And on the other end, there was Frank Ocean, who got revenge for record-label woes by forcing the world to watch a fascinatingly boring video of himself constructing some stairs. The only non-Beyoncé person who did make that concept work was Vince Staples, who is emerging as one of the great music-video artists of our time. After Beyoncé’s watershed, big stars like Drake and the Weeknd attempted to make their own short films - long-form music videos that stretched four minutes’ worth of ideas across 14 and included as many songs as possible. With streaming-service money flying around and artistic ambitions going unchecked, 2016 was the year of the surprise album and also, for many of the same reasons, the long-form video.
Nobody else could’ve pulled off a stunt like Lemonade, and plenty of others tried. It succeeded so completely that I didn’t include any of the component parts from Lemonade on this list, with one big standalone exception. Lemonade was a leap - an indulgent artistic vision that could’ve easily fallen flat on its face and somehow instead transcended the music-video form, becoming something personal and moving and cohesive. The music-video event of 2016 was easily the HBO premiere of Beyoncé’s Lemonade - inarguably one of the best albums of the year, and maybe one of the best movies, too.
0 kommentar(er)
