Grimes is one of those artists who I end up liking more and more the more I hear from her. Here’s a session she did for Yours Truly last year for her amazing song, “Genesis”. So pretty.
“DJ, Ease My Mind” is the perfect kind of song to use to either start or end a DJ set. It’s quiet, atmospheric, and moody, and yet it has a steady propulsive beat that you can still dance to. Fans of Kate Bush should take note because Niki sounds just like her. In fact you could probably find a lot of similarities between this song and “Running Up That Hill”.
HEARTSREVOLUTION’s debut album ‘Ride Or Die’ was suppose to come out years ago, but they’ve had all sorts of frustrating delays with releasing it that have been really disappointing to those of us that have been following them for a long time. Thankfully they’re still putting out new mixtapes and songs in the interim, like this new song called “Hello Baby!” The song is a great little bit of catch up that reminds us that even though we haven’t heard from them in a while, they still haven’t gone anywhere.
I really love this song. The beats sound like classic Bent, which for me is always a good thing. (Bent, make some new music already!) And the lyrics just flow off of her lips in a matter-of-fact conversational way, as if she’s right in the room with you, quietly talking in your ear. I love how they’ve tied all of the recent revolutions like the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement into the theme of their band, and those lyrics combined with the beat’s retro vibe give the song an almost 60’s counterculture vibe. Can’t wait for that album to finally come out.
Happy 2012, people! I thought I’d start off our new year of music videos with a bang, so you better prepare yourself for the bizarre trip that is this video from Kenji Minogue. I guess this video has started to go viral around Europe right now and at first glance it definitely has a “Friday” vibe of what-the-fuck-am-I-watching? But if you take away the odd visuals and ignore the idiotic lyrics (which are essentially the one girl asking the other what her last name is over and over again) the song’s actually really good. They totally have the same vibe as The Knife. So if you’re a Knife fan, or just a fan of weird videos, you should totally check this video out:
Final two time! And I didn’t even realize this until I started to write this post, but both artists presented below are French. Yay for French music!
2. M83 – Midnight City
If there’s a winner for song mostly likely to give you goosebumps in 2011, I’d definitely like to nominate “Midnight City”. And in a year that saw several people try and bring back the 80’s sax solo, “Midnight City” is the song that totally redeemed that horrible fad of the 80’s.
This song defines epic from beginning to end. That screechy synth part at the beginning immediately grabs and holds your attention, while the quiet verse sections of the song pull you in deeper and deeper until you are totally in love with the song. Once the saxophone solo kicks in at the end it’s all over. The first time you heard it you knew: This is going to be one of my favorite songs of 2011.
The video is appropriately just as epic as the song and very similar to the video for The Sound Of Arrows’ “M.A.G.I.C.” This little mini movie is about children with telekinetic powers and weird glowing blue eyes breaking out of the research lab in which they live and going out to an abandoned warehouse to play. The video is very simple and understated and I love the way in which they matter-a-factly show the littlest girl throwing a trailer across a room. Showing something magnificent without drawing any attention to it somehow makes it even more amazing, I think.
This song was so epic that they used it for probably the greatest Victoria’s Secret ads ever made. (I posted that video on my blog’s Facebook page. If you’re not already a fan, what are you waiting for?!) As an added bonus do yourself a favor and go back and watch the video for “Wait”. It’s so beautiful and touching that you’ll thank yourself later for re-watching it.
1. Yelle – Que Veux-tu
Technically this music video contains two songs, “Safari Disco Club” and “Que Veux-tu”, but for me the first half of the video is really just the build up for the second half. You know what it reminded me of the last time I watched it? This video is like when you go to a concert and the opening band is so amazing that you’re sure there’s no chance in hell that the headliner is going to be better than what you’ve just witnessed. As the roadies break down the opener’s gear and set up for the headliner you’re filled with equal parts anticipation and anxiety. That was so great, you say to yourself, but could the rest of the show be just as good? And then suddenly, before you even know it, the headliners take the stage and proceed to rock so fucking hard that you feel like your whole life has led up to this one fantastic moment. Time seems to slow down and each magical moment becomes an event each unto itself. Before you know it, the biggest smile you’ve ever had has crept onto your face and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else anytime soon.
I’m engaging in a bit of hyperbole, of course, but only a little bit. I really do love this song more than my words could ever adequately describe. It kind of sneaks up on you at first before slamming into you with a tidal wave of pure joy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Yelle is one of the absolute best performers out there. I love her facial expressions, her mannerisms, and I totally adore her dance moves. And what’s not to love about this video? From the Tchiki Tah man to the arm keyboard, to the Fanny Pack dance crew to the way that the end of the video seems to evolve into a massive dance party, right down to that final booty shake in the last shot, this video is like a masters class on how to shoot and edit a great dance video.
