Music Lists

12 of the Best Music Videos from 2010

It's always a good time to go down memory lane.

LCD Soundsystem via YouTube

What better way to spend your time than to go down memory lane?

Lots of great music is turning 10 this year, but music videos are a whole other category of nostalgia. Below, here are just a few of our favorite music videos from 2010 to make you miss the good old days of destroyed denim, the best of Kanye West before his "crazy motherf*cker" days, and Katy Perry wearing a whipped cream bra.

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MYRNE & Manila Killa - Where Do We Go From Here? (Official Video) [Ultra Music]

Electronic artists MYRNE and Manila Killa unveil the music video for "Where Do We Go From Here," a track from their collaborative EP, Fluorescence.

Teeming with house energy, the song relates the tale of a young Japanese girl living with her grandmother, grieving the passing of her mother. Feeling alone, she seeks out the company of her pet fish, and finds catharsis through dancing. Soft velvety vocals infuse the tune with aching sadness and a questioning of what's next.

MYRNE & Manila Killa - Where Do We Go From Here? (Official Video) [Ultra Music]youtu.be


Follow MYRNE Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Spotify

Follow Manila Killa Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Spotify

MUSIC

Exclusive: Denitia Finds Clarity on the Edges of the City

"I want to feel like how we think we felt when we were younger. That's the kind of energy I want to bring to the now, the present."

Denitia, Kelly De Geer

The sound of Denitia's Touch of the Sky is how walking by the ocean feels.

Listening through, you get a sense of vastness, a kind of vertigo at the sight of the unending horizon, and an appreciation for a network of things much vaster than yourself. Though the waves of sound can grow ragged and powerful, there's a sense of underlying peace, a transcendence to be found in the cyclicality of the ebb and flow.

It makes sense that the album was born in the Rockaways, the New York peninsula that most city-dwellers only know as the end of the A line. Denitia moved there to escape the city's congestion; from there, something opened up and she began to reflect on the structures that underlie our visible reality.

What arose from those meditative sessions by the beach is Touch of the Sky, a masterful album that fuses glossy electronica with glitchy guitar and smooth vocal lines. It's composed of rich images and sounds—tides of psychedelic synths tangle with muted house rhythms; guitar lines dance like fractals of sunlight over a roof in the early morning. It's fractured and cohesive, awake yet relaxed, the product of an artist fully coming into her own and communing with some sublime creative force.

We spoke with Denitia about finding peace in the city, finding nostalgia for the present, and what it means to dream.


You produce all of your own work. How did you get started with producing, and how does it influence your work?

I basically played everything, wrote everything, and arranged it all, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I've known for a while that I could do it. I had this vision for my sound, and there was always something I felt was missing, and I think I needed to make my own work and start fresh. I really just needed to make this record for myself and express myself with every layer.

I got into production five years ago or something, when I moved into this artist house in Brooklyn and there were a lot of people living there at the time. We had this studio, and a lot of amazing artists lived there. That's when I really started to get into self-production and recording.

You mentioned this record felt different from your past ones, in that you were able to talk about things you haven't before. How was it a fresh start for you, either musically or in another way?

I started out playing guitar and writing songs, and then I got super into electro-pop and electronic music, and I put the guitar down for a while. It's cool because I've gone full circle and picked the guitar back up on this record. I was able to hear guitar textures in the way I'd always wanted to hear them.

Your sound is so vivid and full of imagery. I've read a bit about you doing production out on the Rockaways and I was wondering how that influenced the record, and what other places or images went into inspiring the record?

That's also one of the reasons why I've been thinking of this music as cinematic. I worked in the Rockaways in this bedroom studio, and my room was next to this huge deck and big windows, so every day I'd open my eyes and see this wide open, gorgeous sky. And I'd look around the corner at the ocean, and the ocean just represents infinite possibilities to me.

So much of our bodies are water, so much of this planet is water, and I felt this traction with infinity and the depth of that body of water, so much that it made me feel like anything is possible and it made me feel free. Visually, the ocean and the wide open sky over the ocean has everything to do with the sound of this music. It's in me now.

