2018’s Videos
2018 was the year music videos suddenly mattered again, though not for reasons the industry would’ve claimed. The massive hits were everywhere—Drake sliding through tracks, Cardi B’s unapologetic everything, Khalid’s voice floating underneath like sedation. But what stuck wasn’t the budget or the name. It was the weight. Ariana Grande looked damaged in ways she wasn’t hiding. Selena Gomez let you see it. These were artists who’d been through something and came out the other side still making things.
Hip-hop and pop had fully merged by then. The divisions between genres were getting kind of pointless. Khalid existed in the gaps and it worked. Drake was inescapable because he’d figured out how to sound like the soundtrack to your own life, whether that was clever or not.
What defined 2018’s videos—the ones that stuck—was how willing they were to sit with something dark. Death was in a lot of them. Illness. The specific exhaustion of being young and famous and cracking apart on camera. They weren’t trying to make it beautiful or digestible. They just let it be what it was. Sometimes that meant unresolved.
I watched a lot of them that year. Some because they were everywhere, some because they pulled at something. Looking back, what mattered wasn’t the countdown or the list. It was that 2018’s music videos felt like they were about something real, and that something was as raw as pop music gets.