Music videos are essential for promotion of music and also a way for the artist to communicate in a more than one medium. From vintage looking videos of Lana Del Rey to twerking madness from former innocent girls like Miley Cyrus we’ve had a lot of visual influences…but what was 2014 about?
This year we’ve been around one varied and amazing music year, a bunch of new stuff, successful follow-up albums, and a lot of artists that use the visual media to create a whole new understanding of what their (already amazing) music is about. In this list artists like FKA Twigs, clipping., and Queen Beyoncé shined.
Beyoncé was the boldest of them all releasing in december of 2013 her most sexual album to date, also the most mainstream message of female empowerment, body positivity, and independence. But in a video sence, she did one video for each song; it was a video album that dropped out of nowhere and had no promotion, and she killed it. Only Beyoncé would’ve done this as laud and good.
This year videos were more artsy: From Jesse Kanda creating images as sassy and strange as Arca’s Music to a wonderful performance of avant-garde dance in the hand of Maddie Ziegler for Sia’s Chandelier.
Some didn’t make the cut: Male Supermodel Sean O’Pry for the impeccable and funny video of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space was awesome (and I’m a Sean O’Pry enthusiast) but Madonna used him better (sorry Taylor). Also Jamie T. with zombie make up, or Mr. Oizo’s zombie mass murder of a video that was dropped by the time this list was already made didn’t make the cut. Sorry friends, no imamiwhoami and no Lana Del Rey in this list either.
Now that we’ve listened to the music, we’ve got a video.
Subwaywalk 