WeвЂ™re living through a great time for music videos, and there are 50 pieces of evidence of that below. This list - which reflects my opinion and my opinion only - has so many great videos, and each one is entirely unlike the one before or after it. And there were plenty more voices involved in this yearвЂ™s videos - people who had their own singular visions and who made those visions intertwine with music in fun and fascinating ways. HeвЂ™s made darkness work as pop, which is not easy to do.Д«ut Singer didnвЂ™t have the best video of the year. And with his videos for the Weeknd, heвЂ™s turned evil and chaos and self-destructive urges into these seductive widescreen things. Everything in his Pink videos seemed somehow wrong, in all these compelling ways that you couldnвЂ™t quite parse. With Ariel Pink, he worked up a sticky, Kubrickian sense of transgression. He started out the year working with Ariel Pink, and he ended it working with the Weeknd. So Grant Singer is both the greatest director of this age and the greatest beneficiary of it. (And when the artist and the director are one and the same, theyвЂ™re just that much more symbiotic.) These artists are figuring out that these directors understand their visions and aesthetics, that their music and these peopleвЂ™s visual sensibilities just make sense together. Instead, the big story was the partnerships weвЂ™ve seen forming between musicians and directors: Colin Tilley and Kendrick Lamar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joanna Newsom, Bob Gallagher and Girl Band, Allie Avital and Autre Ne Veut, FKA twigs and FKA twigs, Grimes and Grimes. This year, thanks to an unlikely alliance with a fast-rising pop star, heвЂ™s completely eclipsed both of them.Д«ut then, Singer wasnвЂ™t the big story this year. Last year, Singer was sneaking up behind Nabil and Murai. This yearвЂ™s MVP is Grant Singer, who also did well on last yearвЂ™s list and who has four videos on this yearвЂ™s countdown. This year, the two of them together only have one appearance on the list. Nabil and Murai had four videos apiece on last yearвЂ™s list. Last year, the list was dominated by Nabil and Hiro Murai, both of them in a knife-fight to determine who the best music-video director in the world was.

Back in the вЂ™90s, when cable networks were starting to find excuses not to show music videos anymore, we still saw these great directors who were using music videos like playgrounds: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, Michel Gondry. For the past decade, music videos have mostly lived online, far away from the cable networks that once nurtured the art form.

When I put this list together last year, the big story was the emergence of auteurs in the online era of the music video.

Baby blue song 2015