Wednesday, June 21, 2006

THE MOST SINCERE HELLO EVER OFFERED IN THE HISTORY OF HELLOS: In a truly classic enabling of time-wasting, Pitchfork Media presents its compilation of the 100 most awesome music videos currently available on YouTube.

There are plenty of the oft-seen-and-awesome ("Rockit", "Material Girl", "Gossip Folks") and plenty of videos that you probably haven't seen yet but ought to, like Elton John's "This Train Don't Stop Anymore", The Roots' "What They Do" and Nas' "One Mic".

And the descriptions are, per Pitchfork's normal standards, top-notch. I don't even need to say what video each of these are for, do I?
The guys playing air keys had to be in on the joke, but Steve Perry looks like he's auditioning for On the Waterfront.

How to fight off your abusive pimp the Pat Benatar way: Get all your girlfriends behind you in their ragdresses and shake your boobies at him.

This was the first Prince video to really showcase what he was all about, performance-wise, even if the song only really took off with a re-release after "Little Red Corvette" established him as the biggest thing since oxygen. Exactly what you would expect: neon, keyboards, quasi-lesbianism, poofy hair, poofier shirts, lotsa purple, flash bulbs, dry ice, pencil moustaches. Everyone was, understandably, wigged out about nuclear war in the early 1980s; the best artists made that paranoia danceable.

Almost everyone knows the story by now, and if you don't, I'm certainly not going to ruin it for you. Watching the director's commentary on the DVD, you get the feeling that Kelly discovered the word "cliffhanger" in the dictionary one day and suddenly knew what he had to do.

Take a look. Tell us what else we need to be sure to watch.

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