As with last year’s contenders, we’re in a new era of the lyric video as a new art medium. There was no genius Bob Dylan, channel-flipping “Like a Rolling Stone” entry this year, but from Canada punks Pup‘s repurposing of old 8-bit videogame dialogue bubbles to The Long Winters‘ send up of the Trump Nation mentality, in all its hypocritical glory, and the introduction of a machine that can generate its own horrifying robot overlord lyrics based on what image you present it with, 2016 was rife with beautiful new ways to tell an old lyric story. And so go 15 artists that made essential viewing. Keep marrying text with image, world.
Bad Lip Reading – ‘Bushes of Love‘
Behold, the next logical step to something like synching Pink Floyd’s A Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. Bad Lip Reading, the creative viral video enterprise, genius in its own right, their first entrance into the lyric video world, with Obi-Wan Kenobi lecturing “on the perils of love,” is so absurdly funny, it will surprise you with how well it resonates:
Band of Horses – ‘In a Drawer‘
Readying their fifth effort, Why Are You OK, since blowing up the post-flannel PNW cathartic scene, the reverb still rolls in like their native region’s notorious rain, and the sentiments are still rooted in uprooting the past, but Ben Bidwell finds the sweeter side of bitter in a tale about things found in a proverbial drawer — mostly childhood memories — paired beautifully here with vintage Hollywood b-roll, super saturated sunset shots and quirky little hidden Easter-egg subtexts on lyrics that do the format noble nostalgic justice:
Beck – ‘Wow’
Only Beck “Bizzy” Hanson could flipside the transcendental Nick Drake folkscapes of Morning Phase with a trap beat-laced, ‘elephant-irrelevant’ rhyme scheme of a pop-funk grenade about grabbing life by the proverbial pubes. Dude’s always had a MoMA level collage game, but it takes a special type of breed to pull something like this off, especially with this mind-trip piece of a pop art video, mincing everything form psycho-killer face-swaps to kaleidoscopic ‘wow’ hypnotics. Shine on, you “luminous moves” diamond:
Hang Chu – ‘Neural Karaoke‘
The rabbit hole goes deep on this artificial intelligence project, with tales of 100 hours of online music and 50 hours of song lyrics making up the program’s 3390-word vocabulary, which then get strung at a rate of one word per beat. Image-recognition algorithms then churn out automated jams, associated said images with a bank of words programmed into its robot head to virtually freestyle. The outcome is this Christmas monstrosity that gave, and continues to give, a lot of people nightmares this year:
Cocovan – ‘Mirage of Us‘
Parisian upstart Cocovan recently up and moved to LA, wearing her heart for shimmering mid-career Madonna and the more seductive side of electropop firmly on her sleeve, here, expertly synched to a hypnotic loop of her zipping and unzipping her blouse that feels like being sucked into an 80s time-warp and the CTA scene from Risky Business are everybody’s point of seductive cultural reference. Simple, good, design:
Sam Cooke – ‘A Change is Gonna Come‘
Quietly released in homage to the late grandfather of soul’s would-be 85th birthday on January 22, frozen in parallel with MLK day, Cooke’s Civil Rights Movement masterpiece doesn’t need a reminder that it has aged well. It was timeless before it even was released, adapting and scoring metaphor for history’s alzheimer-type ability to repeat itself forever thereafter. Nevertheless, ABKCO Records put together a fine montage of current and past political affairs, from marriage equality to Black Lives Matter, that succeeds in continuing the conversation without stinking up the joint with too much sentimental cheese:
José González – ‘Save Your Day’
We’ve seen entire album drops of lyric videos for every track before, but they’re usually cut from one cloth and don’t mess with the visual narrative too much. González, for no timely reason, found a way to dig into themes off his first two offerings, 2003’s Veneer and 2007’s In Our Nature to blast his YouTube account with vids for both albums in their entirety at the same time. In Our Nature has this upturned natural world disorientation going on, while Veneer is paired up with these genius slow-roll drawings by frequent collaborative illustrator Ellen Alstrom. A beautiful reminder of how the lyric video format can be an art form in an of itself:
Green Day – ‘Bang Bang’
You have to give Billie Joe Armstrong credit for going from songs about masturbation to socio-political broadway rock operas. Likewise with this first single from LP12, Revolution Radio, that’s written from the perspective of a mass shooter. At least they’re trying to position themselves as relevant still. Any more aggro in the chord structure and this could easily be a Pearl Jam song. While the video is a refreshing blend of magazine-cut out clip art and perfect creepy kitsch for the subject matter:
Steve Gunn – ‘Park Bech Smile’
Gaining traction with his solo career, prolific hired alt-country weapon Steve Gunn dropped Eyes on the Lines this year, taking a kind of Kurt Vile folk jam approach to the monotony of the modern human condition, attacking it with vibes and ‘park bench smiles’, perfectly materialized in this hypnotizing stare at a passing subway train, lyrics cut like a freeze frame ready to board:
The Julie Ruin – ‘I Decide‘
Shot during South By Southwest on the streets of downtown blocked-off festival Austin, Texas, singer-songwriter Waxahatchee plays the face of the feminist proud character in this song taking back control of everything womanly about her. Street poet concrete-jungle pure, with a slight blur on everything but Waxahatchee to keep the focal point even more woman-central. Yet another reminder that you don’t need a big budget to make a statement with these:
The Long Winters – ‘Make America Great Again‘
Part of the 30-song anti-trump movement, and notching in on our 50-lyrics of 2016 list, John Roderick of The Long Winters, nailed the folk platform with his send up of Trump Nation mentality, while the video pairs all of the backwards ass Americans yelling racial slurs at each other and not baking cakes for the LGBTQ community. These things that actually happened in America to, you know, the “good ones.” We know reading isn’t something that is included in the Make America Great Again agenda, but nevertheless, thank you Roderick:
Pup – ‘DVP‘
As everyone loses their shit over a mini Nintendo that only has thirty games on it this Christmas, these Canada pop thrashers had your number, 8-bit nerds, back in February, repurposing all the dialogue in a handful of your favorite playground-neglecting games of yore — Super Mario, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter — this list goes on and deep, paired perfectly with the supplanted story about a lover who takes issue with another about drinking too much and the need to grow up. How they got Mario to graphically comply, well, we’d rather just be in nostalgia awe:
Romagaga – ‘Kiu’
Started as a viral video comedy crew, at surface value, this hypnotizing piece of tone-deaf garbage grew on us quickly this year. The fact that these subversive Brazilians are probably losing the Calvin Harris “This is What you Came For” joke on a lot of people only makes it better. Something about that kaleidoscopic twerk and a verse about wanting something but it being complicated. God bless the internet:
The Strokes – ‘Drag Queen’
For as much shit The Strokes are getting for not being relevant anymore, this rad in the 80s birth of the word sense, TRON adventure in VHS animation art succeeds in every aspect at showcasing the gleaming post-punk the NYC figures will always be remembered for, all equal parts cryptic, disaffected and confused, pairing drag queen imagery with gun-toting shut-ins, flying Deloreans and those NYC-as-pizza now uzi-sharp guitar leads:
Swiss Army Man – ‘Montage’
That movie about a farting corpse used as a multi-purpose castaway tool dropped a lyric video this year, because, of course. At just over a minute long, it’s basically like every rudimentary punk band that ever existed in visual form. Except in place of shit and fart jokes, of which we were expecting, the shock-genius duo responsible for the movie, who picked up Sundance’s Best Director Award, go for handclap, The Polyphonic Spree-ish choral anthemic, that goes from surreal gross-out to heartwarming in glorious fashion with just the right amount of subtitled, factual humor such as:
