Coldplay’s “Up & Up” – arguably more inventive than the music – is just the latest in a run of jaw-dropping videos this year.The surreal video, shot through with the band’s environmental concerns, lifts the song and keeps you watching as it depicts turtles absurdly swimming through subways stations and kids swinging amid the stars.Here is a pick of some of the best videos of 2016, from well-known names. – Beyoncé, David Bowie, Radiohead – to the more obscure, such as Weezer and Mia.1. Coldplay, “Up & Up”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPNTC7uZYrIMay 16 2016, ParlophoneDirected by Vania Heymann and Gal MuggiaThe song is the last track on the band’s seventh studio album, “A Head Full of Dreams,” and the third single taken from it. While it references heartbreak at one point, it is unashamedly upbeat: “We’re going to get it together and go up and up and up.”The band says that directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia have created a video which is a poignant montage which references contemporary issues such as the environment and the refugee crisis.Nearly every shot is shows something impossible, sometimes only obvious as the view zooms out. Chris Martin appears, and then it is clear he is many miles in size and sitting on a tiny land mass. Soccer players are on a pitch that is sink scouring pad. A crowded port is shrunk to bathtub size.Heymann, 30, who has directed a video for Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” and commercial director Gal Muggia, keep coming up with inventive images such as the popcorn lava jumping out of a volcano. Coldplay is in danger of being better known for its videos than music: The Mat Whitecross film for “Adventure of a Lifetime” last year was also stunning, with the band represented as chimpanzees animated by Imaginarium and Mathematic.2. Weezer, “L.A. Girlz”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiPsG7YjrvkFebruary 17, 2016, AtlanticThe sunny song about a sweet kid on the beach comes with a jaw-dropping surprise. It is not the usual boy-meets-girl scenario. First the Rivers Cuomo lookalike with man-sized Buddy Holly frames is footloose and fancy free, playing air guitar and taking Snapchat photos. Then the love of his life appears – a rather more mature, tattooed female body builder about twice his size. They have fun dancing together while most viewers are by this point probably going, “what?” Miss Muscles is soon doing bench presses with him and flexing her biceps. The deceptively bright chorus says “L.A. girlz, please act your age, you treat me like I have the plague.”3. Beyoncé, “Formation”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCHz1gwzTo&list=PL-E79MQ72MqVQWkmv0BEYOwXMc-hCTqHgFebruary 16 2016, ColumbiaDirected by Melina MatsoukasThis song was a standout in the Super Bowl 50 show, and nearly blew Coldplay away. Beyoncé later joined the band for “Up & Up” (and they worked together on “Hymn for the Weekend”), though the inventive videos have little in common.Beyoncé is lying on top of a sinking police car in a flooded street; there are references to black history, Martin Luther King and racist shootings, all wrapped up in commercial pop. While shot in Los Angeles, she also uses New Orleans documentary footage and adds references to Hurricane Katrina. The whole has the serious intent of “Alright,” Kendrick Lamar’s standout from last year.4. Mia, “Borders”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Nw7HbaeWYFebruary 17, 2016, PolydorDirected by MiaMia’s song got some airings late last year so this could count for 2015, though its YouTube hits in 2016 have skyrocketed thanks especially to its video. The parent album is penciled for 2016 anyway. The British rapper, of Sri Lankan descent, takes on the refugee crisis with a location shot on the Ivory Coast. She has an army of extras who wade through water and scale barbed wire fences in desperate pursuit of freedom. The song is dedicated to her uncle, who was one of the first Tamil migrants to come to Britain.5. David Bowie, “Lazarus”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8January 7 2016, SonyDirected by Johan RenckThis video is one of the best-known and most-played and most analyzed of 2016, so much so it hardly needs much introduction. The more than 35 million views on YouTube started when Bowie was alive: nearly every image references death but few got it until he died two days later. The deathbed, the buttons on the eyes, the scars that can’t be seen, Bowie says he is in heaven, and the backwards slow retreat into a coffin-like wardrobe.There had been plenty of misleading trails: Lazarus suggests a resurrection not an ending; the stage show of Bowie’s “Lazarus” has the story of an alien who like Thomas Newton in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” will never die.If the video was initially was strange and eye-opening, with Bowie looking older and careworn, it became scarier and the hairs rose on the back of viewers’ necks when its true meaning tragically manifested itself.6. Lana Del Rey, “Freak”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq30l5-vBboFebruary 9 2016, InterscopeDirected by Lana Del Rey“High By The Beach,” with its paparazzi helicopter getting blown to bits with a rocket grenade, was one of the most “oh wow” videos of 2015. Del Rey has specialized in stylishly dangerous videos, and this one is sleek and sexy with her companion being the extravagantly bearded singer-songwriter Father John Misty. If he hasn’t the reckless risk factor of Del Rey’s previous foil Bradley Soileau, all tattoos and insolent sneers, it makes for an alluring video. Not that we would expect much else.7. Radiohead, “Burn the Witch”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2oS2hoL0kMay 3, 2016, XLDirector Chris HopewellThe video is deceptive: British people of a certain age will recognize it as echoes of childhood and 1960s-on television show “Trumpton.” As an inspector is shown around an idyllic rural town by the mayor they keep encountering evil signs – a gallows, a girl tied to a tree in a pagan ceremony. Most of all it echoes “The Wicker Man,” the horror movie made a few years after “Trumpton.” It all ends nastily with the inspector, like the policeman in the film, being put in a wooden effigy to be burnt to death. There is method in this madness because the group worked out the storyline carefully with the director to fit the lyrics about persecuting people different from ourselves.
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