Settle Further into the Sofa with Our Best Video Content of 2018

Whether you’re a Christian or not, getting a bit of time off work in December’s good, isn’t it? Nice bit of “catching up on reading,” “pursuing your passion project,” “finally separating and recycling the brown paper bags stuffed into that drawer of plastic bags in the kitchen.” Except you know you’re probably going to end up doing what you usually do with this bit of time off work or school: drinking heinous amounts until you feel as though your face has swollen to twice its size, masturbating at 3.47PM for something to do and clicking around online to pass the time between dinner and bed.

That’s where we come in. Not with the wanking stuff, chill out. Instead, we’ve rounded up some of our best Noisey UK videos, so you can open up this page and let the content wash over you like a warm tide. It beats scrolling through Twitter for 45 minutes before realising you’ve learned nothing and are now mostly angrier than you'd been before. Have a go at these instead:

Following on from our past Noisey Blackpool and Noisey Israel Palestine documentaries, this year we headed up the Midlands to get more stories from Birmingham beyond ‘accent’s a bit funny innit.’ Really, Brum is home to loads of massively talented rappers, from Lady Leshurr to Jaykae – and so we found out how they navigate the industry from outside London, and how postcode pride translates in their areas. Of course, we had Brummie Mike Skinner host.

Man, what can we say about this besides just watch it immediately? Grime legend D Double came into the VICE office one day this autumn, to give off-the-cuff love advice to staff members, based on their agony aunt-style questions. It… there’s a bit about “magic pussy”… it’s hard to explain without you watching it, but it’s not creepy. Just click.

We kept hearing about this rapper from Wolverhampton, who’d never really played shows but had a massive following. And so we went to his house, to find out who, exactly, Scarlxrd is and why he’s always screaming over trap beats.

Years ago, we'd get kids to review music. Their unfiltered opinions often cut through the noise more than the thoughts of someone in their forties who's enjoyed the comfort of being considered a tastemaker and also has friends at labels and PR agencies to keep happy. Those little scoundrels told us what they thought about Skrillex, Azealia Banks, The Cribs… it was a time. After John Doran interviewed Liam Gallagher, for our British Masters series, we felt as though the only people who could handle the mouthy Mancunian would be a bunch of primary school kids. So, in a followup interview of sorts, we chucked a bunch of children in a room with him, and had them let rip.

“What’s the point of having money if you don’t have sex?” is exactly the sort of blue-sky thinking Cardi threw out when confronted by a choice between sex, money or music. After we had Cardi respond to YouTube comments under “Bodak Yellow,” she tossed out her rapid-fire answers to our Noisey Questionnaire of Life. Basically that means having to pick one out of three options, in ways that can almost present a dilemma – but she held her own.

BTS are quite possibly the biggest band in the world. If you've not heard about K-pop yet m8, I don't know what to say beyond the fact that they took the 2000s white boy band facsimile of R&B (Backstreet Boys, N*Sync etc) and made it better at dancing, rapping, jumping around and maintaining flawless skin. When BTS came to London, to play their first-ever arena dates here, we went to the top of the actual Shard to ask them to pick between things like people, plants or pets. Almost every frame of this video could be a meme. Thank you, BTS.

It's actually annoying how good Donald Glover is at everything creative that he decides to do. Yeah yeah, you may have hated his rap and thought it was corny and too full of punchlines, but then he bodied that with the one-two punch of Awaken, My Love! and "This Is America." Then he did Atlanta. Then he starred in Solo. All of which is to say, here's a Questionnaire of Life interview we did with him while he was on the Solo promo trail. He smashes this, too, believe it or not.

Late last year, a music video appeared online and featured what we can only describe as two older white men on the streets at night in formal workwear, rapping about how you need to "shut ya maawf." Those two men, we learned, are Pete & Bas. After much back-and-forth, we convinced them to hop in a car with us and tell us their story, in London. Check it out above.

To switch mood for a second, it's been a really intense year for Britain's trans community. Across the political spectrum, newspaper columnists have tended to present this year's campaign to reform a piece of bureaucratic law around trans self-identity as a woman-hating scourge. Beyond that, queer culture has still been misunderstood in so many ways, mostly when people from outside that culture have tried to speak on its behalf in the media. And so we wanted to hear from two pop culture figures in conversation, and had Olly from Years & Years chat to trans activist Munroe Bergdorf. There's some heavy stuff in here, about dealing with discrimination and bigotry, but also plenty of giggles about bottoming and the Spice Girls and androids.

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