Top Ten Meaningful Songs That Are Incomplete Without the Music Video

Actions speak a lot louder than words, and when it comes to a meaningful song, its message is not always interpreted by simply listening to the song. Not everyone sees the videos, and is often that that makes a song misunderstood by the masses. The video says a lot about the song, and more importantly, it gives focus on more than the sound of the song, and can often display something underneath. For the songs which I have analysed on this list, I persuade you to see the video if you haven't yet.
The Top Ten
1 In This World - Moby

Moby has done many powerful videos, from Porcelain to A Case For Shame, but In This World is probably the most striking of them all, and most important to making the song what it is. From simply hearing the song, it is hard to pick up on its meaning, but the video, if anything, breaks your heart, makes you stop and think. We see a group of small aliens come to Earth, and try to make contact with us, only to have every human walk past them, and not see what's right in front of them. The lyrics suddenly say a lot more. Don't leave them all by themselves; if humanity could keep an eye out every once in a while about the world around them, they would see something radically out of the ordinary, but if we walk past it, there could be many things that need our attention, need our help, and we have a responsibility to do this which we misuse. Because of our arrogant, selfish customs, we've missed out on the opportunity depicted in this video, and on many opportunities before. It's ironic ...more

2 We Are All Made of Stars - Moby

This is my favorite song, and easily one of the most important songs ever written. The song is built around a common misconception that is made by the title. When people read that, they commonly associate it with celebrities, and they make the foolish assumption that if they can be that good, anyone can achieve anything. Moby says that this isn't true at all, and pop culture is insignificant, we are insignificant, as far as the real universe is concerned. The lyrics associate the feeling of power that it is in our nature to desire in analogy to how we came to be from actual stars, something few will acknowledge or think about as much as they think about their insignificant lives. The perspective of the human, which we naturally take, is about our normal lives, which are confined to a tiny part of reality. The perspective of the star, however, is more significant, as it has actually made a difference and has created our world and ourselves. The sad truth is that few see it from this ...more

3 Alone - Armin Van Buuren

A lot of people love this song mainly for the sound, but seeing the video is bound to change that. The song is about how support and care is crucial for survival, particularly when we are suffering, but our own suffering is making us more and more selfish and sensitive to much more puerile matters, to say that "the human element has long been missing." Without that constituent part of life which we take for granted, we have nothing to hope for, and we could only lose more things which we hold dear. The video shows this when there are people waiting in traffic, and Armin, along with the singer Lauren Evans, look around them and see that people are going through personal crises of their own, but when they see a man collapse on the road from a heart attack, everyone else is too wrapped up in themselves to even notice. Even when Lauren goes to help him, she can't get anyone to think what she's thinking, feel what she's feeling. She has cared for everyone she saw, but they've deserted her ...more

4 Ghosts N' Stuff - Deadmau5

There's a lot that is hidden in this song, and a lot of people who pay attention to the lyrics and the lyrics alone would say it was your average drug song. There's a lot more than meets the ear, and the video shows what the seemingly arbitrary title represents. The video shows deadmau5's character die in hospital and rise as a ghost, only unable to fit in with society like he could in life. His attempts to fit in only make the situation worse. Eventually, he does join a drug rave and this makes a difference, and suddenly wakes up back in the hospital, still with the tattoo that he got himself in the vision in his coma. The analogy is that drugs can make a new world right before your eyes, but can also bring you close to death, and the tattoo shows that this influence is permanent.

5 Retrograde - James Blake

This incredible song is powerful enough on its own, with haunting vocals and the ever-deepening resonant sound of decay, but the video takes it to a whole new level. It's a musical poem itself about a couple making each other happy by living a lie, by making a Utopian fantasy to distract themselves from the problems that face them every day. However, they can never bring themselves to accept that this will work, hence "show me why you're strong." This world of theirs slowly but surely collapses and burns, as you see in the video, and they suddenly become lost to the world, social outcasts, as this is beyond anyone's control. The lyrics drop the penny with a spine-chilling clang, by saying "show me where you fit."

