December 2019 – The Pinocchio Theory

Favorite science fiction, 2019

Here are my favorite science fiction novels (or in a few cases, collections of stories) from 2019. As before, I make no pretensions toward completeness or towards numbered or objective rankings — these are simply the new SF books I liked most this year, among whichever ones I have read. I am mostly oriented towards what might be considered science fiction proper, as opposed to other speculative fiction genres like fantasy; as well as towards overt genre writing, as opposed to speculatively oriented literary fiction. But of course, these sorts of distinctions are unavoidably inexact. The list therefore includes a number of books that would more likely be classified as fantasy rather than science fiction, but that were sufficiently SF-adjacent to hold my interest.

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. This dazzling novel takes place on a tidally locked planet; one side always faces its sun and is extremely hot; the other side faces away and is extremely cold. Human colonists can only live on the terminator between the two sides. It is always twilight for them; the lack of any solar cycle, or indeed any variation in the light, makes it hard to establish regular sleep patterns. There are two cities: one is harshly authoritarian, and has legally enforced regular sleep times. The other is ostensibly anarchist — which means, in practice, that it is controlled by Mafia-like gangs that violently enforce their supremacy. With no fixed sleep times, there is very little in the way of scheduling; people just go to sleep whenever they feel tired or find it convenient, and lots of people are permanently sleep-deprived. From this starting premise, Anders engages in unusually rich and complex world-building, raising all kinds of issues along the way, including reflections on gender and class, on power and aspiration and inventiveness, on technological dependency, on ecological relations among humans and between humans and nonhumans, and on hybridity and transformation. There are great sentient aliens, as well.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie. This is a fantasy novel from an author whose previous novels have all been science fiction (most notably, the gender-bending Ancillary trilogy). It operates through a highly original conceit that I can only call a theory or theology of multiple gods (and emphatically not of a singular, capital-letter God). The multiple gods of Leckie’s world in this novel are effectively immortal, yet materially circumscribed. They are bound to — or perhaps one could better say — particular physical objects, and their powers are vast, yet finite and localized. Each is a solitary being, though they communicate with one another, and often with human worshippers who feed them energy and in turn receive favors from them. I have never read anything quite like this book, but its conceptualizations are not far from those of a panpsychist power metaphysics.
Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan. This brilliant near-future novel is divided between alternating “Before” and “After” chapters – that is to say, before and after the actions of an anonymous hacker group that takes down the entire Internet, thereby disrupting globalized supply chains, along with much else, thus putting an end to most commodity production along with the ubiquitous surveillance that we have become all too used to. The “before” chapters show us the dystopian mechanisms of control that have come alongside digitally-maintained affluence (for some) and deprivation (for others). The “after” chapters present what might at first glance be dismissed as just another post-technological dystopia – but which at closer examination is something else. Yes, the post-Internet society, as Maughan describes it, is decidedly non-affluent, with fascistoid armies rampaging across the landscape and locked-down localites dominated by petty gang bosses and warlords. But actually there is more than meets the eye, including forms of democratic cooperation and artistic production, and minoritarian or non-totalitarian uses of digital technologies. Maughan asks us seriously to consider that the deprived future world he presents to us might in fact be less oppressive than the consumerist, high-surveillance and micro-managed digital dystopia that we actually live in today. Orthodox science fiction criticism regards the genre as essentially utopian; Maughan redefines what this might mean. Much as I am attracted to the ideal of fully automated luxury communism, it may well be that such a vision is total fantasy, and that Maughan in fact offers us the best possible alternative to neoliberal global domination.
The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption, by Tade Thompson. These are the second and third volumes of Thompson’s amazing Rosewater trilogy – I discussed the first volume, which came out several years ago, at greater length here. An alien invasion takes place, not in the so-called developed world, but in near-future Nigeria. The US has devolved into an overt police state, and hidden itself behind a paranoid firewall. The UK has disintegrated due to alien intrusion effects. But Nigeria remains as ground zero for the encounter between human beings and the alien life forms. The second and third volumes of the trilogy are entirely worthy of the first; we get a complete and interconnected narrative that combines sociological observation and social criticism with bio-cybernetic technologies and much else. Lots of my favorite science fictional tropes are here, but transposed into a new key.
