The Best Music Video of 2013 is also The Best Selfie

A Canadian Astronaut, Chris Hadfield made the best music video of 2013. It also is the ultimate selfie. Hadfield saw space and earth as if they were brand-new and shared this wonder  aboard the International Space Station with millions

An astronaut for the metaverse age, Hadfield has ingeniously harnessed social media to open up space in an entirely new way. His YouTube videos, showing how to make a sandwich in space, or how to brush your teeth, have been viewed by millions. His Twitter followers have ballooned from around 20,000 at the time of the  ISS launch to almost a million.

The songs he recorded from space, and the photos he snapped of Earth, have inspired people to the new wonders of outer space.  Hadfield said he’d make this “Canada’s mission,” and he’s fulfilled that promise; but really, it’s a mission that was shared and followed by people around the world.

With his 166 day flight on Canada’s International Space Station winding down in March of 2013,  Hadfield received significant media exposure  by paying tribute to David Bowie with a rendition of “Space Oddity” starring his selfie-self. The production is surprisingly lyrical. The performance is real, containing a mesmerizing existential ennui. This video has been viewed by more people than the motion picture, Gravity.

Tom Wolfe, the brilliant essayist and  novelist, once said that space exploration requires poets and poetry in order to be able to lift the people’s  imagination to fuel it.  Chris Hadfield has certainly done that this past year.

The only reason I posted this at year’s end is that I recently noticed Kanye West’s video, Bound 2 on Slant Magazine’s Top 25 videos. It has got to be one of the foulest videos of the year. But the magazine rationalizes it with this blurb:  Wherein Kanye continues to dismantle white American iconography, subverting it by placing himself (and his topless reality star of a honey) in the middle of it all. This is Kanye deconstructing Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis all at once while instilling fear of a black planet. 

I’ll stick with the astronaut, Chris Hadfield, on this one.

Happy New Year, everyone!