The Best Music Videos of 2016

Featuring David Bowie’s haunting last rites, a Parisian revolution, an all-powerful Beyoncé, a dancing robot, a weeping Naomi Campbell, a kid from “Stranger Things,” a bunch of sheep in a gym, and more
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This year, music videos proved once again to be one of the most malleable mediums we’ve got. They could last for a few minutes, or an hour. They could explore issues of identity and race, or show off some tight dance moves (or both). They could take the form of DIY goofs or Hollywood extravaganzas. They could offer budding talents an outlet to splash their aesthetic, or give legends a way to say goodbye on their own terms. Here are the 25 videos that had us clicking the “replay” button over and over in 2016.


25. Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake]

Directors: Director X/Tim Erem

And here I was thinking Rihanna and Drake clinking wine glasses in the video for 2010’s “What’s My Name” was their best are-they-or-aren’t-they moment. But then “Work” came along, and new peaks of Riri and Drizzy steaminess were reached. In not one but two videos, Drake lustfully watches Rihanna dance, first in a smoky club and later alone in a pink-lit room. Bottom line: Whatever their status actually is, Drake continues to follow Rihanna around like a puppy, and she continues to relish being his boss. —Quinn Moreland


24. PUP: “Sleep in the Heat”

Director: Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux

PUP frontman Stefan Babcock wrote “Sleep in the Heat” about his pet chameleon Norman; for the video, “Stranger Things” hero Finn Wolfhard fills in for Babcock, and Norman is recast as a big hunk of lovable pooch. It’s the sympathetic take that this song about helplessness in the face of loss deserves. The clip wrings out every last tear as the relationship between boy and his pet builds before quickly disappearing. The punk melodrama ends with a montage of PUP and their late pets, but it’s not easy mush. The takeaway rings strong and true: Grief is OK, grief is necessary. —Matthew Strauss


23. Mitski: “Your Best American Girl”

Director: Zia Anger

In which Mitski Miyawaki embraces her outsider status and takes part in an empowering make-out session with her own hand. The song is about how Mitski, who hopped from country to country growing up, had a relationship unravel because she couldn’t fully connect with her boyfriend’s rooted Americanness. That idealized identity is brought to life here in the form of a lilywhite couple straight out of Coachella’s VIP tent, who kiss with dumb abandon, looking like a parody of young love in the U.S.A. Mitski, meanwhile, slings her guitar, crashes her chords, and stares down the camera. She looks like a star. —Ryan Dombal


22. D.R.A.M.: “Broccoli” [ft. Lil Yachty]

*Directors: Nathan R. Smith and Hidji Films
*

So you made a great song. And it’s called “Broccoli”—and it’s obviously not about the vegetable. So what’s the video for “Broccoli” supposed to be about? Well, there are a few broccoli stalks in D.R.A.M. and Lil Yachty’s clip, but it mostly goes for a psychedelic funhouse vibe. There is a white piano in  swampy water. There is a gleeful homage to Vanessa Carlton’s iconic “A Thousand Miles” video. There is Yachty doing his best pied piper, blowing into a bright red recorder. It’s a deep exhale that nods to the song’s nonsense, with D.R.A.M. flashing his infectious smile throughout. —Matthew Strauss


21. Aphex Twin: “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]”

Director: Ryan Wyer

Aphex Twin shouldn’t mean much to a 12-year-old. The producer’s ambient triumphs and nihilistic beat massacres predate a child’s existence, and even a major contemporary nod like Kanye’s “Blame Game” sample is couched in a track far too risqué for such innocent ears. So what’s left is a pure love of music. Pre-teen YouTuber Ryan Wyer had made a few homemade Aphex videos when Richard D. James and his label asked him to make this official one. The kid’s formless exercise in youthful enthusiasm gets to the heart of what Aphex Twin means to him: dancing with friends and family, that silly mask, and lots of colors. It’s an honest expression. Analyzing it is futile. Just enjoy it.  —Matthew Strauss


20. Cass McCombs: “Opposite House”

Director: Jonny Look

Cass McCombs’ “Opposite House” is all about setting up clichés and then pulling the rug out from beneath them. Soft rock underpins wry, knotty turns of phrase, and slyly self-aware moon-June-spoon-style rhyme schemes give way to extra-dry sarcasm: “Which is why/I’m all sunshine.” The video only extends the song’s counterintuitive logic. The black-and-white scheme doesn’t scan as “moody” so much as it recalls instructional films of the ’50s and ’60s, and every detail seems intended to confound. Is competitive tea-spurting an actual thing? Is there something wrong with me if it all makes me think of golden showers? And who’s going to clean up all that spilled liquid? File under “houseboat rock”: cozy yet oh so damp. —Philip Sherburne


19. Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance”

Director: Zia Anger

A women dressed in beautiful autumnal clothing bounces on top of a yoga ball. A lady in red runs through a graveyard with a sense of mysterious urgency. People cavort in the nude outside a grand Victorian home. It’s ridiculous to write out, but those are the significant scenes from the “Conceptual Romance” video. You’d be hard pressed to find a unifying thread in director Zia Anger’s work here, but if you’re one for symbolism and theory, there is a lot to ponder. The video responds to all kinds of subversive artistic strategies, from dadaist to situationist, and it’s absurdity is particularly affecting in the way only an exquisite corpse can be. But no matter how many interpretations this clip may invite, there’s no escaping the feeling of pure blissful oddness that comes with every frame. —Kevin Lozano


18. Francis and the Lights: “Friends” [ft. Bon Iver and Kanye West]

Director: Jake Schreier

The precision of the camera movement and Kanye West’s prominence in the opening shot suggest a major production, but Francis Farewell Starlite spends as much time as he can trying to prove otherwise in this one-take clip. The Francis and the Lights mastermind breaks the set’s boundaries as the camera follows, ultimately doing an amateur boy band-type dance with an unlikely partner: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The choreography is dead simple, almost juvenile, and the end result is an endearing frame that echoes the sentiment of the song’s chummy hook. —Noah Yoo

17. Lil Yachty: “1 Night”

Directors: Glassface and Rahil Ashruff

There’s a YouTube comment on this clip that pretty much sums it up: “this music video was made off of Snapchat filteres.” That’s not literally true, but it seems possible in the near future that Snapchat will indeed find a way to put you in fisherman’s overalls, and that you and your friends would then dance like you are holding in your pee. (Maybe toss an inflatable shark and a lifesaver in there too, just to mix it up.) What’s the point in trying to be slick when you can be weird? —Matthew Schnipper


16. Japanese Breakfast: “Everybody Wants to Love You”

Directors: Adam Kolodny and Michelle Zauner

The colorful dress that Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner dons in this video is an unmistakable symbol of Korean cultural heritage called a 한복 (“hanbok”). To see Zauner wearing it atop the hood of an 18-wheeler while soloing away at her Stratocaster is marvelous, but also heart-wrenching; the hanbok was originally the wedding dress of her mother, who lost her battle against cancer as Zauner worked on the songs that would form her 2016 album Psychopomp. In a sense, the video is a final celebration of her mother’s life, a piece of her now memorialized forever in two-and-a-half joyous minutes. —Noah Yoo


15. Radiohead: “Burn the Witch”

Director: Chris Hopewell

Radiohead have always been pretty good at reading the room when it comes to surmounting dread. Amidst a year marked by Brexit and Trump, the band used this video to comment on the frightening ramifications of the growing nationalist panic across the globe. The parallels are made clear by the twisted setting the band and director Chris Hopewell portray in this stop-motion clip, which welcomes viewers into an “idyllic” English village similar to the ones that served as backdrops for the beloved “Trumptonshire” British TV cartoons—except with more nooses and fire and human sacrifice. Spoiler alert: Things do not end well. —Jillian Mapes


14. Kanye West: “Famous (Unofficial Official Video)”

Directors: Aziz Ansari and Eric Wareheim

For his official “Famous” visual, Kanye made an art piece about celebrity. It was pure provocation, bookended by naked mannequins of Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, and it got the world talking. Which is, you know, fine. But Aziz Ansari and Eric Wareheim made a superior video for the song, and it’s all about how much they love pasta. When Swizz Beatz exclaims “goddamn!” Aziz lip syncs along, overcome with passion as noodles spill out of his face. The two comedians dance in the streets of Italy, humping either side of a tiny car. They’re sloppy boys with all that pasta lining their mouths, but they perfectly illustrate the bacchanalian elation that comes along with blessed infamy. —Evan Minsker


13. Blood Orange: “Augustine”

Director: Devonté Hynes

Could there be a more liberated image than Dev Hynes pirouetting on a rooftop at magic hour, a pink sky unspooling over the epic poem that is New York City’s skyline? Elsewhere in this painterly montage, we see the colors of the Sierra Leone flag, a black queer studies book, and Time magazine’s “After Trayvon” cover. At Washington Square Park, voguing bodies intermingle with the poise of a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the beat exudes the lonely rhythms of discovery that only New York allows. The “Augustine” video is a prayer of gravity, pain, resilience, grace. It is a reminder that however ugly the world, however head-spinning its flux, a good day in the city is eternal medicine. —Jenn Pelly


