The Pharcyde - Drop (1995)

The greats are great for a reason.

Some people consider this to be the greatest music video of all time. And that feels fair. Spike Jonze, director of Her and Where the Wild Things Are, worked with The Pharcyde to create this music video in reverse. This was Tenet before Tenet. And not only was it filmed in reverse, but it was rapped in reverse. Jonze’s team found a professor at UCLA who studied phonetics who transcribed the sounds, and placed them on top of the reversed song.

“Given less than a week to study their cues, The Pharcyde was instructed by linguist coach Robert Belvin, who received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. In reverse, the lyrics to “Drop” were nonsensical — almost gibberish — but Belvin wrote and aided The Pharcyde in recitation — which they referred to as a collision of different languages. To further prepare The Pharcyde to not only rap in reverse but also walk in reverse Jonze took them to various street locations, filming them on a personal video camera.” - Jaelani Turner Williams in okayplayer.

Jonze was inspired by hearing a backspin scratch effect sample on the song and said “they’re walking backwards, if they fall down…it was hard…after a month of prep, my brain’s been working backwards for a month.”

This video’s place in the music videos hall of fame goes undisturbed — a surreal gem in a time of repetitive, even perfunctory, aesthetics.