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley. This is the second sf novel by an author whose other works can be categorized as harsh, bracing feminist fantasy. (The first was the brilliant The Stars Are Legion from 2017). This novel is Hurley’s revisionist take on military science fiction, combined with an inventive time travel premise. Military sf has both obnoxiously idealized (e.g. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers) and unsparingly displayed the horrors (Haldeman, The Forever War) of organized militarism with its endless conflicts. Hurley’s book is an updated entry in the latter category; it takes place in a fully neoliberalized and technologically heightened society in which corporations have overtly displaced nation-states as the units of conflict. Soldiers are transformed into pure energy so that they may be transported at light speed to the interplanetary battlefields at which they are rematerialized. But the protagonist is unmoored in time as a result of this process, so that she experiences her different military missions in nonlinear order. (So you could think of this novel as The Forever War meets “Slaughterhouse-Five*). The time loops ultimately provide an escape from what is otherwise endless neoliberal/imperialist horror. The book’s final vision is therefore both poignant and hopeful, even as its time-paradoxical nature leaves us uneasily aware how unlikely such an escape from the neoliberal time prison actually is.
Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow. This book contains four unrelated novellas, all compellingly political in their implications. The first one is about immigrants who, even when they are finally allowed into the United States, face harsh exploitation, enforced by proprietary digital technologies — until they find ways to hack the technologies for themselves. This story folows lines that are familiar from much of Doctorow’s earlier fiction. But the other three novellas are much more fresh and surprising. One is about older white men who are radicalized into acts of domestic terrorism, except that their targets are not the imaginary ones that propel right-wing terrorism today, but rather health insurance companies that have refused payments for medical procedures that could have saved their loved ones. Another one gleefully deconstructs the ruling-class fantasy of retreating into a bunker in order to sit out (and survive, unimpacted) political/economic/environmental catastrophe. And best of all, there’s a story which is basically Superman meets Black Lives Matter; the story movingly but unswervingly demonstrates the inability of liberal empathy and fair-mindedness to fight against, or even minimally deal with, the systematic and socially-embedded structures of police violence under white supremacy.
Waste Tide, by Chen Qiufan. This is the English translation of a powerful, near-future Chinese SF novel. It takes place in a Chinese city, based closely on the actual city of Guiyu, that has become a world center for the recycling of electronic waste. Junked computers, cell phones, etc., as well as worn-out biological prosthetics, are disassembled so that rare metals and polymers can be recovered for re-use. The workers are overworked and poorly paid, while the corrupt post-communist ruling class, combining hyper-modern and old-fashioned forms of oppression, appropriates the profits. The processes of disassembly also result in massive toxic waste, and the workers have short life spans as a result of poisoning and infection. In such conditions of hyper-exploitation, it’s nearly impossible to accumulate enough savings to be able to afford to move elsewhere. All this becomes the setting for a dazzling high-tech thriller involving artificial intelligence, and both computer and biological viruses. The novel reminds those of us in the West of aspects of the current global world order that we tend to overlook; beyond this, it is brilliant for the way that it raises and recombines technological issues, socio-political ones, and conditions both of political economy and of the way new forms appropriate and transform old traditions.
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. Chaing is one of our finest contemporary science fiction writers; this volume, his second collection of short stores, contains pretty much everything he has written since the previous volume, Stories of Your Life and Others was published in 2002. The stories in this new volume range from just a couple of pages long to novella-length. They are all treasures, and I cannot here comment on all of them. I will just mention that I wrote at great length about one of the stories here, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” in my 2016 book Discognition.
Sweet Dreams, by Tricia Sullivan. This was actually released in the UK in 2017, but I am including it in this list because it only received its first US publication in 2019. I wrote about it here.
Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is a sequel to Tchaikovsky’s 2015 sf novel Children of Time. That book dealt with the remnants of humanity trying to terraform distant worlds, inadvertently leading to a society of upraised (boosted to human-level intelligence) Portia spiders. This book takes a mixed crew of humans and spiders to another terraformed world, this one inhabited by upraised octopuses. They also encounter a non-Earth-originated intelligent lifeform, more or less like a sentient, and highly computationally efficient, sort of slime mold. This volume, like the previous one, is brilliant in the way that it imagines and articulates the nuances of intelligence in nonhuman form. Spider intelligence is very different from mammal intelligence, and cephalopod intelligence is different from both. All the intelligences in these books ultimately operate on underlying forms of computation, which is what makes communication between them possible at all. But these intelligences are always embodied, and remain radically distinct from one another because of their different biogenetic and sociocultural characteristics. These novels explore the rich terrain in between the fantasy of total communication and communion, on the one hand, and the opposed fantasy of absolute, radical otherness, on the other.
Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky is an alarmingly prolific author; the majority of his books are fantasy, none of which I have read. But this year he published a second science fiction book in addition to Children of Ruin. This one is much shorter, just a novella. It is totally unrelated to the Children series, but mind-blowing in its own way. A alien, clearly constructed labyrinthine structure is discovered in the outer solar system that seems to provide shortcut transit (through interdimensional wormholes? we never find out) between solar systems and worlds that are otherwise inaccessibly distant from one another. Our narrator is an astronaut who is separated from the rest of his team, and finds himself walking through and exploring the folds and caverns of the structure. I don’t want to give away the plot here; let’s just say we have an unreliable narrator, and a story that combines old-fashioned science-fictional “sense of wonder” exploration with plot twists worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.
Stealing Worlds, by Karl Schroeder. This novel is a powerful thought experiment that considers the utopian and dystopian potentialities of combining the technologies of augmented reality glasses, massively multiplayer role playing games, ubiquitous networks, and artificial intelligence. At worst, this could lead to a new form of surveillance-based extractive capitalism, with corporations controlled by self-perpetuating algorithms that have optimized themselves for rent-seeking. This is just a small extrapolation from the ways that, already today, both banking and financial institutions, and high technology companies, are trying to create conditions under which they can extract payments from all transactions (even ostensibly non-economic ones) in which human beings take part. But against this dystopian situation, Schroeder proposes a vision of cooperative networking, an economy decoupled from the imperatives of finance, and most importantly, the input of nonhuman actors (trees and forests, rivers, ecosystems) into decision-making processes. (This vision was first sketched out by Schroeder in his 2014 short story “Deodand”). This is the first science fiction novel I have read that contains a shout-out to the philosophy of speculative realism (Levi Bryant and Tim Morton are explicitly mentioned).
The Iron Dragon’s Mother, by Michael Swanwick. This is the third and final volume of Swanwick’s “Iron Dragon” trilogy of deidealized fantasy. All three novels take place in the parallel reality of Faery – but Swanwich envisions a Faerie whose magic entirely coexists with the uglinesses of Victorian Era capitalism, and the overload of 20th-century-and-following branding and consumerism. The first volume of the trilogy, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), is IMHO one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written – it is brilliantly imagined, and ferociously nihilistic in tone, sort of like the punk rock cover version of traditional fantasy. I didn’t like the second volume, The Dragons of Babel (2008) anywhere near as much, though it has its powerful moments. This new (final?) volume strikes me as better than the second, though not as good as the first. But it is still rich and powerful, and it gives us an admonition on the next to last page that we ought to keep forever in mind: “The world is choking on old stories. Tell new and better ones.”
And Shall Machines Surrender?, by Benjamin Sriduankaew. Whatever you might think about the author’s past activities in fandom, she has undeniably become a powerful author of posthuman BDSM-lesbian fairytales. She writes both science fiction and fantasy; I prefer the former (as in this book) because there is also lots of stuff about artificial intelligence, cyborg beings with non-binary genders, and the pleasures (as well as limitations) of living in a total-surveillance, algorithmically-governed society. In any case, Sriduangkaew writes in a highly-wrought prose that I find irresistible.
The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz. The author has recently described this novel on Twitter as “a book about angry Jewish girls traveling through time and kicking the ass of the white supremacist patriarchy.” I can’t really better that description, so I won’t try. I will just note that in this book we get, among other things, a glimpse of the Great Columbian Exposition held in 1893 in Chicago, riot grrl rock in an alternative timeline, a vision of the ancient kingdom of Petra, and even a visit back to the Ordovician Period, when trilobites were the world’s dominant life form. The book is an inspiring feminist vision, behind which we get troublingly reminded of the fragility even of the greatest human accomplishments, and therfore of the need to continue struggling. I wrote about this novel at greater length here.