6 Lie Down In Darkness - Moby

Of all videos I have seen, this is easily the most surreal. The lyrics are simple, but they cut through you very sharply. The video shows how big and beautiful the world around us is, but how isolated we can be within it, or even looking above it. What gets more haunting is how we can so simply leave it all behind, and it have devastating consequences. We see an astronaut alone in a capsule, on a collision course with the Earth, only bound to take him to his death, and at the same time, we see people on Earth trying to fix things that are making them lonely and depressed, but in the end, they're still struggling. What the lyrics add to this is the emptiness of sadness, but more so, the emptiness of death. You never see the Sun. The connection: sadness can take things away, but death takes it all away, and it's often too late to undo the steps which lead to it. What I can add is that you see this death every step of the way, and I think it is that which reflects on the experience, and ...more

7 Almost Home - Moby

There are two videos to this song, but the one that matters is the one with two twins that became astronauts and crash landed on Earth. From simply listening to the song, you get a light downtempo tune and the soulful vocals of Damien Jurado, and you may decide from what you hear that it's about making a big step to achieve something big. What the video shows is love and death, and that the song is really about the consequences of death. In life, though you are with people that look out for you, shown by the twins helping each other on when they are each getting weaker, you can't be entirely happy. One of them dies, and it tears the other apart before he too suffocates, but at the end of the video, you see that they are both in a better world. It shows that this goal that we have to the fine treasure in the lyrics is in death, but you leave others who cared for you and your legacy behind, shown by their family at the end.

8 I Had This Thing - Röyksopp

The first thing you'll be thinking is that this is a beautiful piece of music, but dig deeper, and it's not solely, or even dominantly, the audible beauty which makes it powerful. The song is built on a failed relationship, but it makes you think about how we take things we love for granted, and collapse when we let it go. The video shows a couple split up, and try to communicate a message that they can't get themselves onto, which the lyrics fit perfectly. Only at the end, where the finishing lyric is repeated on her phone. In both of their eyes, as soon as they lose each other, they see fire rain from the sky and destroy the world around them, and fire is an element that Röyksopp have put to great use in their most poetic songs, both lyrically and visually, but only now do we see it put into this effect, so suddenly and devastatingly. The video turns a tragedy that's under-appreciated on the surface into an apocalypse, which is what this song brings across.

9 One - Metallica
10 Professional Griefers - Deadmau5

This video is very misjudged. It shows a duel between two giant robot mice as a spectator sport, and that is a prospect that attracts the masses for no big purpose. But that is reminiscent of what the song is saying. The culture of electronic gaming and sport has already taken over society, and to individuals as much as groups, this has given them the opportunity to temporarily break away from real-world troubles, and create things and meet characters which they directly interact with and relate to, as the lyrics put it, "watch them build a friend just like you." What this is doing to these people is making them rely on a virtual world to learn to interact with the world that they actually live in, and with the distinctive ways of living in these virtual worlds, they can make these people accept only what they learn from these fictional beings, which will make us more and more like them, until we can no longer think for ourselves. "Because we are the last disease, ...more

The Contenders
11 Unfinished Sympathy - Massive Attack

Another very subtle video, but one that really brings out the isolated feel of this song. As we see the singer just walking along a suburban road, we don't immediately feel what she's feeling, but as the lyrics relate more and more to her being torn apart by what she's been through, we see that she stands out amongst the world around her, not quite fitting in. We just see her move on after this, with nothing left to see, only to think where she will fit now.

12 Incomplete - Backstreet Boys

, it's incomplete anyways!

13 Overlord - Lamb of God
14 Power to the People - John Lennon
15 Strength of a Woman - Geri Halliwell
16 We Exist - Arcade Fire
17 What I've Done - Linkin Park
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