Not too long ago there was an article about the state of music videos in some relevant culture magazine. The alt suits were basically saying at print time (last year) that it was the best time to make music videos because of no budgets. That was the dumbest shit I have ever heard. If you have never even had money the decline doesn’t affect you. On a REAL level of video making, you are concerned with spending less of your own money and not going to jail. Aside from these videos, this year sucked for videos. Rap videos this year were shit. Rappers are amazing. They go to jail, kill each other, and generally do ridiculous entertaining things. Yet most videos of good songs are the same car/girl/money video. Rage, Gill Green and Hype all need to be in time out. What Needs To Die: VHS videos or VHS video effects/artifacts are the visual equivalents to Auto-Tune. Doing a shitty low budget video that looks VHS is one thing, but actually paying money to make your images look crappy is mind-boggling. Here are some of the year’s best videos that sucked less, in order from when I saw them.
—Paul Rodriguez

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bsXOcK9_Cw]
Depeche Mode ‘Wrong’ (Patrick Daughters)
This is the best thing Patrick Daughters has written since he made Karen O and everyone else cry when he did ‘Maps.’ The cinematographer Shawn Kim photographs downtown L.A. in a realistic beautiful way. Throw in a Liar as your main character and have Spike Jonze being hit by a car for a nice touch.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zol2MJf6XNE]
Animal Collective ‘My Girls’ (Knowmore Productions)
When I first saw this I hated it. Then I realized it was okay. Then compared to everything else this year it got better. AC’s visual presentation is crazed and they are on their own shit. The best AC video is “Water Curses.”

Kanye West ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ (NABIL)
Kanye’s sweater is dope in this video. I don’t care you hate him. He did “Jesus Walks” with Chris Milk and he has Michel Gondry doing his alternate videos that barely get seen. This video’s visual device is called data moshing. When Kanye found out about Ray Tintori’s clip for Chairlift with data moshing they pushed up ‘Welcome To Heartbreak.’ Artist Takeshi Murata is known for data moshing so when two video clips came out by the same production company some NY art people were crying.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek3coSedm7o]
Bat For Lashes ‘Pearl’s Dream’ (Nima Nourizadeh)
In this mystic drop Natasha is styled in a look directly pulled from the Margiela Spring ’09 show. Nima went so smart with the art direction and cinematography. Wolves need to be in more videos.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7WAHnZPIX0]
The Horrors ‘Sea Within A Sea’ (Douglas Hart)
I guess this would be the their musical redemption. The visual setup is simple and colorful yet perfectly fitting. Everything gets prime around 4:27.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gHLHbYVeA]
MSTRKRFT ‘Heartbreaker’ (Vincent Haycock)
The idea of MSTRKRFT and John Legend in one song might sound horrendous if you are not a fan of either. The story is boy likes girl, but can’t have girl. You really see and feel a narrative here, which is rare for a three-minute music video spot. The casting is good (I would recast the girl, though) and has it boy model A.J. English in it. The best part of the video is when A.J. takes his sunglasses off at :40.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt6imgDYoTg]
Wavves ‘No Hope Kids’ (Pete Ohs)
This is pretty standard guy-on-tour video except everyone hates/loves Wavves. The edit could be way better. I am for drug use in videos. Weed is a good start.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_uDoTmokUM]
White Lies ‘Death’ (Crystal Castles Remix) (Tim Walker)
White Lies: nobody cares about them in our country so they paid Crystal Castles to do a remix. Still no one cares. Technically this video is a re-edit from the original. The video is on the mundane UK suburb/Bat For Lashes ‘What’s A Girl To Do’/Donnie Darko vibe. The best shot is at 3:25. I could do without the shitty Photoshop glowing effect.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4OhRVn_b80]
Micachu & The Shapes ‘Turn Me Well’ (Cannot find director—sorry!)
This just feels right.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcqwfFKagH4]
Girls ‘Hellhole Ratrace’ (Aaron Brown and Ben Chappell)
Girls and this video are for the people. The visual device is slow motion/overcranked throughout the whole video. There have been a bunch of these over the years. Off the top of my head: the Cat Power and the Cass McCombs one. ‘Hellhole Ratrace’ has some arc to it even if it’s simple. Who doesn’t want to have fun with your friends in your city? No matter how fucked up you get, I think you will always remember the sunrise.