And I haven’t even mentioned the equally amazing fan video that someone made to Madeon’s remix of this song. Or the similar music video Yelle recently did for “Comme Un Enfant”. If Yelle’s name was attached to a music video this year, chances are it was totally worth checking out.
Well, that’s my Top 10 Music Videos of 2011. I honestly thought 2011 was one of the greatest years for new music that I can remember. There were so many fantastic songs that came out this year and so many other videos that I think were equally deserving to have made it onto this list. What’d you think? Were there any great videos that you thought should have made it onto this list?
We’re getting down to the final stretch, folks. Numbers 3 and 4 on our countdown are surprisingly similar. Both bands play indie rock with a retro sound, featuring similar looking smoking hot brunettes on vocals. Both songs are about being madly in love with someone. Both bands put out a ton of great singles this year, and almost all of those singles had fantastic videos to go along with them. And both bands garnered a lot of love and attention from me this year (for instance, I discovered halfway into my fourth post on Best Coast that I had begun 3 of the last 4 posts with “I love Best Coast”). They’re so similar that if you had asked me what my favorite band of 2011 was in the first half of the year I would have said Best Coast, but in the second half that had changed to Summer Camp.
4. Best Coast – Our Deal
It was really hard for me to decide between this video and the one for “Crazy For You” because I really like them both. I went back and forth on this question for a while. Honestly I like “Crazy For You” more as a song and the video–featuring cats directing the band’s purrformance on a local TV show–is simply delightful, but you just can’t ignore how magnificent Drew Barrymore’s video for “Our Deal” is. It perfectly captures the lyrics’ deep feelings of confusion and longing that are equally matched by the visuals of a Romeo & Juliet/West Side Story-esque love story between two members of rival gangs. Add to that the tongue-in-cheek in-joke of the casting that I mentioned in my original post and it all makes for a great little mini movie.
3. Summer Camp – I Want You
Starting with this, my top three videos of 2011 also feature my top three favorite songs of the year. I’m not really sure of the exact numbers, but Summer Camp was very probably my most blogged about band this year with an amazing 6 posts. I just can’t get enough of this band. I think I became really sold on them with this song, which in four and a half minutes builds and builds and builds and builds into this amazing fever pitch of lust and dancefloor ecstasy. The tempo slowly creeps up on you while the drums get heavier and heavier, the synths build layers on top of layers and Elizabeth Sankey starts moaning “I Want You” with ever increasing lust and intensity…yeah, the whole thing gets really damn sexy.
This fan video featuring footage from the film “Bubble Boy” seems almost tailor-made for this song. The editing of the video with the washed out, grainy, wavy VHS quality to it matches the distortion and fuzz in the song and the subject matter of two people in love separated by a plastic sheet is the prefect fit for a song about wanting to be with someone with every fiber of your being.
We’re halfway through! Today’s two videos are going to get a little weird, so you might want to get a good buzz going before watching for optimum music video effectiveness.
6. Clams Casino – Natural
I think what I really love about this video is the fact that if you’ve ever seen Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wraith Of God” then you know how well this song goes with the footage from the film. There’s this amazingly beautiful otherness to the song, this exotic intoxication with insanity that the song has that perfectly matches up with the film footage. Close your eyes and you can almost feel yourself getting lost in the jungles of the Amazon. I think if Herzog made “Aguirre: The Wraith of God” today he’d totally be up for using this song for the soundtrack. If for nothing else, you’ve got to love how well that growl sound at the end of the song goes with the curling of Klaus Klinski’s lip. On top of being one of my favorite songs of the year, “Natural” gives this footage such an amazing feeling of immediacy that draws your right in.
5. Destroyer – Kaputt
Where do you start with Destroyer’s “Kaputt”? I love this video from beginning to end, but especially that beginning. I’ve probably watched the first section like fifty times. When the dorky guy in the tracksuit comes pushing through all the models in sexy American Apparel 80’s leotards I lose it every time, and the first lyric just seals the deal:
“Wasting your days/
chasing some girls/
alright, chasing cocaine through the back rooms of the world all night.”
It’s so tongue-in-cheek, like this guy says he’s going out to pick up girls, but lets face it, he’s really just going out to snort some coke. Then the white mist disappears and he’s really just fantasizing about all of this on his computer when his mom busts in on him, as if even in his fantasies he doesn’t get the girls. From there we go to an old guy crawling through the desert until he sees some Bedouins dancing on the pyramids and then later there’s a flying whale…well, at that point I have no fucking clue what the video’s about anymore, but I’m still on board with its wacked out craziness.
On top of that I LOVE the song on its own. From the saxophone solos to the easy listening groove to the above-mentioned hilarious tongue-in-cheek lyrics, this is such a killer track. Put this song on late at night with a glass of some alcoholic beverage in your hand that makes your stomach all warm inside and you’re in for a good night.
