Two Amazing New Videos

Back when I was in high school and finally got cable and MTV, I remember me and my friends would sit there for hours upon hours at a time just watching all the great videos that were played; even if they repeated some of those videos a hundred times a day.  Although there were a fair share of performance clips, the majority of videos were actually short films that at least attempted to convey some sort of artistic expression, even if said expression turned out, in hindsight, to be ridiculously cheesy. 

Now, almost 90% of videos are just some lame performance clip, with almost no thought or effort put into them.  Even Lady Gaga's videos are really just overly styled performance clips with the same tired dance moves used over and over again.  I do applaud her for trying to bring back more attention to the music video form, I just wish she would do something other than grabbing the latest hot designer and having them shove her into some ridiculous outfit.

Slowly though, I have seen that a lot of musicians and bands are trying to stretch the limits of the art form again.  In the past few months I have seen a lot of great videos, either using amazing cinematography or utilizing state of the art computer generated effects.   It shows that there are still brilliant artists out there working on smaller canvases.  Today alone, I have found two videos that are really quite striking.


Flying Lotus - Kill Your Co-Workers from beeple on Vimeo.


Flying Lotus is a brilliant young electronic artist whose complex music simply cries out for amazing accompanying visual images.  We saw him at Coachella, and his backing videos were startling.  He has teamed up here with the director Beeple, for a whimsical, yet disturbing video featuring a robot parade wherein the parade watchers are disposed of in increasingly hilarious ways.



And the second video is from legends Massive Attack, who are no stranger to using cutting edge and brilliant directors (Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, etc) for their videos.  This video for single "Atlas Air" brings back an animated character from one of their earlier videos to comment on so-called "rendition flights."  It's an amazingly dark and dense work, which perfectly compliments one of Massive Attack's best songs.