5/26/2023 0 Comments Gay music video tennisHer career continued to soar with 1991 release of her second number one album, Spellbound, which sent two more singles (“Rush, Rush” and “The Promise of a New Day”) to the same highest position. 1 album, Forever Your Girl, which propelled four singles, including “Straight Up,” “Cold Hearted,” “Opposites Attract,” and the title song, to the top of the Billboard charts. Abdul began her career as the first Laker Girls cheerleader (Abdul features as a character in the acclaimed HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) before becoming renowned in the industry as the talented choreographer for an array of iconic entertainers such as Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, and Prince. The entertainer has been rehearsing for her upcoming concert that will close the White Party Palm Springs this weekend and wants to finally get on the stage to sing and dance in front of her fans. The clip’s cathartic and unbridled spirit makes it one of Mitski’s, and 2021’s, best.Paula Abdul is ready to party. The video’s outro follows suit, extending a full minute after the song’s ended, with Mitski flailing and panting alone on a stage. It would be a gasp-inducing moment even in non-pandemic times. The video’s first truly shocking moment comes when Mitski licks a handrail. And working alongside director Zia Anger and choreographer Monica Mirabile, she displays the eccentric movements and erratic behaviors that defined the videos for “Your Best American Girl,” “Geyser,” and “Washing Machine Heart.” But it’s the heightening of these elements and increasingly uninhibited commitment to her eccentricities that make “Working for the Knife” so thrilling. In the song’s lyrics, she laments that she’s spending the final days of her 20s as a cog in the workforce, expanding on themes that date as far back in her catalog as her 2012 debut. In many ways, “Working for the Knife” feels like a refinement of Mitski’s well-established creative impulses. Mitski, “Working for the Knife” (Director: Zia Anger) ![]() Heyman’s images blend and interact in increasingly unsettling ways: Arca rides on the back of a distorted, muscled equine creature while reaching above her for a levitating pelvic bone she mirrors and sings to a masculine figure with a tail and human bodies merge with machines and animals and, above all, defy classification and embody otherness. The video’s reinterpretation and skewing of the human form is evocative of the online extreme beauty space occupied in large part by trans and nonbinary visual artists. While Arca is credited with the video’s “ymbolic gestation” and creative direction, visual artist Frederik Heyman provides digital models of Arca and the objects, machines, and inscrutable forms that surround her through a scanning process called photogrammetry. The dual video for Arca’s recent reggaeton singles is populated predominantly by the 3D renderings on the album covers for the second through fifth installments of the artist’s Kick album series. ![]() Sal CinquemaniĪrca, “Prada/Rakata” (Directors: Frederick Heyman and Arca) And of course, a few of these videos subtly (or, in the case of Mitski’s “Working for the Knife,” not so subtly) acknowledge our seemingly interminable pandemic life. This year, the culture wars lamentably continued to come roaring back, reflected in videos about identity (Lil Nas X’s “Montero” and Arca’s “Prada/Rakata”), climate change (Lorde’s “Fallen Fruit”), and capitalist ennui (Radiohead’s “If You Say the Word”). ![]() The best videos in any given year bear a bit less of a burden to stand the test of time, but these 10 selections make a noble effort, tackling the themes and concerns of 2021 with imagination, humor, and skill. While clips from the ’10s comprise nearly a third of that list (second only to the ’90s and a testament to the medium’s digital-era renaissance), only one video from 2020, the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” made the cut. So when we updated our list of the 100 Greatest Music Videos of All Time last month, we were especially discriminating about which videos from the last couple of years to include. Music videos can be such specific documents of their time that some age like milk just as often as others do like a fine wine.
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