Yeasayer ‘Ambling Alp’ (Radical Friend)
This is the best video after Patrick Daughter’s ‘Wrong’ for ‘09. The Yeasayer visual presentation is murder and I would not expect anything less. This is the best art direction and best use of effects I have seen in a while in a video. It’s hard to make something without people acknowledging an existing visual reference. So here it goes: the running falling naked people is on Sigur Ros ‘Gobbledigook’/Ryan McGinley. ‘Gobbledigook’ shot by Christopher Doyle is easily one the best-shot videos of all time. The intro graphic shot, the mirror face guy on horse drumming, the boxers and the liquid face drips are my favorite parts. Radical Friend gets respect.

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Not next level enough/progressive, but I still like, or I just like but I don’t back it that hard.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFbE3lHTcuo]
Fuck Buttons ‘Surf Solar’ (Andrew Hung)
Once I drank all their liquor in a hotel room. One of their PR people called me drunk at 4 AM to tell me check this video again.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uVLaGvdAKc]
Coconut Records ‘Any Fun’ (William Strobeck and Mark Gonzales)
8mm and pro skaters.

Young Dro ‘I Don’t Know Y’All’ (Gabriel Hart)
When I get drunk, I talk about who I don’t fuck with. This video is pretty fucking ridiculous.

BEST NON-MUSIC VIDEOS (OR THESE PEOPLE SHOULD MAKE A MUSIC VIDEO)

K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (Ryan Trecartin)
This is one of his two videos released in ‘09. Yes/No. This is fucked.

Hood By Air SS10 (Reid Van Renesse)
Shot in Terence Koh’s A.S.S. gallery. ZOMBY.

Gems for Arielle de Pinto (Margaret Haines)
Margaret asked me to help her work on a film, but I ended up playing a football player who wanted to fuck a slut. Her film also has progressive children, which is in right now. This clip is captured perfectly.

Binare (Marie Hanhnhon)
Pretty strong work by the youth. Zak, the dancer, plays a slave boy in my new music video for Former Ghosts.

The Kills by Carlton Beener

Dear Rock Concert Gods,

I’ve put off writing this letter to you due to my admiration, love, and passion for good music. But it’s time. Please, dear gods that rule our eyes and ears—our hearts and our dancing feet—can you please put a cap on how many a-holes are allowed per venue per show? I’ve been to so many shows lately where the bands rock it to the max while the audience stands staring like a vacuous black hole of suckage. If you plan to grow roots in the middle of the dance floor only so that you can stare at the band with an “I just pooped my pants” expression, please, leave.

Having said that, I’d like to personally thank you, gods of straight up Rock and Roll for the Henry Fonda Friday the 22nd of May night train to rock-town. I jumped out on the dance floor with a drink that matched the pink and red lights that veiled the boyish Horrors on the stage. The five skinny mods danced minimally as they emitted deep, dark, droning music with hints of ‘60s garage rock. I had a hard time not staring at the bassist who, with a slightly disheveled bowl-cut and a striped black and white shirt, looked like a mannequin from the ‘80s. From their name to their music to their clothes, these British tater tots are skilled but raw musicians and talented performers. Proof that a good band is composed of artists who are both good musicians and good actors, The Horrors brought the proverbial “it.”

The Horrors’ theatricality led fluently into The Kills set. Both in name and in spirit, these two bands drop it like it’s cold, deep, dark, and handsome. Alison Mosshart knows how to handle the hipster crowd, seductively spewing lyrics from underneath her sweat beaded long dark hair. Jamie Hince, the musical Fred Astaire to Alison’s Ginger Rogers, feeds the ever-hungry rock crowd with his steady guitar riffs and occasional dapper vocals. Chronology never sounded so good—If The Horrors danced me into the 1960’s—The Kills kicked me into the punky, grainy 1970’s.

