Britney cuts the restraint and lets it all out in her new video. She first broke out as an enthusiastic rebel schoolgirl but now, in "I'm a Slave 4 U," she's imprisoned in an Asian bath house with a Blade Runner backdrop and surrounded by obsessed boy-clones. There's something depressing about this whole scene.
The eroticism is almost antagonizing, as she finally personally confronts her minions of male viewers who are lounging around apparently unzipped on some computer screen in Minnesota or Malaysia. She declares to them her frustrations with a mix of complacency and bitterness. Nevertheless, none of them are paying any attention. At least, they aren't paying attention to the words.
When music videos aren't about sex there's really no point in watching them. For years people have been complaining about MTV for no longer playing music videos. Most music videos are so boring, though, that I don't see why anyone would want to watch them. As the crowds get bigger in these videos, and as the lead artists increasingly have more fun, the camera becomes almost unnecessary. The viewers are simply assumed, nobody's trying to convince them to watch it. Who wants to watch a bunch of guys having fun without encouraging our participation? What if we don't want to take our shirts off and twirl them around like a helicopter?
Some people, therefore, try to experiment, and the results are mixed: You've got your slow-mo video, your fast-forward video, your dancing scenes. Marumari gets chased by giant crabs. In "19-2000" the Gorillaz play with everyone's secret desire to drive a car in an upside-down loop. Tortoise bore us to death in outer space and too many indie bands to mention remind us why they're not on TV by their snore-inducing depictions of themselves playing music in Tolkien-esque forests and other scenarios. G. Dep recognizes his medium as a commodity and does an entertaining and clever video about a bad boy delivery service. Rufus Wainwright sings to his own TV.
There is some hope in this sea of mediocrity and it's easy to determine. The litmus test for a good video is the ability to watch it from start to finish without turning it off. The following all passed the test for me, though I'm not pretending any kind of cultural authority. These are my top 10 favorite and essential videos of 2001:
Avalanches, "Frontier Psychiatrist"
This is one of the most brilliant videos I've ever seen, yet I couldn't even begin to try summing it up. It's like the Lawrence Welk Show stuffed in a Hampden Laundromat and choreographed 30 years later by Andy Kaufman. An absurd collection of unrelated motifs that actually comes together as perfectly executed comedy. The Avalanches come from Australia, but that doesn't help explain anything.
Synopsis: The curtain opens. The Baltimore County School Board is trying to figure out what to do about Dexter's truancy problem. Then an elderly man dressed as an elderly woman starts playing the drums! In come vintage rapping psychoanalysts, black cowboys, swaying ghosts, giant birds and monkeys, coconuts, a mariachi band, and so much more.
Clinic,"The Second Line"
A simple and beautifully computer-animated depiction of a fly and the things he/she lands on. The lyrics are gibberish and the song itself is great. Comes with a video game.
Synopsis: There's a fly, there's a room. A bunch of slackers are laying in that room. The fly flies around.
Spoon, "Everything Hits At Once"
It's no coincidence that this band and Waking Life filmmaker Richard Linklater are both from the capital of Texas. One of Linklater's animators created this video to accompany a pop tune by the Austinite band Spoon. It was filmed first by real actors, then painted over later.
Synopsis: A young man drives around, encountering many women. But one particular girl in a house he drives by still occupies his mind. Much of the narrative mystery can be put together by the many expressive nuances captured by this film technique.
Sigur Ros, "Vidrar Vel Til Loftarasa" ("Nice Weather For An Airstrike")
This queer-friendly vid by Iceland's hottest export is like a more candid version of the dramatic rock video narratives of the early '90s. The music is beautiful, though it doesn't necessarily coordinate with the story line. I mean, look at the song title. What? Jonsi, don't think because we don't know what you're singing you can just put any song to any video and get away with it. This video is a companion piece to the band's other video, a lush dance by mentally-disabled angels over an Icelandic landscape.
Synopsis: A father thinks, why is that boy playing with dolls? Are those dolls both boys? Does one of them have lipstick! Cut to soccer game. Boy gets goal. Team wins. Boy celebrates by making out with other boy on the field. Check out the tongue action! All the Icelandic soccer dads and moms are staring.
White Stripes, "Hotel Yorba"
When I saw the White Stripes at the Ottobar all of nine months ago everybody still thought they were "supposedly" brother and sister and wondered why they looked at each other "that way." Then the whole dirty truth came out: these two actually used to be married. Jack and Meg White play with that conceit in this video set at a dingy old hotel to a screeching old-time rock song.
Synopsis: Jack plays guitar, Meg's on the bed with a tambourine. Jack's going to get married with some other girl and Meg's stuck to the married couple by a rope.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, "Wig in a Box"
On the one hand this entire film was like a "feature" music video and one of the most entertaining pictures of the year. This specific clip takes one of the lead musical numbers and adds a bouncing ball for a participatory sing-along, saying: don't despair, even you can be a punk rock drag queen.
Synopsis: Hedwig is lying around, sadly, on a trailer park couch. Then she punches the clock, puts on some makeup, turns on the tape deck, puts the wig back on her head. What to be? "Miss Midnight Checkout Queen?" "Miss Beehive 1963?" "Miss Farah Fawcett from TV?" Or, ultimately, a punk rock star.
Mr. Lif, "Because They Made It That Way"
This Boston hip-hop master has managed to make a video that omits decoration and puts all of the attention on the words and the music itself. No dancing or entertainment, but there's something about Mr. Lif's performing grace that makes one want to keep listening and watching until the end. Successful in its simplicity.
Synopsis: Nothing but Mr. Lif walking down the street, singing toward the camera.
The Shins, "New Slang"
There are two video versions of this song. One of them is your dull run-of-the-mill suburban indie rock video. The other version is a brilliant answer to both that video and the whole medium itself. There's just a girl (Kim Baxter) lip-synching along to the male vocals for the entire length of the song. It combines a pleasant, catchy tune that lingers for days with a punk music video manifesto that "fuck you's" the medium and its clichs.
Synopsis: A plane lands and then we cut to a young woman, getting ready to start singing the song. The anticipation is remarkable. She keeps snickering, and sometimes she just stops singing entirely as the song continues on.
The Strokes, "Last Nite" and New Order, "Crystal"
I could write a thesis about the new Strokes video, which joins New Order in a tie for last place on this year's top 10. Both feature modernized Ed Sullivan-like stages. The Roman Coppola-directed Strokes video is an earnest representation of a retrograde form of visual rock performance that borders on self-parody. The New Order video is itself a parody of earnest representations of retrograde forms of visual rock performance. The New Order video is also a parody of the boy-band genre in general, even Velvet Underground-inspired boy bands like the Strokes. New Order, who of course are getting old now, places attractive, fashionable nobodies as their stand-ins and thereby confuse anyone who's never heard of New Order into thinking that they are some hot new youth band. Both songs are great though, so I'm not complaining, cynics be damned.
Synopsis for "Last Nite": There is something incredibly disconcerting about this video and I wonder if it's intentional. There is no doubt that lead singer Julian Casablancas and his band are not physically engaged in this music, especially compared to the rocking New Order fake model stand-ins. Look at the way Casablancas throws his microphone stand onto the side of the stage. There's nothing spontaneous about that movement at all. What is he thinking about, staring at? Did Roman Coppola put that beer bottle there, and was Casablancas scheduled to go pick it up and drink it? Weird.
Synopsis for "Crystal": Basically the same thing except at the finale the masses rush in and beat the band up. I really wish something like this could happen in one of those southern hip-hop videos.
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