Beneath the World, A Sea, by Chris Beckett. Chris Beckett is one of my favorite contemporary science fiction writers, but this beautifully mysterious book is different from anything else I have read by him. (A chapter in my forthcoming book Extreme Fabulations discusses Beckett’s Dark Eden trilogy, and I published review of his novel before this one, America City). Beneath the World, A Sea is about a remote region in South America, the Submundo Delta, where biological forms, and maybe even the laws of nature, are different from anyplace else on Earth. What seems to happen in the Delta is that your most repressed and unwelcome unconscious thoughts and desires emerge, and you are forced to confront them. It’s a realm of truth, but also (and therefore) a realm of neurotic misery and depression. Moreover, even to get to the Delta, you need to pass through another region, the Zone of Forgetfulness, whose nature is such that, whenever you leave it, you are unable to remember what you did or what happened while within it. It appears, as far as we can tell, that here people cast off their inhibitions entirely, and do things that they would never countenance were they able to remember having done them. So the novel is really about people of various white European mindsets — the narrator is a hard-headed cop; we also meet scientists, anthropologists, artists, hippies, colonialist administrators, and capitalist entrepreneur types — all of whom attempt, and all of whom fail, in their various ways, to come to grips with the disconcerting otherness of the Zone and the Delta. The novel recalls both Lem’s Solaris (with its alien intelligence that repels our efforts to understand it) and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (with its Zone where noramal Earthly categories do not quite seem to apply, and which less discloses anything about itself than it responds to those who would explore it and exploit it by reflecting back their own prejudices and limitations to them). But Beckett brings to this novel a sense of metaphysical and psychological disquiet and displacement that is more in tune with our neoliberal present than is the case with those novels written under conditions of “actually-existing socialism.”
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon. The Detroit techno band Drexciya invented the mythology of an underwater realm, inhabited by the descendants of pregant African women who were thrown overboard from slave ships during the Middle Passage. The children of these women continue to breathe in the water, as they did in the womb, and they create a utopian, high-tech society, safely apart from the horrors of land and air. The experimental hip hop band Clipping revised and extended this mythology, with a 2017 song that imagined the Drexciyans no longer safely apart from the surface world – for now they have to deal with worldwide ecological catastrophe, and with current efforts by large corporations to mine the seabed. Rivers Solomon picks up the story and again reimagines it in this novella, which turns on the dilemma that the Drexciyans can afford neither to forget nor to remember the traumatic history from which they originated: to remember the traumas is ti be crippled into inactivity, but to forget them is to lose any sense of what defines them as a community with a common history. I wrote at greater length about this powerfully affecting novella here.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers. Chambers writes science fiction that is exuberantly multicultural — her galaxy is filled with wildly different species, different genders, different social/familial/reproductive arrangements, different forms of intelligence (both biological and computational), and so on. At the same time, her novels have a decidedly retro emotional feel — they are entertaining, and even comfy, in a way that recalls Golden Age science fiction (if only that older sf hadn’t been so white, patriarchal, and heteronormative). It’s a peculiar affective combination, and I know people who have been turned off by Chambers’ upbeatness and utter lack of cynicism or even irony. This has never been a problem for me, but YMMV. In any case, To be Taught… is my favorite book of hers so far. It’s a standalone novel, apart from the Wayfarers series of her other books. There is very little plot or drama; a group of scientists simply examines the various life forms (none of them reaching human-scale sentience) on a number of planets in a solar system 14 light years away from Earth. The novel succeeds in imagining forms of life that are truly different: they don’t fit into anthropomorphic (or mammalomorphic) categories at all. Yet they are also free from any tinge of the uncanny (such as we find in “weird fiction” from Lovecraft a century ago, all the way to VanderMeer or Mieville today). To my mind, this is not a flaw, but a positive accomplishment, and an important one.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. This book is kind of a spy romance, in the form of an epistolary novel. Two women are ruthless agents on opposing sides in a universal war that involves time travel — it is fought by both agents going back or forward in time in order to change the very shape of the timeline. The two spies are always setting traps for one another, and outwitting one another. It reminded me, actually, of Antonio Prohias’ Spy Vs Spy comic strips, that appeared in MAD Magazine when I was a kid. In any case, the spies leave letters for one another, each taunting the other for defeating her plans. As things progress, the spies gradually fall in love with one another, and look for ways to defect from the war they are both involved in, in order to be with one another. I found this novel cute and engaging. It was fun to read (though I didn’t love it quite as much as many people on the Internet seem to have done).
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. This book is ostensibly a mix of space opera and horror-cum-murder-mystery, but it is actually lesbian goth fanfic of a very high order. The prose is lively (or deathly, if you prefer), the plot twists are outstanding, and the highly emo love/hate relationship between the two protagonists (one woman a magician, the other a fighter/bodyguard) intensifies without ever letting go, and gets resolved in the most weirdly twisted manner imaginable.