So, despite a sometimes bitchy and mostly unmoved (and unmoving, physically) audience, The Horrors and The Kills delivered. Alison Mosshart’s cover of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” are definitely worth mentioning. She and Jamie Hince kept the integrity of each song while simultaneously Killing it. And, in a collective finale, The Kills had The Horrors came out on stage for an animalistic game of each lead singer singing “Baby, Please Don’t Go” back and forth to the other while circling him/her. Just like in the rock jungle, the game ended in a (female) Kill attacking the lead Horror in a jumping maneuver that left the Horror immobilized on the ground beneath the lead Kill. (P.S. Thanks, Rock Gods, ladies always win.)

—Linda Janota + [Photos]

Eminence Front and Hula Hoops: Having no choice, I’ll own being the guy who looks like Sting standing in the back of L.A. rock venues scribbling on fragments of actual paper. I don’t mind the work and only tourists take the actual cat before their faces as the for-reals-dawg Gordon Sumner of two decades ago. Thus does my faith in human intelligence dim a little every year at Coachella, the giant music and art festival held annually in remote and dusty Indio. It was my fourth time covering the event and first for L.A. RECORD, a publication I’m happy to report needs zero introduction among the rock cognoscenti swamped inside the variegated mass of bikers, geezers, ravekids, hucksters, b-boyz, flygirls, mainstream families and, yes, tourists; with every twentieth of the latter pointing a tentative digit at my face and mouthing “Aren’t you…” under the all-obliterating sonic uproar. Such hopeful gawkerati also spotted Paris Hilton in the crowd this year, along with Jared Leto, Alicia Silverstone, David Hasselhoff, Reese Witherspoon, Keenan Ivory Wayans and more sweating with the commonality at this Great American Rockshow. Bitsy, my driver and plus-one, has a pleasant form of celebrity as the bomb-ass chick whose hula-hoop workout on the roof of her building in the Hollywood flats draws hundreds of daily spectators, with necks craning from as far as the Roosevelt Hotel. Her hips and hoop carved us a path this past weekend through a mob made agreeable, even buttery, by some of the best music likely ever played in Riverside County.

Time Waits For One Man: The weather on Friday was excellent, so Felix Da Housecat’s set at the Sahara was packed to overflow with ravers and my driver drew the first of many crowds with her hooping. At the big stage, the Airborne Toxic Event disappointed, seeming to wilt a bit in their dark clothes, but the Black Keys turned in a rousing gutbucket-rock set done in the grand manner, channeling the first-wave festival eminences like Deep Purple and the Who. Going next, Franz Ferdinand hit the mark completely, turning in a polished and ferocious performance that rocked many a skeptical veteran of the Glaswegians’ mainstage outings in previous years. The crowd at mainstage next came to grips with Morrissey, with the celebrated (if tubby) romantic opening for headliner Paul McCartney. Alas, we were far away at the Gobi (throwing down to heroic dancefloor sets by Bug and Peanut Butter Wolf) when Moz threw his celebrated bitchfit, storming offstage in the middle of his performance, his still-fetching nose sickened by the smell of frying burgers. Leaving a whirling Bitsy with our cool-as-fuck campmates, I met my friend Kirsten at the Do Lab’s rocking misting station, and we dallied at Silversun Pickups’ triumphant star turn on the Outdoor Stage. I’ve followed these local prodigies from their earliest appearences and they laid into the audience with new songs off Swoon, a long-awaited sophomore album fitting punky rhythms, sheets of decorative noise and an adroit four-fingered salute to Iron Butterfly into the band’s established sound. Guitarist Brian Auber bitched wittily about the Cute Beatle, as the rest of Friday night began shutting down and we drifted to the mainstage for the Act We’ve Known For All These Years.