I moved back to Brooklyn a couple of months ago, but I can still feel how integral that experience was to unlocking who I am. Moving out there at that time in my life when I felt like things were tumultuous and crazy and jumbled helped me return to myself and my purpose, which I feel is making beautiful music that moves people and allows them to feel.

That's definitely a tension I think a lot of people—New Yorkers or anyone—can relate to: wanting to be in the rush of the city and wanting to find space to reflect. How are you finding the move back?

I love New York City. I'll always love this place. From the first time I came here when I was twelve years old, I just felt like I belonged here. I feel like I can be myself here, and I feel free. Something about the kinetic energy just feels inspiring.

But you can go to the extreme, you know, so since moving back to Brooklyn—it's important for me to take walks and have quiet time and not to over-commit like a crazy person to different things. There's a lot of stuff I say no to. I say no to chaos, I say no to nonsense. I just like to keep my life chill and focused. I just want to be connected to my purpose, spend time with my girlfriend and my purpose and, like, call my mom.

A few years ago I stopped drinking, which put me in this whole space in my mind. I get up really early in the morning now, and that's where I find my quiet, meditative time. It's really about balance and quality of life. I think that can be achieved in the city, still, if you really work on it.

So what's coming next, and what do you have on the radar?

I'm gonna dig deeper. This music is very visual to me, so I'm gonna dig deeper into making more filmic visuals to accompany the music and really put on my art director hat.

I'm never stopping making music. I'm a creative person, that's when I'm at my best, so I'm just gonna keep working on music and fleshing out the album in a visual way.

Kelly De Geer

All the songs are so unique, and I was wondering if there are any stories about any of them you'd be interested in sharing.

For the song "23," the first song on the album, I was getting up every day at like 6AM… I had an endorsement for this livestream app, and I'd get up and livestream me making tracks, and one day I grabbed some drums that I had been working with and started building this track. The words "23" came to me, and I was like "What about 23? I want to feel like we were 23, I want to be as free as we seemed."

I started thinking about being a young person fresh out of college. I was living in Nashville, I had this apartment that was on the tenth floor… As we get older, I think there's this romanticizing of the past, like oh my god what if we could just be 21 again or 23 again. So I started to unpack that illusion of nostalgia.

When I was 23, I was f*cked up. I was worried about what I was gonna do with my life; I was in crazy relationships that were non-reciprocal. I was anxious about everything. That song plays with that idea, well I want to be as free as we seemed we were. I want to feel like how we think we felt when we were younger. That's the kind of energy I want to bring to the now, the present.

I think often there is this idealization of youth or just other places or other ages, so it's cool to think how can we use that in the moment.

You released a video alongside your album. What was the inspiration for that?

I met Hugo Ferrocko, the director, when I opened for a premier of a movie he worked on. We hit it off, and when we got together, he was like, I love your music, let's make something… We had this idea to make something that was documentary, part music video—something that starts to unpack some of the themes of this record, which are love and the power of love, identity, consciousness, awakening—and surround it with the beauty of the Rockaways.

Hugo came to me with that treatment after we had that conversation, and I was just blown away. He's a visionary filmmaker. I'm really glad to have had the chance to work with him; he's gonna have an incredible future making things.

Denitia - Touch of the Sky (Short Film)www.youtube.com

You mentioned themes of consciousness and awakening, which are kind of loaded terms, and I'm wondering how you feel like those play out on the album?

I hope this always happens to me in life, but when I pulled out of Brooklyn and went to the Rockaways and when I was writing the album, I felt like I was going through this other level of awareness. Inevitably there was a slowing down, and that led to a lot of reflection and looking around and asking, What is my place in this world, and how do I fit here, and what are we doing?

It was less of a conscious thing; I was just musing and looking around in the world.

On the track "Touch of the Sky," I was thinking about how in black neighborhoods, there are cops everywhere, and it's infuriating. I was hearing so much about black people dying wrongfully at the cops' hands, and I was thinking about how sometimes we wait until people die to lift them up and to lift up their spirits, to focus on them and give them their flowers, so to speak.

That song was written in stream-of-consciousness, when I was thinking, I want to be lifted up now. I want us to have an anthem about being lifted up now, and getting this touch of the sky now. Let's fly now, while we're still alive. Let's raise each other up now.