Interference, by Sue Burke. This is the sequel to Burke’s previous novel Semiosis. These books are about sentient plants, the dominant life form on a planet that has been colonized both by human beings escaping the ecological and political catastrophes on Earth, and an equally intelligent arthropod-like species. Where the first novel was mostly about how the human settlers both learn about the sentience of the native plants, and learn how to coexist with them, this second novel widens the scope, giving us a multispecies variety of viewpoints and (often unreliable) narrators, and a wide range of different forms of intelligence, and different sorts of social and political arrangements. I wrote about the novel in greater depth here.
The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman. The second volume of the Book of Dust trilogy picks up the story of Lyra ten years after the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Wonderfully inventive, as Pullman always is; and deeply expressive of Pullman’s own sort of vital materialism (in clear opposition both to the dogmatism of organized religion and to any sort of eliminativism and reductionism). Pullman is still exploring his great theme, “the amorous inclinations of matter” (to quote from his early masterpiece Galatea), with a lively and inventive narrative of an alternative world. Also, the book ends on a cliffhanger — Lyra, and a number of other characters towards whom we have become affectionate, are all in deep trouble — and I cannot believe I will have to wait several more years for the third volume, with the resolution.
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine. The author of this novel is (in ‘real life’) an historian of the Byzantine Empire; and she puts her knowledge to dazzling use in this novel, focused on a galactic empire reminiscent both of Byzantium and of the (long dominant, but now declining) American imperium. The protagonist is the newly-appointed ambassador from a distant space station, sent to the center of the Empire, and needing to negotiate her way through a dizzying complexity of social rituals, political infighting, and plots and counterplots, all the while striving to somehow maintain the independence (or at least, semi-independence) of her home, which the Empire is anxious to absorb. Besides being tense and thrilling, the novel plays powerfully with the way that different cultures have different customs and rituals, and different underlying assumptions. The narrator is somebody who has grown up entirely fascinated with the Empire’s art and culture — much the same was as people today, in far-flung parts of the world, have been fascinated by American movies, music, and sports. But she is uncomfortably aware that this sort of fascination is very different from being an insider of the culture one is fascinated with. She needs to learn how to negotiate the vast complexities and unexamined assumptions of the Empire, which are alien to her despite her lifelong fascination with them. In addition, she needs to grasp how the Empire is not a monolith, but riven by political and economic privileges and by class conflict. And above all, she also needs to come to terms with her increasing realization that she is in fact a colonized person whose obsession is with her colonizers. The different cultures do not meet on anything like equal terms, and no matter how many of the Empire’s arts, sciences, and general assumptions she adopts, she will never really be one of them, but rather always seen as a barbarian outsider. Add to this artificial intelligence and other cybernetic technologies, and the novel as a whole involves cognitive estrangement (often said to be the defining characteristic of science fiction as a genre) to the max.
Escaping Exodus, by Nicky Drayden. Drayden’s previous novels are best be described as something like magic realism, set in an African context (Drayden is African American, but she lived for several years in South Africa). The present novel, however, is full-blown space opera. Human beings of various nationalities and backgrounds live in an interstellar flotilla; Earth is only a very distant memory. The humans have outgrown the generation starships that originally brought them to the stars, and they haven’t found any planets around other stars that are sufficiently Earth-like to live on. So instead they live in the innards of gigantic (Moon-sized) spacefaring beasts; they are essentially parasites, drawing sustenance and shelter from the animals within which they live, and from the animal’s other intestinal fauna and flora. The animals are mortal, however, and whenever one of them dies the human beings have to evacuate, and capture and colonize another one. Add to this the social arrangements, involving rigid class hierarchies, poly-marriages arranged for political or economic advantage rather than love, gender-role inversion, and revolutionary stirrings among the lower classes that are viciously repressed by the ruling class. And cap it all with a forbidden (because cross-class) love between two young women. What’s most remarkable about the novel is its squishy biotechnology; Drayden imagines in discomforting detail what it might be like to live within another organism’s vascular systems. In addition to the politics of race, class, and gender, ecological politics plays a central role, as the people gradually realize that they are killing their hosts, and thereby destroying themselves, through the unchecked exploitation of their resources. The novel is wildly inventive in its particulars, and compelling in its overall bio-ecological vision.

