Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” may have already garnered nearly 20 million views on YouTube, but it’s not the best of the many great music videos of 2008. Here are five that are better –– and none of them rip off Bob Fosse. You can see my picks for the 5th through 10th best videos of 2008 (yes, including Beyonce) at my blog, alsolikelife.com/shooting.

5. Killer Mike featuring Ice Cube, “Pressure” Directed by Giovanni Hidalgo

One can only imagine how many hours director Hidalgo spent ripping and mixing clips off the internet, cable news, and who knows where else, but watching the result is like a long night’s cram session for a Black liberation theory class in the space of a song.

The sheer breadth of footage is breathtaking, flashing everything from archival newsreel to Hollywood clips to graphic crime videos. The shock-and-awe montage makes it hard to arrive at a coherent thesis for grappling with the laundry list of social ills laid out by both the lyrics and visuals, full of jarring juxtapositions that radically recontextualize familiar images and figures into an alternative universe of hip-hop resistance. Even Barack Obama doesn’t come away unscathed: his “Yes We Can” iconography is eventually followed by a clip of him dancing with Ellen Degeneres that’s as ingratiating as Stepin Fetchit. The lasting effect is a purposeful distancing from the daily stream of images that spoon-feed us into complacency, something that viewers of any race or background can take to heart.

As Ice Cube says, “I’m here to deprogram you.” A machine gun spray of media-fueled dissonance, “Pressure” accomplishes in six minutes what took Oliver Stone’s JFK three hours.

Zoom in on: 2:46. The juxtaposition of Saddam Hussein and O.J. Simpson at their respective trails exemplifies the mad method of this video: a knee-jerk provocation, an inspired association, or both.

Compare to: Terry Lynn, ”The System”

4. O’Death, “Lowtide” Directed by Benh Zeitlin

The perfect marriage of Jean Cocteau and hillbilly folk rock, the video for “Lowtide” starts on the most polluted shoreline imaginable, littered with thousands of bottles, from which a redneck Orpheus plucks one bottle cast from the other end of the world. The message of despair contained within propels him to bore deep into the earth to find his own Eurydice of the Orient. This live action equivalent of a claymation video literally spills over with dirt in its headlong rush towards love and resurrection. It’s a stunningly lo-fi vision of a journey to the center of the earth whose inventiveness is worth a thousand Brendan Fraser paychecks.

Zoom in on: 0:28. Ask not how they did that (though really, how?) but how they captured that feeling of giddy love at first sight that suspends you in air.

Compare to: Passion Pit: “Sleepyhead”

3. Kanye West, “Love Lockdown” Directed by Simon Henwood

Kanye certainly was no slouch in the music video department this year, issuing no less than six clips, each with their own distinctive look. “Flashing Lights” got a ton of attention on the blogosphere (SpoutBlog not excluded), but the Takashi Murakami-helmed “Good Morning,” Hype Williams’ “Heartless” and especially the exultant “Good Life,” by Jonas & Francois with animation by So Me, are exquisite in their own right. But sufficient praise has not been lavished on the first video off the 808s and Heartbreak album.

“Love Lockdown” is a perfect harmony of tension between elegance and rawness, the futuristic and the primitive, virtual fantasy and real pain. In many ways it’s an apotheosis of what the best of Kanye is about: a searching scrutiny of his best friend and worst enemy, his ego. Its lustful striving to realize its wildest fantasies renders him a prisoner within his own desire, unable to privilege anything or anyone else, redeemed only by its honesty in facing this state. It’s Synecdoche, New York, only told with a refreshing lack of self-pity and a ton more cinematic in setting psychic demons to space and time.

I’ll probably get laughed out of the room for comparing this to the brooding masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, but this video deserves comparison with Solaris: not for the suggestively symbolic telescope prominently placed in his crib, but for the stream of illusory objects of desire that demonize the mind, floating within the stark isolation of a sterile utopia.

Zoom in on: The guy leaping out of the 16:9 frame at 1:02 is one of those moments that has you wondering why no one had ever thought of doing that before. But 2:35 is the moment that gets me, with Kanye cornered by his primal counterpart, his internal, eternal entourage.

Compare to: Kanye West, “Flashing Lights”

2. Yeasayer, “Wait for the Summer” Directed by Mixtape Club

Another video involving dirt and decay, video animation trio Mixtape Club takes Yeasayer’s thematic variation on The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” to set in motion one of the most morbidly beautiful meditations on nature you’re bound to find anywhere. It’s 60s rock psychedelia done with 21st century CGI, flowing in a free-associational ballet dancing along the ABCs of life: apples, beetles, crabs, death, earth. And if you’ve ever wondered if the universe is rotten to the core, the last image might serve the answer.

Zoom in on: It’s hard not to give props to those hovering Jedi Knight beetles at 0:56, but an iPod commercial can only dream of using silhouettes as majestically as what you see at 2:42.

Compare to: Goldfrapp, “A&E”

1. MGMT, “Time to Pretend” Directed by Ray Tintori

An OC beach party-meets–Lord of the Flies-meets-Lord of the Rings-meets-Second Life-meets-God knows what else. MGMT and Tintori took the song’s campus org t-shirt lyric “We’ve got the vision; now let’s have some fun” and used it as a rallying cry to dive headfirst into a maelstrom of ill-advised pagan hipster imagery executed with cheeseball CGI. The result is not something as simple as laughably endearing kitsch, but something brave and audacious. Ostensibly it lampoons any number of expensive, computerized blockbuster fantasy sagas, but gradually it suggests a realm that is infinitely more exciting than Middle Earth or Narnia, where crab monsters explode into dolphins and bare-chested warriors ride tabby cats to victory. (And with the final glimpse of Andrew VanWyngarden surfing through a cresting wave of shark’s teeth, we might have found the year’s quintessential image for the independent artist.) A vision emerges of Hollywood collapsing under its own market-tested, terminally safe weight, only to have its cindered ruins paved over by a horde of low-budget, low-tech pastiches along the lines of this one. Maybe it amounts to another kind of hell, but at least it has prettier colors.

Zoom in on: 2:34. This was the moment that I was convinced that what I was watching wasn’t something merely clever, goofy, self-deprecating, but could achieve original lyric beauty, and had just done so.

Compare to: Vampire Weekend: “Oxford Comma”