I'd never really written about anything like that before, and, even so, it's pretty abstract, but I feel like it's another step in my reaching this awareness in thinking about the world around me.

I think consciousness plays out in a lot of different ways in the record. I talk a lot in the record about dreams being essential. In the end of "Touch of the Sky," there's this poem that goes, half my life's been spent dreaming. That's about the power of dreams in marginalized communities and among people who are struggling. Dreams are essential for us. Of course I'm going to be dreaming. My reality is not what it should be, so the dreaming is essential to push me forward into the life that I want.

Follow Denitia on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

MUSIC

The Boyband Era is Resurrected in New Monsta X and Steve Aoki Music Video

"Play it Cool" is a glittery blast from the past with a few modern twists and turns.

Steve Aoki is back with yet another EDM-pop banger.

This time he's aiding South Korean boy band, Monsta X, on the posh banger, "Play it Cool." The song initially appeared on Monsta X's Take.2 We Are Here, which dropped in February and climbed to the number five spot on the Billboard World Albums chart by March 2nd. The highly anticipated music video for the English version of "Play it Cool" dropped yesterday, and it's a fun bit of nostalgia packaged in a glitzy blend of Eastern and Western culture.

Parts of the video make you forget what year it is – a five-piece boy band doing some high-energy choreography in perfect unison while flashing bedroom eyes at the camera? Surely this is 1999 and NSYNC will be appearing on TRL tomorrow. The only thing that firmly roots this video in the present is when it cuts from the pop group's nonstop dance parties and pillow fights to show Steve Aoki driving his car aimlessly, jamming along to the song until he just can't "Play it Cool" any longer and is compelled to pull over so he can get out and dance like mad in the middle of nowhere.

The song is three minutes of fun bubble gum K-pop infused with plenty of Steve Aoki's signature vocal sampling and infectious drum loops that are sure to energize the clubs when it comes on —from Seoul to New York City.


Dustin DiPaulo is a writer and musician from Rochester, New York. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University and can most likely be found at a local concert, dive bar, or comedy club (if he's not getting lost somewhere in the woods).


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Top Videos

Revisiting the YouTubers You Watched in High School

Hey Youtube! Hey, what's up you guys! Hey everyone! What is up everyone?

PewDiePie

Whether or not you support the culture and ethics of YouTube—the insensitive and salacious clickbait, and outrageous thumbnails—you understand that it's no different than TV and Netflix, or any other form of media you use to entertain yourself...

YouTube—a playground for the terminally bored, and the website you visit to learn how to make poached eggs—is a DIY platform where regular people jump online for ten minutes to talk about their weird Uber experiences, clothing hauls, new horror game releases, and quirky sugar daddy experiences. YouTube is the platform that best represents what millennials are all about—the "StoryTime" videos, the countless scare pranks where unassuming men and women are harassed in elevators, and teenage girls and boys garnering Beiber-esque fandom from vlogging, are all a mirror of Generation Y. Yeah, that YouTube, where the bully in your English class is somehow paying rent for his studio apartment on a schedule of three video uploads a week.

Whether or not you support the culture and ethics of YouTube—the insensitive and salacious clickbait, and outrageous thumbnails—you understand that it's no different than TV and Netflix, or any other form of media you use to entertain yourself after work, on the weekends, and during bouts of chronic procrastination. The catch is that your next-door neighbor is streaming his/her life online as a job. When dead bodies in the Suicide Forest aren't used for clickbait, or random exclamations of the N-word aren't accidentally blurted during a live-streaming shootout, YouTube can be a place of unbridled creation, DIY comedy, and unimpeded debate. But a website dedicated to the tides of culture—the newest drama online, hyped products on Instagram, and trending, social media fodder—is a website that introduces new starry-eyed college grads just as fast as it trades 'em up for baby-faced high schoolers.

Before you slam your head against your keyboard, declaring millennials as lazy, privileged brats, consider how millennials capitalized off of an of-the-moment market, a landscape where everyday charm is profitable to millions of subscribers. YouTube has some of the most noteworthy comeback kids in popular culture: regular people screwing up and miraculously recovering with heartfelt apologies and tweets (the type of contrition reserved for A-list celebrities). But not all of YouTube's celebs are publicly chastised after idiotic slip-ups; some simply take a break, you know, for personal reasons. And some have stuck to their grind, sharing their ups and downs with the world.

