December means one thing in media: Year-end lists. Artists, if you released anything this month, well, good luck to you. But from the lists, the videos that had the most nudity, that just managed to stay on the borderline of soft-porn won most popular music video award for the year.
Most bloggers are busy compiling their “best of the year” lists like “14 Songs That Should Have Been Hits” and “Best Celebrity Selfies.”
Thanks to YouTube, we now have the 10 Most-Watched Music Videos of the Year, which have cumulatively boasted more than 2.8 BILLION views.
For a medium that’s supposed to have become irrelevant years ago, the music video was surprisingly central to the way we thought about music in 2013—for better and for worse.
This was the year that clips for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” spawned 1,000 think pieces, the year that we ran around our cities trying to find a place to watch Kanye West project his face onto the side of a building.
It was the year that artists from Arcade Fire to Bob Dylan continued to push the boundaries of what a music video can be, and it ended with the surprise, Internet-breaking release of Beyoncé’s self-titled “visual album,” which included a whopping 17 videos. If it’s all not quite enough to declare a new golden age, it’s certainly cause to be eager for what lies ahead. Chase Woodruff
via Slant Magazine, Fuse
