Next year, YouTube will celebrate its 10th anniversary. For nearly a decade, then, music videos have belonged almost entirely to the internet. Once upon a time, video directors made their work for TV, expecting you to run across their images when you were flipping through channels. By the time YouTube hit its second year, that was out the window. People were making videos without any expectation that they’d ever be on TV, and that meant an entirely different set of rules and aims and ideas. That’s been the case for long enough, now, that the internet music video has developed its own auteurs, filmmakers with bodies of work that can compete with what Hype Williams or Mark Romanek once did. In the past few years, the internet music video has even found its Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the brilliant minds who reshaped the form.
Nabil and Hiro Murai are two of the greatest music video directors we’ve ever seen, and both are peaking right now, making stunning videos with freaky regularity and developing their own visual and narrative sensibilities. 2014, for these two, feels a bit like 1997, the year Gondry came out with “Around The World” and “Bachelorette” and “Everlong,” finally equaling what Jonze was doing and maybe beating him at his own game. Nabil has dominated for the past few years, but he only shows up three times on this list. Murai is on there four times, and he’s got the highest spot on the list. He’s the head music video director in charge right now. Someone needs to let these two make their Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. (Grant Singer is on the list three times, as well, so throw him in that group as the Chris Cunningham.)
This list is entirely generated by one person, and that person is me. The list reflects my tastes and ideas and predilections. It’s not objective, and there’s no way it could be. Plenty of worthy and important videos did not make the list, and it might look different if I made it again tomorrow. I switched the #1 and #2 videos back and forth as I was writing it, and I might switch them back again if given a chance. But every one of the videos on the list below is worth your time.
40. Childish Gambino – “Telegraph Ave” (Dir. Hiro Murai)
A beautifully shot tropical love story suddenly becomes a genuinely unsettling monster movie, and I suddenly find myself wishing this was an entire feature.
39. Municipal Waste – “Miserable Failure” (Dir. Whitey McConnaughy)
The new gold standard for every skate-metal video, from now until forever.