12. Kendrick Lamar: “God Is Gangsta”

Directors: Jack Begert and the little homies and PANAMÆRA

K-Dot cuts a demonic figure in this seven-minute clip, which combines two *To Pimp a Butterfly *tracks into one blunt, lacerating look at sin and temptation. Opening with “U,” Lamar writhes like a man possessed, screaming his self-loathing into an ever-draining decanter; at the end of his rope, he’s submerged in a baptismal pool, but his angst isn’t washed away. “For Sale” has him hazily meeting Lucy, Butterfly’s satanic incarnation, and drifting dazedly above a club fracas. Call it Kendrick’s Inferno, and pray he finds his way back out. –Stacey Anderson


11. Kaytranada: “Lite Spots”

Director: Martin C. Pariseau

This video contains the best use of a robot since Wall-E. Kaytranada’s little automaton buddy is a big time dancer, copying the styles of everyone it meets throughout the day. There’s a dance at the bus stop with an adorable little girl with a big bow in her hair, a dance at the beach in front of a perfect sunset, even a dance in the driveway with an impressively limber Kaytranada himself. That’s basically it. Don’t come for the plot. But do come for a refreshingly optimistic take on the incoming robot revolution. —Matthew Schnipper


10. Angel Olsen: “Shut Up Kiss Me”

Director: Angel Olsen

Guess what: Angel Olsen is funny. Her self-directed video for “Shut Up Kiss Me” does many things, but bringing out Olsen’s sly sense of humor is the most important. A singer-songwriter bored of being miscast as a “country-folk sad-sack lost in a forest,” she uses the soft power of persuasion here: How can you not love a record that’s obviously so much giddy fun? The visuals ensure no one misses the wink, as we see Olsen in a silver wig goofing around with her starring role: She’s at the bar, she’s skating at the roller-rink, she’s in a parked car clutching a rotary phone. She ends, unforgettably, by asking someone off-camera if she needs to “give more attitude”—as if that is even possible. She is whoever she wants to be now. —Marc Hogan


9. Grimes: “Kill V. Maim”

Directors: Claire Boucher and Mac Boucher

A Grimes video is always inspiring in its muchness. Here, Claire Boucher gives her Art Angels mobster anthem “Kill V. Maim” a fittingly grand visual—a maximalist, fantastical thriller featuring a motley crew of freaks from her Montreal underground. These are mad geniuses in their element, which is to say, the underbelly of a seedy subway station: a caged dark angel, a mystical modern dancer, blood rituals. They hang out of a fucked up pink car; elsewhere, Boucher dons pink boxing gloves and fangs. It is a surreal appeal to the margins, a strangescape in which logic does not apply. —Jenn Pelly

8. Jamie xx: “Gosh”

Director: Romain Gavras

Romain Gavras, the director behind jaw-dropping clips like M.I.A.’s “Born Free” and Justice’s “Stress,” specializes in the kind of music video that makes you go: How the fuck did he do that? With “Gosh,” he uses Jamie xx’s slow-building breakbeat anthem to soundtrack a disorienting epic that resembles an Olympics opening ceremony from an alternate universe. Hundreds of Asian boys march and dance in sync with each other through the streets of Tianducheng, China—a city built as a replica of Paris, complete with its own Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées. The video’s magnetic star, Hassan Kone, is a 17-year-old albino kid Gavras cast off the street of the real Paris—a stranger in a very strange land. The entire thing was made using no CGI or special effects. Just a whole lot of people and a whole lot of crazy ideas. —Amy Phillips


7. ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me”

Director: Nabil Elderkin

Bleakness meets beauty—aggressively, subtly, devastatingly—in ANOHNI’s clip for “Drone Bomb Me.” In it, the supermodel Naomi Campbell tearfully steps in for the song’s distraught narrator—a young girl pleading for death after a drone attack kills her family—translating the harrowing imagery with languid, elegant movements. It is a gorgeous, excruciating act of empathy, one that brings intense personal scrutiny to the anonymous masses slain by drone warfare. —Stacey Anderson


6. Frank Ocean: “Nikes”

Director: Tyrone Lebon

After false teasers and months—years!—of silence, “Nikes” marked Frank Ocean’s proper, full-color re-entry into the world at large. He was back, older, bolder, leaning against a car in heavy eyeliner, lip syncing while drinking from a styrofoam cup. Here was his overflowing introduction to Blonde, presenting a world of fast cars, rapping chihuahuas, white horses, devils, glitter erupting from between thighs, and lots of flesh. It’s a place of passion and imagination, and it’s exactly the kind of Frank we were hoping would return. —Evan Minsker