Music videos, 2019

Music videos, 2019: I don’t do top ten lists, because my viewing/listening is just too limited. There could well be — and indeed, there undoubtably are — great videos made this year that I haven’t seen and don’t know about. So here are my favorite music videos of 2019: an entirely subjective list. I mention artist, song(s), and (director in parentheses). Most of the comments are fairly short; a few are somewhat longer. (I can’t help it, I always get carried away when it comes to FKA twigs). The videos are not listed in any particular order. (If I see any additional ones that I really like, after this has been posted, I will add them).

(I am not doing a favorite films list at all this year, because there is so much I haven’t seen. But this list should bear witness that there is at least as much invention and creativity overall in music videos going on right now as there is in movies and in television series).
NOW UPDATED WITH LINKS!

Solange, When I Get Home (Solange). This is a long-form video, incorporating most of an entire album, in the manner of Beyoncé (Lemonade), Janelle Monae (Dirty Computer) and Tierra Whack (Whack World) in previous years. It is pretty impressive on first viewing, though I haven’t watched it enough yet to really comment.
FKA twigs, Cellophane (Andrew Thomas Huang). The first sounds we hear, before the song begins, are applause and the metallic click of high heels. The music, once it begins, is quite spare: FKA twigs’ high-pitched, breathless singing is accompanied just by a few piano chords and irregular percussion. The whole song is an erotic lament: “And I just want to feel you’re there,” with the “I…” drawn out; or in the chorus: “Why won’t you do it for me/ When all I do is for you?” FKA twigs walks backstage, peers through a curtain, then passes through and displays her body to an audience we hear but do not see. Once we get through the curtain, the stage is immaculate: sepia-toned and highly reflective. FKA twigs flexes on the ground, and then starts pole dancing. She wraps her body around the pole, ascends, turns herself upside down, exchanges places with her own reflection. Audience forgotten, she rises along the pole into an open sky, where she meets her cyborg insect doppelgänger. The contact is fatal: she falls, falls, falls, her body still rotating wildly, sometimes around the pole, other times through air, at one point maybe even through water. The camera work is gorgeous: sometimes blurry, sometimes with strobe effects, sometimes circling rapidly around her, other times contemplating as she seems to float gracefullyh downwards. Finally she falls through a hole in the earth. She lands in a large circle of richly oozing, ochre-colored mud or clay. Masked women crawl toward her, and rub the ochre substance all over her body. Behind the song, we hear twigs coughing and panting. The panting continues for a few seconds after the music ends, while the camera fixes on a close-up of twigs’ face. The video is mythical and carnal, all at once. We seem to have moved through a ritual of ascent, descent, and grounding, or of death and (perhaps) rebirth; but despite the performativity of the pole dance, and the special effects of the ascent and the fall, we are left with the shocking intimacy of FKA twigs’ body and voice.
FKA twigs, Holy Terrain (FKA twigs and Nick Walker); Home With You (FKA twigs). FKA twigs has made some of the best music videos of any artist, consistently, all the way back to her debut in 2012. This year she released two other videos besides Cellophane, both self-directed or self-co-directed, and both really good, even if Cellophane overshines them.
Tierra Whack, Unemployed (Cat Solen). This is the only video Tierra Whack released this year. But the combination of gross and whimsical horror is totally her sensibility. She seems to be a captive chef, and the food talks back to her, or at least shows terror when she tries to prepare it. Have you ever had a nightmare about potatoes?
Yves Tumor, Lifetime (Floria Sigismondi). The music feels viscous, yet with violently dislocating rhythms. The visuals are as baroque as anything Sigismondi has ever done: dark hues, extravagant costumes, glitch editing, a dance of yearning and confinement; it feels like an odd but intense ritual for some unknown religion. Yves Tumor is alternately dressed in drag, and pulled upon by multiple ropes while wearing devil’s horns.
Stormzy, Vossi Bop (Henry Scholfield). Rapture: delirious and mostly mobile long takes, matched across multiple London locations, as Stormzy raps and dances with a backing crew of hundreds. Inspirational. “Fuck the government and fuck Boris.”
Chemical Brothers, Got to Keep On (Michel Gondry and Olivier Gondry). The music could have been beamed in from thirty years ago; the multicultural dancers, with their moves and the costumes, at first seem equally, charmingly retro, until… something happens… alien metamorphoses, but somehow still joyous.
Brockhampton, Sugar (Kevin Abstract). Coitus interruptus, a grumpy cartoon Sun, alien sex terrorism, green goo with the consistency of jello, the kitschy flames of hell, spinning cameras, suggestions of flight in a balloon, and the yearning-r&b vocals of the world’s greatest boy band: “Do you love me, love me, love me?”