I just noticed that today’s two videos both spell out the main word of their chorus. Let’s get right to it, why don’t we?
8. The Sound Of Arrows – M.A.G.I.C.
While the song is almost three years old now, the video for “M.A.G.I.C.” is brand new for 2011, and boy was it worth the wait. The video feels like an extended trailer for a lost children’s movie, something like if My Neighbor Totoro was done in the style of Monsters and shot like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. It totally gets that magical world that kids create in their heads when no adults are around and they’re free to do whatever they want. You know you’re watching a great music video when you wish that it was stretched into a feature length film.
7. João Brasil – L.O.V.E. Banana (feat. CSS’s Lovefoxxx)
“L.O.V.E. Banana” wins the awards for most colorful video of 2011, most thinly veiled sexual innuendo of 2011, and it’s probably the most purely fun video of 2011 too. From the human alphabet to the bright tropical color palate, to the rotating word board and the animatronic parrot, you can just tell that everyone involved with the making of this video was having a blast. It somehow manages to walk that fine line between sexy and innocence and has a killer chorus that you’ll be singing along with by the time you hit the second chorus.
One of the things that I love about this time of year are all of the “Best Of” lists that everyone makes. I love making them too, but they’re really damn hard to make. Take for example this list you’re reading about right now. I got it in my head that it would be fun to make a list of my favorite music videos of 2011. “This will be easy”, I said to myself, but very quickly I realized that I could just as easily make this into a Top 20 or Top 30 list.
There’s so much I want to include, but then again I’ve already posted all of these videos before, so there’s really no point in making you watch everything I posted this year all over again. I had to limit myself to 10 and really push myself to prioritize what does and doesn’t qualify one for “Top 10” status. In the end it came down to those videos that had the total package: they had to be memorable, the subject matter had to match the song, the cinematography, editing, etc. had to be superb, the video had to be worth watching over and over again and most importantly of all, the song had to rock.
My numbers 10 and 9 you can find below and I’m going to count down two songs a day until New Years Eve when I’ll announce what I think is the best music video of 2011. Feel free to guess which videos you think will make the Top 10, and I’d really like to hear in the comments what you think the best music videos of 2011 were.
But without much further ado, here’s my number 10:
10. Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
While this song doesn’t really match a lot of the stuff I normally post on C’est Non Un Blog, there’s actually quite a few reasons why I think this video deserves a spot in my Top 10. First, this is arguably the best pop song of the year. If you don’t think so, you’re taking life too seriously. Seriously. Lighten up. This song is damn fun. And the video for the song is one of my all-time favorites. It really does have everything. It tells a John Hughes-esque story about a dorky girl who throws a killer party, it has celebrity cameos galore (and they aren’t just in the video to be in the video), it’s funny, it’s well made and it has that killer disco breakdown right in the middle of the song that I SO wish appeared on the album version of the song. It’s a little mini-movie that starts out great and stays great even through its surprise end credits. I dare you to watch this video again and tell me that you don’t love it.
Honorable mention goes to Rebecca Black who appears in the video as Katy’s “good girl” best friend and whose other song about Friday just barely missed making it into my Top 10. Whether you love her or hate her, love to hate her or hate that you love her, you’ve got to admit that “Friday” was one of the biggest videos of the year. I know the song is horrible, but that’s why I love it so much. There’s a magical train wreck quality to it that dug its way into my brain and never went away. When people in the future look back on 2011 they’ll remember three things: we got Bin Ladin, the Republicans went from normal political crazy to batshit insane crazy, and Rebecca Black.
9. Gold Panda – You
If you had asked me when I started this project if this video was going to make it into the Top 10 I would have given you a pretty funny look, because I honestly forgot all about this video. But as I went back through all of this year’s posts there was just something about this video that I kept coming back to over and over again. It’s so beautiful. The cinematography is gorgeous, the dance choreography is stunning and the song…oh wow, that song. This song is one of the reasons why I love music so much. If you forgot about this video like I did, do yourself a favor and re-watch it right now. You won’t regret it.
DJ Earworm always does a United State of Pop mix at the end of the year–a mash-up of the 25 most popular songs of the year–that in the past have varied from mildly amusing to annoying as fuck, which is of course very dependent on how good the most popular songs of the year were. 2011 is probably the first year that I felt everything from the lyrical content to the beats to the video editing have fit together surprisingly well. I really loved his mix for this year. Not only does the mix have a theme (most of the songs have an “End of the World/things blowing up” vibe to them) but the beats he picked are some of my favorites, and on its own, if you didn’t already know that this was a mash-up, this is just a really fun song. If you like the song too, go to the YouTube page where there’s a link to download the song for free.
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