The Best Videos of 2010
From Gaga and Beyonce's sexy killing spree to Die Antwoord's surrealist freak show: the clips that blew us away this year
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“Telephone,” Lady Gaga and Beyoncé
The divas make like ultrafab versions of Thelma and Louise, dancing (and murdering) their way through dozens of costumes on a gloriously trashy nine-and-a-half-minute clip that's more entertaining than most feature films.
Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Music, Movies, Videos, Photos and More
By Jonah Weiner and Will Hermes
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“The Wilderness Downtown,” Arcade Fire
Set to the gorgeous, sweeping "We Used to Wait," this forward-thinking art film uses Google Maps images of your childhood neighborhood — with amazing, poignant results.
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“Who’s That Brown”, Das Racist
The Brooklyn MCs make a hilarious clip that's also a fully playable video game — like Nintendo's Double Dragon, but set in Williamsburg.
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“This Too Shall Pass,” OK Go
The Chicago guys step up their game, grooving with a dazzling Rube Goldberg machine that smashes TVs and triggers paint-spewing cannons.
Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Music, Movies, Videos, Photos and More
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“Drunk Girls,” LCD Soundsystem
Spike Jonze sics hell-raising pandas on LCD, and singer James Murphy is bound with tape and forcibly dressed in drag. Raucous, anarchistic fun.
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“Power,” Kanye West
Yeezy calls this 90-second clip by Italian-Canadian artist Marco Brambilla — the concise flip-side of the sprawling 34-minute video for "Runaway" — a "moving painting." With half-naked, neo-classical angels and demons floating around the rapper in slow motion like a Salvador Dali wet dream, we call it awesome. Though, like all the best dreams, it ends too soon.
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“O.N.E.,” Yeasayer
A mutant dude walks into a 22nd-century warehouse party and sits down to play some kinda Oujia-backgammon with crystals, while a hottie cries into her MDMA-absinthe martini. The house band, meanwhile, makes dance music with weirdly illuminated instruments that's so damn catchy, it literally colonizes our hero's skull — pretty much exactly what it does to us.
Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Music, Movies, Videos, Photos and More
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“Kill Your Co-workers,” Flying Lotus
Digitized line-drawings with a cheery Pantone palette depict "Pattern + Grid World," a community of cubist androids chilling sweetly at a parade — until the evil robots come along, of course, and fuck shit up. Balancing analog warmth with digital chill, it was as perfect a visualization of an artist's sound as we saw all year.
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“I Feel Better,” Hot Chip
In which the U.K. avant-dance-pop geeks re-imagine themselves as a boy band performing for a bunch of screaming girls, until a freaky seraph comes in and goes all Carrie on their asses. Then everyone comes together in dance-party unity. And then it all goes to hell again. Like LCD Soundsystem, proof that self-conscious dance music is sometimes the best kind.
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“Enter the Ninja,” Die Antwoord
Scrawny white South African rappers, rocking out with rats and a gnomish dude with Progeria syndrome? Yes, it's a freak show — until Ninja's pugilist slang and Yolandi's squeaky hooks pull you into their Cape Town ghetto surrealism.
Rolling Stone's Best of 2010: Music, Movies, Videos, Photos and More