Rabbits Full of Magic

Dow got you down? Jobless like me? Or just bored? I've been trolling youtube for the past few days and after running into a few recent music videos I realized I really haven't seen any music videos from the past couple of years. I found out Britney Spears's "Piece of Me" won a bunch of MTV awards so I decided to check it out. She should have called it "Piece of Shit", if you ask me! This is her comeback video, this retarded indulgence into narcissism? It has all the good taste of a VH-1 I Love the Blahblahblah's commercial. Of course Britney Spears is not where you go for good taste.

One of my favorite video blogs has been antville, so I checked out their sites 2006 and 2007 Music Video Awards lists and downloaded all of the winners, plus a healthy bunch of the 2005 contestants. Since I'm not going anywhere today I'm going to review them all.


Bat for Lashes "What's a Girl to Do"
Man there must be a zillion videos like this, filmed with one camera in a Spike Jonze-worshipping manner, hijacking Phil Spector for indie cred and people being quirky with animal masks. I wonder if that was old in 2007, I bet it was. Also, the director must really like the Feist video that's coming up on this list, as many of the other quirks are recycled from that..


Battles "Tonto"
I like the light setup and all but at first I was like "oh man, another disco rock song?" but then, 5 minutes into it, it does into this beautiful half-tempo funk drone that turns into distant Indian war music as the sun comes up and the final 2 1/2 minutes are much better than the preceeding. Cool!


Cornelius "Like a Rolling Stone"
A pretty amazing video from one of my favorite current musicians, and the director Koichiro Tsujikawa has done plenty of wonderful videos for Cornelius. I like how the video has a beginning and an ending but no real middle, it's an ambient video much like the song. I was thinking about how you could do this video because lots of his videos have the look of stop motion/clay-mation doing things that you could only do with CGI. Possibly you make sure the individual animation are slightly wonky and running at half frame rate?

Beck "E-Pro"
When this came out I was torn because I knew it was the end of the Beck that I loved so much yet the video was so freaking cool. A vector wonderland, one of those "crap, why didn't I make that?" videos. Love the vector graphix, and cartoon Beck at the end is the best part!


Bobby Birdman "I Will Come Again"
Kiwis opened a show for this guy, and I remember he played awesome Momus-like electronic pop music that was pretty videogamey and quirky and cool at the time. This song is kind of boring, tho, and the idea to make him a taxidermist doesn't really excited me too much either. Another graphic designer with an animal fetish must have been behind this one, methinks.


Daft Punk "Technologic"
Blows its wad in the first 7 seconds, which are amazing and I wish was the whole video instead of this creepy robot skeleton baby.


Deichkind - Ich betäube mich (feat. Sarah Walker)
Pretty kitschy and fun and gay. Not my cup of tea, but I like when it does the extreme close-up into the girl's nostril!


Dizzee Rascal "Sirens"
I like that distorted-as-fuck guitar sample, and the scary/surreal nature of this video. The ending is some serious shit.


Emily Haines "Doctor Blind"
The part where the sound goes down and she's checking her purse makes me think the music is like elevator music or something else dull and boring and narcotic that you'd hear in a setting like this, in a shopping mall. The supermarket-shoppers-as-dominoes hurts to watch and it just feels like a bored version of something Radiohead must have done several times more than a decade ago. The video for Our Hell starts with someone in an animal mask and from then on the only thing it has to offer is that everything is black-and-white, filmed in negative, and the footage interlaced. These videos feel like paid advertisements for Zoloft geared towards indie girls.


Feist "1234"
More Jonze-worshiping single-camera quirkiness, but I can't look away because the vocals were all recorded far away from the microphone and then compressed the hell out of resulting in a wonderful live sound that reminds me of things I record at home sometimes.

Fionn Regan "Be Good Or Be Gone"
Pretty cute idea, to have him play the song in many different places and seemlessly fade each performance into the next. Couple of funny moments too. The video saves this otherwise boring-as-shit song.


Grizzly Bear "The Knife"
Hell yes! This is one of the few new acts I listened to over the past couple of years that weren't my friends and I really like the Yellow House record. The video is absurd and surreal and beautiful. I like the New Age crystals!


Hifana "Wamono"
Holy shit is this cool. One of the trippier and more fun animated music videos I've seen..


Hot Chip "Over and Over"
Cool the guy is wearing a Flaming Lips shirt. Kind of a meta-music video where the humor comes from seeing people in skin tight green suits. I swear last time someone dragged me into an MJQ dance night they were playing this song. It just sounds so corporate, like a car commercial or something.


Kennedy "Your Mama"
My current dream job would be having to animate the crazy psychedelic backgrounds in videos like this. The song made me laugh the first time I heard the chorus but by the middle of it I was tired of it already. He kind of sounds like Jarvis Cocker.


Mu "Paris Hilton"
I discovered this back in 2k5 when it came out and was obsessed with it. I change that last comment, my current dream job would be getting the storyboard for this and having to edit it together. One of the coolest music videos/songs I've seen in a long time. Those swirling pixelated stars, those bleeding skulls, the night video footage, that part where they bluescreen out her hips, the blurry ending, etc. I have a huge crush on this video!

OK Go "Here It Goes Again"
If you're idea of a good time is watching 4 guys jump from treadmill to treadmill synchronized to music then here it is. It's not mine. Single camera indie rock quirkiness strikes again.


The Album Leaf "Always For You"
Meh. After Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" and even Semisonic's "Closing Time" nobody should be allowed to dabble in split screen again unless it has some seriously cool concept behind it. This video is as boring as the song.


Bumblebeez "Dr. Love"
Indie choreographers must have made off like bandits in 2k7. I kind of like the fake-tattoos-that-play-music idea but as soon as they all do a simultaneous handclap on the roof I checked out.


The Horrors "She Is The New Thing"
Hah hell yes this looks fun. Like More Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark animated with rotoscoped corporate garage goths! Guilty pleasure but I like!


Vitalic "Poney Part 1"
Holy shit, silly looking dogs jumping in slow motion in front of 1980s department store lasers!!! Ever since the "Lady Jane" portion of "Tonight Let's All Make Love in London" I thought, you know, more people should make use of slow motion when they do a music video. This is simultaneously silly, badass, bizarre, beautiful, grotesque, kitschy, and futuristic.


Wolf Parade "Modern World"
I still think the leader singer sounds exactly like old-school Beck. I quite like this video, makes me think of the Quay Brothers.


Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Gold Lion"
Cool video, classic in spirit, builds up slowly to the finale of band playing in front of fire and smoke and a huge sandstorm, cool climax.


Ariel Pink "For Kate I Wait"
When this came out it looked like it was filmed in my living room, right down to the television on the horizontally-placed cat scratch furniture. I gathered all my roommates in to see it and we laughed giddily at it. The sound is still amazing to me.

The two 2008 MGMT videos are awesome as well but they make me jealous because they combine so many ideas I had been thinking about for years. Ah well, it must be the collective unconscious or something to that effect. Time to Pretend extracts a music video from my subconsciousness circa 2005, right down to the exploding cheesy CGI dolphins and the Holy Mountain ripoffs. Electric Feel has that cool AE glowing effect I worship, it has the Showbiz Pizza band whose record I found in a thrift store back then, it has the moon being pulled down to earth like this Moon Landing on Robot Cities animation I made a year ago, and it has alot of the lead singer looking like Marc Bolan. These radical videos have stolen from my subconscious!