The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos

Now that music videos are primarily watched online, artists find themselves freed from the constraints of the traditional three-minute short. The past year has seen the debut of the personalized, interactive music video and the return of minimovies that are much longer than the songs they accompany. The best example of this is Kanye West’s “Runaway,” a 35-min. film written and directed by Kanye, set not just to one song from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but to (almost) the entire album. The plot — Kanye falls in love with a supermodel phoenix and tries to assimilate her into the human world, only to learn that she can’t stay with him because, well, she’s a phoenix — is told through a series of visually stunning set pieces that in a more traditional world would probably serve as stand-alone videos for their accompanying songs. The scenes are connected by occasionally comedic interludes (in one scene, Kanye takes the phoenix to a dinner party and is asked by another guest, “Your girlfriend is very beautiful … do you know she’s a bird?”). In that sense, “Runaway” is a visual representation of Kanye West’s music career: often artistic and beautiful, but sometimes incredibly silly.