9.9.14: The Last VJ’s Top 5 Music Videos of the Week - Free Press Houston
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9.9.14: The Last VJ’s Top 5 Music Videos of the Week

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Welcome to The Last VJ, music fans! This week it’s nothing but the weird. Headless rappers, imaginary friends, great white sharks and some kind of Cirque de Soleil madness are all in store, so put on your big girl panties and make sure that your preferred psychological counselor is in your health insurance network. This one is going to be darn loco.

clipping, “Inside Out”

Ladies and gentlemen and whoever may fall in between the two camps, this is simply put the greatest rap video of 2025. I simply can’t imagine anything topping it. It’s exciting, innovative, brilliant, and utterly without peer.

A headless man wanders an endless circular street, and within seconds of the song he begins to rap and his neck hole begins to spit out visual representations of the lyrics. They’re painfully literal sometimes, but there’s no arguing that the effect is really well done.

Director Carlos Lopez Estrada has an uncanny knack for timing his effects. The first time the chorus cycles and the man shoots lighting into the sky you’ll find yourself jumping and laughing at the same time. It’s very good stuff.

Paradise Fears, “You to Believe In”

You have to invest a little more of yourself in “You to Believe In” if you really want to get the most of out of the experience. Initially, it seems like little more than a standard indie pop performance vid with a slight romantic angle.

Slowly, though, as you watch you realize it’s a song and a video about people in their mid-20s coming to grips with the fact that we’ve blurred the line between childhood and adulthood in America pretty bad. Our hero is a somewhat lost and jaded guy with no religion, but who portrays what little faith he has into an imagination friend that is a Power Ranger. His counterpart is a girl living vicariously through an imaginary princess.

What a great commentary on modern life. Not only does it look at the arrested development that has become some internally troubling, but it makes a subtle dig at the impossible stereotypes of heroes that we try to live up to. Eventually our two heroes find each other after their Drop Dead Freds run away, and it’s a touching moment made even more insanely peppy by Paradise Fears’s near-contemporary Christian rock energy.