Haim, Summer Girl; Now I’m In It; Hallelujah (Paul Thomas Anderson). Haim is a really good band whose music just doesn’t resonate emotionally with me very much; Paul Thomas Anderson is a great filmmaker whose movies I admire more than love. But Anderson made three music videos for Haim this year, and they are all beautiful and evocative: loopily performative, showcasing the charisma of the Haim sisters, and adding to the storehouse of my cinematic (imaginary) vision of Los Angeles.
Moses Sumney, Virile (Moses Sumney). Moses Sumney dances frenetically, bare-chested, in a meat locker (though the space is occasionally seems to be dressed as a sort of perverse shrine to dead meat). His body tenses and spasms, as if he were at war with himself. (The lyrics and the harsh music suggest that he is at war with the suffocating social stereotype of masculinity, which he hates, but within which he is trapped). The camera bobs and weaves around him, aiming for his torso, almost like a boxer; and the harshly chopped-up editing adds more layers of discomfort. The latter portion of the video shows Sumney running through a field, while menacing (CGI) insect swarms roil the sky behind him. And it ends with Sumney lying on the ground, the camera moving in on his face and torso, as beetles crawl over every inch of his flesh. Astonishing and devastating.
Kesha, My Own Dance (Allie Avital). I described this video on twitter as being “ferocious and abject, all at once”; the director favorited and re-tweeted me. The song, with its poppy melody matched to a brutal beat, is Kesha’s kiss-off to her haters: don’t tell me what to do, “don’t circumcise my circumstance” (!!!). The video shows a tacky Los Angeles apartment complex; Kesha is out of generic dry cereal, so she sashays over to the convenience store, passing apartments with creepy twins out of The Shining, musclemen exercizing and making out, furry sex orgies, narcissists chilling by the pool, and other iconic instances of sleazy Los Angeles night life. And the video ends (as it must) with Kesha submerging herself in a kiddie pool filled with generic milk and cereal. Wow.
Billie Eilish, bury a friend (Michael Chaves); bad guy (Dave Meyers); you should see me in a crown (Takashi Murakami); all the good girls go to hell (Rich Lee); xanny (Billie Eilish). Billie Eilish released five music videos in 2019, and they are all great. What’s more, though they are all made by different directors, and even though one of them is anime, they all project a consistent aesthetic. Along with the minimal, skewed bass lines, the childlike singsong melodies, and the vocals that are both whispery (suggesting intimacy) and heavily electronically processed (suggesting alienation), we get goth horror tropes, sometimes pushed to the point of absurdity; stark color schemes, sometimes minimal, nearly black and white, other times garishly contrasting; a kind of wallowing in morbid materiality (blood from a nosebleed; slick and thick oil stains, flames); and acts of impersonal aggression (hypodermic syringes plunged into Eilish’s back, burning cigarettes stubbed out against her face).
Matt Ox f. Chief Keef, Jetlag (Al Kalyk). I am tempted to say that, in this video, Al Kalyk does for digital post-processing today pretty much what Eisenstein did for silent film editing ninety years ago. I leave it to others to consider which director offers a more severe critique of capitalism.
James Massiah, Natural Born Killers (Ride for Me) (Ian Pons Jewell). The world reaches its solar climax or heat death: exhaustion and extermination. The ever-inventive Ian Pons Jewell shows us amazing architectural tableaus of human bodies, exquisitely lit, oozing with sweat, on the edge of transformation, in various postures of stasis and liquefaction.
Christine and the Queens, Comme si (David Wilson). A fantastic solo dance video, set in a natural pool fed by a waterfall. It starts with a visual allusion to Millais’ (in)famous painting of Ophelia; but this Ophelia rises from the dead, as Christine says, “to express her desire and madness with exhilaration” through an amazing dance in which she jumps and splashes, shadowboxes, and moves with wild gestures, emulating Krump dance style. There are long, fluid takes at first, but by the end the camera is also dancing and lunging, while waterspouts explode out of the pool. And Christine herself has never looked more butch, androgynous, or trans (I am not sure which is the best word here).
