#ryan staake

Charli XCX & Troye Sivan - 1999

1999 by Charli XCX + Troye Sivan

5. Haim - “Want You Back” (Director: Jake Schreier)

Out of all the music videos that I’ve ever seen, Haim’s “Want You Back” has the choreography that comes closest to capturing what 95% of actual dancing is like. Most of the time that people dance isn’t on a dance floor and doesn’t involve the whole body. Instead, it’s in our cars, or at our desks, or while we’re doing the dishes, and it involves the little movements that feel like a natural extension of one little sound or section of the song. Wagging your finger or bobbing your head or doing some little shoulder thing. And that, not the single take or shutting down Ventura Boulevard, is why it’s stuck in my mind.

4. Miya Folick - “Give It To Me” (Director: Eva Michon)

I had never heard “Give It To Me” before I watched its video, which was unwittingly lucky on my part. The concept is basically the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” but on a roller coaster. So I (like many, I presume) watched coaster ascend for the first minute or so thinking that there’s no way that chorus will be cathartic enough to justify being timed with the drop. But it is and it does. If you’re among the uninitiated (like I recently was), there is no better introduction to this barnburner of a track. 

3. Jay-Z - “The Story of O.J.” (Director: Jay-Z and Mark Romanek)

There have been countless discussions of the way that this video manipulates, inverts, and reappropriates centuries of racist caricatures of African-Americans, and they’ve all been written by people far more suited to do so than I. So, instead, I’ll just say that I can’t think of this song without thinking of it’s video. And isn’t that the mark of every great music video?

2. Young Thug - “Wyclef Jean” (Director: Ryan Staake)

Ever mercurial, Thugga decides to skip out on a hundred-thousand dollar video shoot, leaving director Ryan Staake in a lurch. While plenty of people would have packed it in then and there, Staake took what little footage he had and blended it into the “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” of music videos, crafting the piece around Thug’s absence and turning him into the void in the silhouette, the hole in the donut.

1. Charli XCX - “Boys” (Director: Charli XCX and Sarah McColgan)

Let’s just put it this way: I talked so much about this video this year that I once found this written on the whiteboard in my university’s script library.

Today’s lesson in making lemonade.