With news that Michael Jackson’s Thriller has been remade as a 3D film which will premiere at Venice Film Festival next week, we put together a wish list of 10 music videos that deserve to be given the full in-your-face treatment.
Katy Perry, California Gurls
There’s a lot of spraying-as-sexual-innuendo in the universe of pervy pop promos, but perhaps no one before or since has done it quite as nasty-cute as Katy Perry in 2010’s California Gurls video, where hence she dispenses whipped cream from her chest mounted frosting canons. These bad boys make Madonna’s coned bras look positively coy in comparison, and positively ripe for 3D enhancement.
D’Angelo, Untitled (How Does It Feel)
This 4.28 minute celebrate of D’Angelo’s assets – abs, chest, singing voice – deserves the full 3D treatment. We don’t really know how that would work; all we know is watching it again in all its glory, we would like someone to place a pretty much nekkid D’Angelo in our living room.
Bjork, All Is Full of Love
Bjork being Bjork, she’s actually gone and made a 3D music video already (Wanderlust, which still looks incredible in 2D). But the Chris Cunningham directed All Is Full of Love from 1999, in which two robots make out feels like the kind of promo deserving of the directly intimate experience that 3D can bring.
Madonna, Frozen
Like a very early audition for Melisandre in Game of Thrones, this late 90s incarnation of Madge as a witchy goth lends itself incredibly well to the medium of in-your-face. There are 3D prerequisites of various menacing shit flying your way (in this case a bunch of crows and a lean looking black dog) but really we’re here for Madonna in that Olivier Theyskens gown which she swishes about like nobody’s business; the perfect fit for a post-two dimensional viewing situation.
Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball
Taking the sledgehammer approach to moving from child star to adult performer, the Wrecking Ball promo from Terry Richardson sees Miley Cyrus tongue said hammer, mount said ball and lose all of her clothes in the process. It’s the Pornhub of pop promos, one that spawned a mini industry of Miley-a-like filth (we checked), and is basically as about as subtle as Tezzers photo career. Obviously, 100% ripe for 3D.
M.I.A., Bad Girls
Concocted with video director Romain Gavras in 2010, M.I.A.’s Bad Girls pilfers liberally from the box marked ‘Arab iconography’ while introducing a wider audience next level car trickery and blokes who can skirt alongside vehicles going 60mph. The only way of this could be improved is if it felt like it was the whole shebang was driving a crash course towards your eyeballs.
Blur, Coffee & TV
Because what the world needs right now is a 3D version of that cute carton of milk padding about suburbia, trying not to get run over.
Aphex Twin, Windowlicker
In which Richard David James does unspeakable things with an umbrella and then various unspeakable levels of perviness with the most fucked up manifestations of himself in the back of a limo, before a spot of dancing and inevitable jizzing a load of champagne all over his bootylicious freak show. It’s a horror show which could only get more up in your face if it had some 3D effects all over it.
DJ Snake and Lil Jon, Turn Down for What
The 2013 trap anthem, Turn Down for What did not disappoint on the WTF visual front either. So if your idea of a good 3D experience including out-of-control mammary glands, crotches and various body parts crashing through floor upon floor until everybody gets similarly frenzied, then this is the music video — from the never disappointing the Daniels — for you.
Kendrick Lamar, Humble
Dave Meyers – a music video veteran whose clips include the early Miss Elliott oeuvre, through to Britney, Ice Cube and Pink – is the guy behind the wheel on Kendrick Lamar’s opening shot from his 2017 album Damn. Humble is everything a music video should be: fresh, memorable, exactly how you sometimes fantasise your music video of your life would roll. There’s dizzyingly fast camera angles, a weird inserted world sequence that Lamar cycles through, heads on fire, dollars flyin’ and an Instagram forever shot of the star swinging for a golf ball from a car roof. This is hole in one, 3D ready stuff.