Ray William Johnson

Remember Ray William Johnson and his popular web series Equals Three (stylized as =3)? He reviewed viral videos, usually people falling, tripping, and slamming into things. He was one of the biggest YouTubers with nearly 10.4 million subscribers and billions of views total on his video archives. Johnson took a hiatus from Equals Three after publicly announcing he wanted to explore other business ventures—filmmaking (Riley Rewind), and developing a script with FX. Johnson also produced hilarious music videos under the name "Your Favorite Martian," a collection of pop-inspired tracks that were actually catchy and worthy of download on iTunes.

Charlie Puth

Before Charlie Puth was a celebrity pop star, making hits with Meghan Trainor and G-Eazy, he was a nerdy boy on YouTube who made comedy skits and music videos featuring his friends and family. If you're curious to see Puth's earlier work ("Who threw this pickle at me?!"), you'll be sad to know he deleted all of his original content. Puth is doing big boy things now, for big boy money. RIP Charlie Puth's YouTube vids.

KevJumba

Far East Movement's "Folk Music" opened Kev Wu's videos that were filmed in his house, often featuring his charismatic father, and everyday household props. Watching KevJumba was like watching the kid on your cul-de-sac you've never talked to—the one in basketball shorts and Nike sandals with socks, blasting hip-hop from his windows, with Sailor Moon in the background. He made uncool things very cool, and average parts of life hilarious and endearing. His recent upload on Christmas day confirmed rumors that his hiatus wasn't a weird stint in a religious cult, but a spiritual journey learning about Buddhism.

Julian Smith

Jellyfish…jelly fish…jellyfish. Julian Smith was the king of whimsical humor. Uploads of an odd and quote-worthy character named Jeffery Dallas brought in millions of views. Whether Dallas was making hot Kool-Aid, peeing with the door open, mispronouncing milk, or arguing about waffle equality, his quest to be heard never went unnoticed. In his latest video, Smith details why he took a one-year break from YouTube, and it's a refreshing take on Internet fame and popularity. Word of advice, don't eat a live jellyfish, lest you end up a Jeffery Dallas. In Smith's humble words, "I MADE THIS FOR YOU!"

Shane Dawson

The OG. (A classic YouTuber to those of us who graduated high school in 2013.) Shane Dawson is the boy who wore lipstick and wigs, and made millions of people laugh with his extensive theater of outrageous characters on "ShaneDawsonTV": Shananay (a drug addict and sex fiend), S-Deezy (a wannabe wanksta), Paris Hilton (a hilarious impersonator), Amy (a girl desperate for popularity), and Switch (a poster child for Emo kids everywhere). He's amassed 20 million subscribers in his career and is still going strong. Dawson has also ventured into TV and has one memoir, I Hate Myselfie: A Collection of Essays, and a book titled, It Gets Worse. Through the years, Dawson has remained one of the most entertaining voices on YouTube.

Simon and Martina

Your favorite Canadians turned Korean and Japanese expats hosted "Eat Your Kimchi," a channel exploring the differences between Korean and Western culture. A favorite among American K-pop fans, and a go-to destination channel for high schoolers who enjoyed every new Big Bang single, or Hyuna music video, "Eat Your Kimchi" was like the TRL of YouTube. Husband and wife, Simon and Martina Stawski, reviewed the latest K-pop singles and albums, commenting on the fashion and music videos trending in Korean pop culture. Their videos were (and still are) light, fluffy, and everything that makes YouTube special. Plus, their pets are adorable (and worth turning off your Google AdBlock plug-in to their support their channel).

What's your favorite channel on YouTube? Leave your interesting or creative responses in the comment section below.

Giphy


Shaun Harris is a poet, freelance writer, and editor published in avant-garde, feminist journals. Lover of warm-toned makeup palettes, psych-rock, and Hilton Als. Her work has allowed her to copyedit and curate content for various poetry organizations in the NYC area.



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