5. Solange: “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair”

Directors: Alan Ferguson and Solange Knowles

These sister A Seat at the Table pieces elevate something largely uncommon in the realm of music videos: stillness. Solange and her husband Alan Ferguson create regal yet delicate tableaus of black women and men here, from an indelible shot of seven bodies connected by one purple dress, swaying against a mountain, or the guys bouncing around a temple in burnt orange Akademiks velour tracksuits and finger waves. As the lyrics to “Cranes in the Sky” suggest, keeping busy isn’t necessarily the best cure for loneliness—slowing down and discovering one’s own power, on the other hand, can be a subtle declaration of control.  —Quinn Moreland


4. Radiohead: “Daydreaming”

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Is this video, as some online wonks have suggested, a nerdily referential trip through Radiohead’s own visual history? Is it Thom Yorke’s attempt at unsettling autobiography, with each new doorway opening up to a scene from his past? Is it director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most strangely moving piece of work in about a decade? Is the clip a comment on our inevitable environmental destruction? A symbol of the endless internet, with each new path representing a proliferation of links and tabs and rabbit holes? Does it show a content middle-aged man who’s never met a knob he couldn’t turn, or someone terrified of the choices he’s made? Is it willfully perplexing or deservedly complex?

The answer to all that and more, of course, is yes. — Ryan Dombal


3. Kanye West: “Fade”

Director: Eli Linnetz

Teyana Taylor’s sculpted form is the kind that stands a testament to hard work—which is why people lost their shit when the G.O.O.D. Music signee recently admitted that she doesn’t even work out. “All I do is dance,” she told Vogue, and her breathless, vaguely Flashdance-inspired performance in a sweat-soaked thong and sports bra is apparently what came out when West asked her to freestyle to “Fade.” But just when you think this is simply a mesmerizing dance video, there’s that bizarre family portrait: Taylor naked in cat prosthetics alongside her baby and husband, all of them surrounded by actual sheep. As a wise man once said: “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative—gets the people going!” —Jillian Mapes


2. David Bowie: “Lazarus”

Director: Johan Renck

The symbols came so fast and furious, you barely knew what to do with them all: the hospital bed, the fountain pen, the buttons on bandaged eyes. Then, three days after this video was released, all those fraught objects suddenly became as clear as a syringe full of morphine. David Bowie was gone after secretly battling cancer for 18 months; death’s hand, clawing up from beneath the bed, was no metaphor. Anyone who has seen someone die of a disease like cancer will be intimately familiar with the world of this video—Bowie, his skin like parchment, turning hospice care into high art. Biting his nails as he faces a blank page, he makes no bones about the fact that he’s a man who’s run out of time.

The song’s title is clearly meant to remind us of the biblical Lazarus, whom Jesus brought back from the dead after four days. And Bowie, a master showman until the very end, pulled off his own perverse sort of miracle in reverse here, retreating backwards, trembling, vanishing into that shadowy armoire: On the fourth day, when we flung open the door, there were only mysteries left. —Philip Sherburne


1. Beyoncé: Lemonade

Directors: Kahlil Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles Carter, Melina Matsoukas, Todd Tourso, Dikayl Rimmasch, Jonas Åkerlund, Mark Romanek, and Warsan Shire

Teeming with visions of black feminist fortitude, remixed American history, and ancient sources of strength, Beyoncé’s latest world-halting opus is dense enough to warrant an entire college course devoted to unpacking its multitudes. In fact, that’s already happened: This fall, The University of Texas at San Antonio offered a multimedia class called Black Women, Beyoncé & Popular Culture that used Lemonade as an intellectual springboard. This is Beyoncé’s power. She is the world’s most awe-inspiring pop star and she’s using her mind, money, and reach to challenge, to teach. Michael Jackson, the forefather of statement music videos, revolutionized the form with ambition and imagination, but his rise as a visual powerhouse coincided with the gradual erasure of his own physical blackness; as her ideas become more intricate and grand, Beyoncé is placing her blackness—and the overarching struggle of black womanhood—to the fore.

Part of this film’s genius is how it packs all of its heady allusions and personal politicking into something that, on its surface, would make TMZ drool. But the tabloid theatrics—will the real Becky please stand up?!—essentially serve as a Trojan Horse, with Beyoncé leveraging her fame and (supposed) family drama into something much more far-reaching. She cuts a Nefertiti silhouette and transforms a historical place of slavery and suffering into a bastion of liberation (and twerking) in “Sorry”; she flaunts her Southern heritage while standing atop a drowning police car in “Formation”; she unleashes torrents of fire wherever she sets her feet. *Lemonade *conjures a world where women of color are omnipotent and where men are swept to the side, barely-there—it’s graduate level pop art that mulls the past while setting its sight on what’s to come. —Ryan Dombal

[Watch Lemonade in full on TIDAL.]