Street's Music Videos of 2009

With the movie-babble of Oscar season fast approaching, I decided to cover a different - and arguably less predictable - medium for our "Best Of" feature: the music video. After all, there is something unique about the music video, which is perhaps the only medium where avant-garde innovation and stylistic daring are actually encouraged for a mass-market product. While videos no longer receive the massive exposure they did in the '90s, they are still a breeding ground for some of the most exciting feature-film directors working today: This year, "Zombieland" director Ruben Fleischer joined luminaries like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and David Fincher on the list of music video-turned-film directors. The raw talent on display in the best of this year's videos will surely propel more directors along this same path. Here are some of my favorite music videos of 2009.

Department of Eagles: "No One Does It Like You"

Director Patrick Daughters is probably most famous for his playful one-take videos for Feist, including "1234," which was featured in an iPod ad. Yet his best work runs much deeper and darker. For the Department of Eagles song "No One Does It Like You," Daughters, along with co-director Marcel Dzama, created a stylish four-minute war epic in which red-hooded ballet dancers with AK-47s clash with an army of Pillsbury Doughboys clad in Buckingham Palace gear. The video is a showcase of spectacular synchronized choreography and beautiful art direction, but most impressive is the way Daughters invests his fanciful creations with real humanity through a short interlude in which a Doughboy's leg is amputated.

MIMS: "Move (If You Wanna)"

The videos of director Keith Schofield often re-examine the most basic conventions of filmmaking to playful effect. The censor bar is repurposed as an artistic building block for the video for "Toe Jam" by The BPA (which is both decidedly not safe at work and yet completely safe, as you'll see), and closing credits wreak havoc in the world of the video for the Justice remix of Lenny Kravitz' "Let Love Rule." In taking on rap videos with MIMS, Schofield has taken an approach that is simultaneously simpler than most rap videos and also far more complicated. The content of the video is simply MIMS rapping with a few cute women and breakdancers in the background, which is far removed from the lavish excess of most rap videos. But Schofield cleverly employs a number of interesting tricks that make the video far more interesting to watch than most: A moving sidewalk carries a swaggering MIMS effortlessly across his city, the hypnotic use of slo-mo isolates the apex of the most challenging movements in breakdancing and, at the end of the video, an editing trick known as time displacement is used to create an effect that defies description and really just needs to be seen.

Young Dro: "I Don't Know Y'all" & Kanye West: "Welcome to Heartbreak"

Music videos have traditionally been a testing ground for cutting-edge computer-generated imagery and visual camera effects, and Dro and West brought us two of the coolest this year. Director Gabriel Hart treated the video for "I Don't Know Y'all" with a visual filter than makes the images resemble a graffiti mural, an arresting effect that helps cast Dro as an urban hero of almost mythic status. West's far less self-aggrandizing approach, created by director Nabil Elderkin, uses a technique called data-moshing, which transitions between scenes by fragmenting the image into the kind of pixelated mess you see in blurry internet video. It's an effect that's much cooler than it sounds, and the result is an exciting work of imagery that seems truly avant-garde. And yes, I know that the video for Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" did the same thing a few weeks before this video was released. But Elderkin's video is not only more visually daring and interesting, it is also a great metaphor for the song, aptly mirroring West's emotional breakdown and the auto-tuned technological route he's chosen to express it.

Depeche Mode: "Wrong"

Daughters' masterpiece, however, is undoubtedly his video for the Depeche Mode song "Wrong." As the video begins with a car speeding in reverse on a city street, it seems like we're seeing another variation on the trick invented by Spike Jonze and rehashed by Coldplay, where a video is filmed backwards and then replayed. About a minute into the video, however, the realization sets in that everything is happening in normal forward motion, and that the scenario is in fact a terrifying variation on an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest." This video is ingeniously constructed and shot with a streetlights-gleaming-off-car-metal look that would make David Fincher proud.

Fever Ray: "If I Had a Heart"

You would be forgiven for mistaking Andreas Nilsson's "If I Had a Heart" video for part of the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road." The video, with its incredibly well-done cinematography, perfectly captures the novel's simple, spare style along with its overwhelming apocalyptic dread. As two children and a parent drift along on a river raft, carrying only a torch to part the fog, we see images of onlookers with tribal masks and a mansion littered with bodies. Most hauntingly, the lead singer stands in reaper-like garb above it all, seemingly surveying her handiwork. Like all of the best videos from this year, Nilsson's work here stands as a powerful aesthetic achievement that also has real emotion and soul.