Billy Bragg builds a wall, a French metal crew get all furious Jack Kerouac on a typewriter, Green Day enlist a genius Spanish animator to spread some ‘too dumb to die’ propaganda, The Stones‘ bust out the color kaleidoscope to lead a trip down lady Rainbow memory lane, and more, in the 36th week of the year’s best lyric vids.
The Rolling Stones – ‘She’s a Rainbow’
A fitting kaleidoscopic blast of Monty Python clip art meets barrage of classic art movement figures meets the late 60s flower children realm from which the classic Stones’ cut was originally spawned, the Yes Please! Productions crew that put this together nailed the vibe pretty spectacularly; all to push the 50th anniversary of Their Satanic Majesties Request:
Billy Bragg – ‘Why We Build the Wall’
If it were anyone else than legendary folk punkster Billy Bragg overlaid on this video it’d feel chintzy. Anyone with the most basic of Photoshop skills could put this together. I could think of a dozen other ways in which to include an actual wall, here, but but it’s Bragg’s bare yelp and guitar that bring it to life — a stinging bullet at the insanity of anyone thinking of building up a damn wall. In that respect, kill ’em creatively softly fits just right:
Green Day – ‘Too Dumb to Die’
In the aging Dookie-nites homage to “the middle of the road” ilk from Revolution Radio, Spanish illustrator MiraRuido is poached, splaying a graphic novel worthy montage of imagery somewhere in between war propaganda and Adult Swim with thoroughly entertaining results. Like the rest of their lyric videos for Revolution Radio, handclaps and handshakes for showing they still got bite, especially in a song about recognizing one’s intelligence aptitude is not as important as one’s moral compass:
Novelists – ‘The Light the Fire’
Though you can safely put a distorted guitar and a metal thrashing melody to just about anything and have yourself a ball — cooking instruction (Vegan Black Metal Chef), cartoons (Metalocalypse) — this has gotta be the first time a band has taken the typewriter trope into the metal realm. And, like metal is as metal does, the French crew pull it off. You never see the protagonists face, just a blur of a lens trick straight out of The Matrix realm and a figure furious typing “The Light the Fire” narrative, which seems to be a severely haunted tale of regret:
Frank Ocean – ‘Provider‘
Released out of nowhere per Frank Ocean cryptic standard, along with a bevy of alternate mixes and lyrics, the narrative here, if there is one amongst the random association of words Ocean teeters on, rides on defining the artistic process. It’d be just as warm and inviting via audio only, but the video, only available on his website, ups the ante with a dude building a franken-boombox with a machete and speaker upgrade to pop a cassette tape in for all of us to listen to, complete with a Hello Kitty karaoke text overlay:
