The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

This column never covered the video for Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You,” currently the #1 song in the country, and I forget why. But it’s a smart, canny video, one that effectively harnesses the power of charm and celebrity and turns an efficient, forgettable song into something that’ll at least linger in your brain. This past week, Maroon 5 released another version of the video. It’s just a reedited version of the first, with the celebrities in question at different points of their Adam Levine dance-along, and it’s perfectly entertaining, too. That video is presumably a transparent attempt to keep “Girls Like You” at #1 for another week or two. It’ll probably work. But if they really want to find their way onto this list, they need to release the version that’s nothing but Beanie Feldstein, the best friend from Ladybird. She can do the Cardi B part and everything. This week’s picks are below.

5. Paul McCartney – “Come On To Me” (Dir. TG Herrington)

Paul McCartney, or maybe the team responsible for handling Paul McCartney, is currently making an adorably misbegotten attempt to turn this video into a viral dance sensation. It must be weird for someone whose music used to cause spontaneous public dance-alongs to be working to game the system to cause non-spontaneous public dance-alongs. But the video is fun anyway, mostly because they cast good dancers.

4. How To Dress Well – “Body Fat” (Dir. Tom Krell & Justin Daashuur Hopkins)

Tom Krell is really out here making body-horror D’Angelo videos. That boy is wild.

3. Joji – “Test Drive” (Dir. James Defina)

This guy is hanging from a crane cable, suspended over the desert sand, wearing a straightjacket. And he’s managing to look bored. Color me impressed.

2. 6LACK – “Pretty Little Fears” (Feat. J. Cole) (Dir. Matthew Dillon Cohen)

Here we have an R&B video, with a standard R&B-video storyline. And yet it looks like a prestige indie film. When you find a new way to look at conventions, you can start to rediscover why they’re conventions in the first place.

1. Antarctigo Vespucci – “Freakin’ U Out” (Dir. Clay Tatum)

At first, I was perfectly charmed by this allegory about how hard it can be to get people to pay attention to your art. It would’ve made the list already. But then we got to the wall of historical artifacts. I was entirely unprepared.

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