Browsing through music videos from the passing year, I had the impression that nostalgia is a guarantee of commercial success. Video creators seemed very eager to return to the scenery from the communist period and the early 1990s. I saw many rooms in blocks of flats, summer houses and more or less successful references to school days – uniforms, school corridors and, of course, parties. While preparing the list below, I tried to avoid these types of clichés. Although they appear, for example, in Kacperczyk's music video, they are used there to settle accounts with the past, and are not merely empty decoration.
Much more interesting than returning to the past seems to me to make references to current social discussions. In the list below, I’ve included artists who dared to look for a form to illustrate, among others, the problem of paedophilia, the experience of war, and climate catastrophes.
Summarising the past year in music videos, one cannot ignore the problems reported by industry employees. In October, activist Jan Śpiewak published messages sent to him anonymously by people who work on film sets. There you could read about the realities of working with the largest production houses: work done for free, often only for an entry in a portfolio or a vague promise of later employment. They also touched upon the problem of irregular working hours and the lack of meals for extras. Let’s hope that being part of this discussion will help avoid similar situations in the future, and that budgets in the many thousands will ensure appropriate working conditions for all those present on set.