Top 5 of Our Favorite Things: Hideously Wonderful Music Videos
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For our ultra-pretty music video portal 2Pause, we are blessed with the not unpleasant task of trawling through the finest music promos around, and selecting the ones we think are most visually exciting, technically innovative, or just plain brazilliant, to feature on the site. But sometimes beauty gets boring! And one needs to go RAW, back to basics where it all began to reset the aesthetics-ometer. It’s like sniffing coffeebeans between sampling the perfumes in Duty Free. So we’ve put together a Top 5 of music videos from the eras before this one, which are somewhat hideous but profoundly alluring at the same time. Send us yours!
1. Deep Forest – Deep Forest
A glorious flurry of glitchy animation cut with flowers, plants, trees, and (somewhat insultingly?) indigenous peoples sends a clear message: there is nature and there is evil, EVIL mankind and its horrible, destructive technology obliterating the gifts Pachamama has bestowed upon us.
2. Neneh Cherry – Manchild
So wrong but so, so right! From the seasick camera to the over-exposed sparkle boys to the be-towelled hotness that is Neneh with child, this is hypnotic 1989 GOLD and we can’t get enough of it (seriously, we watched it at least 10 times today alone).
3. Yma Sumac – Chuncho
Where to start… It’s lush, it’s green, she wears face–paint, she speaks to the animals, she hugs trees; a parrot remains motionless while someone off-camera makes tropical plumage fly across the set. Remarkable! Extraordinary! Other-worldly! Make it never stop!!
4. Joe Smooth – Promised Land
Simple but effective! Otherwise known as: wtf?! Smashing tune though.
5. Sidney Youngblood – If Only I Could
Channeling the velvet and floppy beret beloved of early 90s flower power-enthusiasts, he spins a globe and throws out the occasional peace symbol as he bemoans his inability to make this world a better place. You’re wrong Sydney, the world without you would be so much worse!
