This is not to say that the music video for Yonkers is bad. In fact, it's a powerfully nihilistic clip that delivers a sensory body blow. In an age where all the other nominees in the best video category range from sanitised pop artists like Katy Perry, Adele and Bruno Mars; the inclusion of Yonkers is an obscenely leftfield choice and probably more fitting to the desperate and harshly bleak times were living in. If anything, Yonkers is perhaps a historically accurate cultural marker for these days, arguably more reflective of a world where unemployment is rampant, the economy is in the toilet and social fabric is disintegrating before our very eyes.
Directed by some guy called Wolf Haley (aka: Tyler, The Creator) and shot in stark black and white, Yonkers is most definitely controversial, but is it anything more than a slickly contrived shock piece, or is it a genuinely daring artistic statement?