Anon roared the profound nonsense of “Jet” and a spry and slender sexagenarian named Sir Paul McCartney went on a 33-song stomp though one of the premier music catalogs of the twentieth century. The set incorporated songs by John and George along with a few surprises and a long trawl through his 1970s and ‘80s Wings albums. From the square of way upfront where we stood, it looked like a big chunk of Macca’s present-day fanbase is composed of tender-looking indie-pop kids and these imps were as blown away as any of the hard-bitten journos who raved of Friday’s finale. Like the peachfuzztone young ‘uns prostrate before Roger Waters at last year’s festival, they’d come to see someone (correctly) regarded as one of the Immortals and a still-vibrant presence in their own rock ‘n’ roll lives. Sir Paul outlasted everything else on the lot, going on almost an hour past the 1 AM closing. Looking at beginnings of the second-highest take in festival history, organizers wisely decided the $1000-a-minute the city of Indio charges for after-curfew music was the merest bagatelle.

We Are the Night: The hour was well advanced by the time we made it out to the Polo Grounds on for Saturday’s bop-til-you-drop. Drive-By Truckers were shivering to a bravura conclusion with a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” at the Outdoor as Michael Franti & Spearhead (who were playing late-night desert gatherings of Burners just a few years back) were vibing tribally from the big stage. Passing the Mojave stage on our way to dance to the Bloody Beetroots DJ set at the Sahara, I saw a tiny Henry Rollins deep within, belaboring a milling fringe of onlookers like the village atheist. As the sun went down, longtime Coachella vets Thievery Corporation did a rousing beat-heavy set on the mainstage, heavy with their patented thundering harmonics and bracing agitprop. I left the din with a lovely campmate named Kat to check out Booker T. & the DBTs, with members of Drive-By Truckers backing organist Booker T. Jones, venerable anchor of 1960s soul giant Stax Records, in a welter of raw Dixie funk. Our by-then swollen party skipped Turbonegro and passed on M.I.A. for the dance-dance immolation incinerating the Sahara for the rest of the night. I heard about the Killers’ less-than-adequate mainstage turn at soured secondhand and felt glad to have trusted my social instincts, as first mash-up kings Crookers then a DJ set by the Chemical Brothers then a balls-out performance by MSTRKRFT slammed beats into a writhing mob of friendlies, with Chem Bros. lifting an already bliss-dosed, e-sodden, candy-flipped-out mob into the stratosphere with a robot-chant of “Some chemicals are good/Some chemicals are bad.” True dat, but the bad were mainly rotten vibes emitted by a pushy wedge of aristos pitching random helots out of the way a few feet from my group. Online sources credit Paris Hilton and her entourage with the brief disturbance, but from what I saw, the culprits could’ve been any clutch of overdressed Hollywood Boulevard shitheels. It was just like a night in the L.A. underground, minus the sketchy nabes and a chance of being mugged.

Feedback Apocalypse: We’d raged hard the night before and the sun was well along its path before Bitsy and I struck camp Sunday afternoon and loaded out for the festival. Staying since Thursday night at a campground by the Salton Sea with a group of sexy party-hardy Burners had the great advantage of dead calm at night, broken every few hours by the symphonic Doppler roar of a Union Pacific freight train high-balling by. Jointly feeling heat exhaustion and sleep deprivation while singly spacing out from individualized drug intake, we tootled the three-dozen miles to Indio on an overheated engine, arriving just in time to miss Perry Ferrell’s now-traditional Sunday DJ slot at the Sahara. We got our groove on briefly with Plump DJs, before gliding past hundreds of exhausted attendees for whom a hooping hottie and some mutant looking like Sting held no interest. We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. I can’t imagine how the Horrors could hear even themselves going off at the Gobi many hundreds of yards away. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties. The crowd, thus blitzed and shit-hammered, was easy mop-up for the Cure, since even the dirgiest of their album tracks sound like 1910 Fruitgum Company by comparison. Bitsy was limp with exhaustion, but these Byronic proto-goths are her favorite-ever band and she was soon slicing circles through the audience with her hoop. I let her decide when she’d had enough and escorted her out when she did, leaving the headliners to what observers described as a power-trawl through B-sides and obscurities that went on until approximately 1:30 a.m. when organizers pulled the plug and the band did two more numbers in the dark. About 70 minutes later, I was standing in front of my crib in Boyle Heights, watching Bitsy’s taillights fade up the street. On my desk was a notice that the cheerful folks at the Lugo Station post office had my ticket to Burning Man 2009. Bon temps roulez, motherfuckos.

—Ron Garmon