Clipping, All in Your Head (C. Prinz). I don’t really understand this video, or know how to describe the experience of watching it. Clipping’s barrage of noise and feedback, and savage rapping by Daveed Diggs, is supplemented by black womens’ voices: the deranged preaching of Robyn Hood and the yearning pseudo-gospel of Counterfeit Madison. The Clipping men themselves don’t appear in the video, but Robyn Hood and Counterfeit Madison do: the former refracted into multiple mirror images, while we spy upon the latter through a glory hole. The video also features two other black women performers, Jazz Washington and Jantae Spinks. We see one or the other of them twirling their long braid like a lasso, gyrating in front of a car, in multiple iterations stapled to the walls as living sculptures, and walking down a corridor, carrying a hooded hawk at some moments, and a living flame at other moments. The editing is as fractured as the sound. The video is both haunting and disruptive, even though you wouldn’t usually expect these qualities to fit well together.
Charli XCX f. Christine and the Queens, Gone (Colin Solal Cardo). The song is a beat-heavy feminist anthem, angry but ultimately affirmative. Charli and Christine dance intimately together. Colin Solal Cardo, who has made great videos for both artists separately, pulls out all the stops. We have both artists bound with ropes on top of a car (but escaping); we have rapid-fire dance montages; we have banks of harsh lights; we have artificial rain pouring from the ceiling; we have a ring of fire. It’s almost a parody of the spectacular grandiosity of so many (male) rock performances and videos; but the absolute, furious conviction of the artists and the director pulls it off.
21 Savage f. J. Cole. a lot (Aisultan Seitov).Double consciousness, and double actuality. Scenes of an African American family reunion, with all its joys, affirmations, and aspirations, are intercut with briefer shots of police murders, incarceration, criminal activity, etc. A sweet soul sample underlies 21 Savage and J. Cole rapping about the harshness of their lives. “How many times did you cheat? – A lot. How many times did you lie? – A lot… I’d rather be broke in jail than be dead and rich.” It’s worth noting that 21 Savage has been harrassed by ICE (he was born in the UK, though he grew up mostly in Atlanta), and that the video’s director comes from Kazakhstan: what we call the American Dream is most fervently believed in and pursued by the very people whom the current regime seeks to exclude or imprison.
Lana Del Rey, Doin’ Time (Rich Lee). I find this fantasia irresistible. Giant, movie-monster Lana, enjoying the summertime as she strides over LA, comes to the aid of 1950s Lana at the drive-in. It’s corny, it’s cheesy, it’s archly self-reflexive, and it’s too disingenuous by far — but it works.
Flying Lotus, f. Denzel Curry, Black Balloons Reprise (Jack Begert). Flying Lotus and Denzel Curry have both separately released music videos with horror-film and surrealist imagery before. And Curry has released two previous songs/videos that center upon the menacing image of the black balloon. Here, the combination of Lotus’s electronic sounds and Curry’s desperate vocalizations is dense and implosive — both sonically and visually. The video is a quick nightmare tour of Los Angeles, as a mouth grows on the back of Curry’s hand, and a Christian cross radiates from his chest. He also draws figures directly on the screen: cubes and pentagrams within which he then finds himself imprisoned. Black balloons rise into the air, expand, blaze and give off smoke, and change their skins; often these metamorphoses flow across the screen while Curry himself seems trapped as a still image.
Kelsey Lu, Foreign Car (Vincent Haycock). This video is very nearly a series of static tableaus, as the singer poses, wearing extravagant costumes, and usually surrounded by gorgeous bare-chested men. Though sometimes we just get contemplative glimpses of a man or men by themselves; and sometimes Lu poses in front of a bright red Ferrari (presumably the “foreign car” of the title). Lu is easily as glamorous as any of the men — though they are clearly spectacles for her delectation, rather than the reverse. (Also, Lu disdains to shave her underarm hair).
Sevdaliza, Martyr (Marlou Fernanda and Sevdaliza). The song lies somewhere between angry and mournful, with sparse instrumentation (mostly violin), brooding vocals, and lyrics about abandoned love. The video is in black and white, the frame mostly quite dark except for the light on Sevdaliza’s face and (sometimes) arms. The fluidly-edited shots are from a variety of angles: but they are always close to Sevdaliza’s body, ranging only narrowly from regular closeups (we see all of her body as she crouches hunched up on the floor) to extreme closeups (her face filling the frame). Sevdaliza does not lip-sync the song; instead, all she does is slowly writhe and twist, in a kind of minimal or not-quite dance. The effect is smothering: extreme intimacy as we feel so physically close to Sevdaliza as she expresses emotion directly; yet we still somehow remain at a vast distance from her inaccessible inner self. Like the lover she addresses in the song, we have abandoned her.