapper who's shaping up as maybe his generation's single greatest music-video artist.
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6. Rihanna - "Needed Me" (NSFW) (Dir. Harmony Korine)
A luridly beautiful slo-mo riot of sunsets and motorcycles and skull masks and boobs and blood and money and slowly drifting smoke, from the guy who wrote the playbook on lurid beauty.
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5. PUP - "Sleep In The Heat" (Dir. Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux)
A tale of child-punk/animal love and companionship that breaks my heart every time I watch it, and I watch it way too often. Finn Wolfhard is good in Stranger Things, but he's great in this.
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4. David Bowie - "Lazarus" (Dir. Johan Renck)
When this video came out, it was a freaky vision from one of our foremost longtime purveyors of freaky visions. Then, a few days later, David Bowie, that purveyor, died. And so this video became something else: a vision of death from a man who knew he was dying. I still don't know what it meant, but I'm glad it meant enough for Bowie to make it.
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3. DJ Shadow - "Nobody Speak" (Feat. Run The Jewels) (Dir. Sam Pilling)
In August, when it came out, this was a fun video. Now, it's a chilling vision of America's diplomatic future.
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2. Jamie xx - "Gosh" (Dir. Romain Gavras)
Sergei Eistenstein by way of MTV's Amp. Just brain-shattering.
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1. Beyoncé - "Formation" (Dir. Melina Matsoukas)
An absurdly powerful piece of filmmaking, one that puts all of Beyoncé's transcendent shit-talk into a context of centuries of subjugation and oppression and resilience and cultural genius. Somehow, it continues to grow more vital every single day.
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