I’m a dreadful old curmudgeon about “top music” lists; I (naturally) prefer music I know well to music that I haven’t heard often enough to appreciate, and I don’t listen to very much brand-new music these days (and never quite caught the hip-hop bug). So my sense that most “top” lists favor very recent selections has both a legitimate empirical basis (we can run the statistics to prove this, but even a cursory look at many lists reveals that they favor releases within the past five or ten years) with an entirely arbitrary, unjustifiable, old-codger preference for older material that I like more.
That being said, I’m watching the Stylus “top 100 music videos” list (they’re unveiling the list progressively, so as of this morning they’ve only named the bottom 60) with some interest. So far, the list does seem biased toward recent material, but that could be because I just haven’t seen most of the recent choices, and also because the craft of music video direction has improved over the last couple of decades. I’ll wait and see how the list shapes up.
Wonderful as it is to have these videos available for watching (thank you, YouTube), it would be even better if the videos appeared in a shade better quality.
I don’t know–any list that doesn’t have the twenty-minute David Bowie “Blue Jean” video is suspect. I’m also missing “Let’s Go To Bed”, “True Love (Pt. 2)”, “Undercover of the Night” (the uncensored version), and…well, I guess I’m old now.