The 100 Greatest Music Videos

How does Björk visualize falling in love? It’s a random delivery guy who doubles as a dance partner, a mailbox that comes to life and twirls, a businessman doing backflips ‘til he’s out of frame. It’s the sheer chaos and unpredictability of a new love that, against all better reason and judgment, you allow yourself to be swept up in oblivious to future results. And there’s Björk, under the watchful eye of director Spike Jonze, channeling Busby Berkeley, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and other classic musicals to summon a whole town (and every viewer who comes across this video) into an exuberant sense of ecstasy. —J.N.

Imagine a first-person video game in which your objective was to get ready for a night out, go to a bar, get drunk, assault bartenders and bouncers and passerbys, get even drunker, snort coke, go to a strip club, and became a genuine menace to society. That may be the easiest way to describe Jonas Åkerlund’s video for the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” which turns an after-hours excursion gone haywire into a harrowing, you-are-there downward spiral. The track was already highly controversial, thanks to its name (derived from a couplet in an Ultramagnetic MCs song, the only lyrics heard in “Smack”). The debauched, dizzying video only added diesel fuel to the fire, with MTV originally airing it only after midnight before banning it all together. It’s not an easy watch, and the “twist” ending isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. But once you’ve seen it, this virtuosic clip is impossible to forget. “No radio station was gonna play the song,” the Prodigy’s Liam Howett told Q Magazine. “So we thought we’d make a video that no one would play either.” Well done, sir. —D.F.

By the time Tierra Whack’s 2018 debut album arrived, it was hard to imagine anyone reinventing the music-video wheel. But this Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philly hip-hop innovator managed to do just that. Whack’s album — 15 tracks, each one minute long — was inventive in and of itself. Yet she and directors Thibaut Duverneix and Mathieu Léger elevated the project to another level. Every track was accorded its own 60-second clip, each with an eyeball-popping visual hook: Whack cavorting with dead-dog puppets, rapping inside a doll-house suit, surrounded by bright red balloons, or portraying a domestic-abuse survivor (with graphically distorted features), among other scenarios. The lusciousness with which most of the clips were shot tied the “album” together, as did Whack’s sense of playfulness, even when her songs expressed frustration, anxiety, or wrath. Whack and her collaborators accomplished more in a quarter of an hour than many acts did in an entire career of making videos. —D.B.

In the pre-YouTube days, OK Go used to pass out VHS tapes — then DVDs — at shows featuring the complicated dance routines they executed both onstage and in their yards. The video for their poppy 2006 song “Here It Goes Again,” which premiered on the fledgling video-sharing site, took those early efforts to a new level, depicting the band dancing across eight treadmills in one continuous shot. It also set the gold standard for viral music videos going forward — and proved much more effective at garnering attention for the band than a handful of burned DVDs. “For a few minutes that was awesome and then it was like, ‘Oh shit. This is us now,’” guitarist-vocalist Damian Kulash said later, reflecting on the band’s sudden fame spike after the clip caught on. “‘Our tombstones will read: One of Those Treadmill Guys.’” —B.E.

Not everyone was happy as major-label video budgets ballooned in the second half of the Nineties. Case in point: this 1996 video, where the Roots pair a characteristically smooth and soulful groove with a subtitled satire of their peers’ formulaic choices. No MTV cliché is spared, from the mansion (“Rented for the day”) to the bubbly (“It’s really ginger ale”) to the scantily clad models in bed with the star (“Yeah, right”). Director Charles Stone III’s pointed humor hit a little too close to home for the Notorious B.I.G., who reportedly saw “What They Do” as a dig at his own expensive videos. (Compare with the party scenes in “One More Chance” and “Big Poppa,” and draw your own conclusions.) Questlove has said he still regrets not getting a chance to clear the air before Biggie’s death: “Based on the way the set looked, we didn’t know we were doing a direct reference to ‘One More Chance.’ So, when we saw the final cut. … They showed it to us and I was like, ‘Oh, damn.’ But it was too late.” —S.V.L.

James Cameron rented out every turn-of-the-century prop in Hollywood during the making of Titanic, making it nearly impossible for the Smashing Pumpkins to create their own vintage masterpiece. But they pulled it off with the help of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, concocting a video influenced by Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon. It brings the dreamy, celestial aesthetic of the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness cover art to new heights, as a couple take a trip to the moon and the band perform the track floating in space. “You just knew it was something special, because the moment it was on TV, everybody — and I mean everybody — on the street that you would meet wanted to talk about it,” Corgan said. “And I’m not just talking about fans of the Smashing Pumpkins. I’m talking about the guy parking your car, [or] how you go into a restaurant and the waitress who’s 52 years old was talking about it. It was just one of those videos — for some reason, it just connected with everybody.” —A.M.

The original knock on MTV was that it prized cheekbones over chops, and that once the channel became a tastemaker, bands that didn’t fit the pretty-boy aesthetic would be left out on the cold. In other words, no one was betting that a veteran blues-boogie trio out of Texas, with two members sporting Biblical-length beards, were destined to become early music-video MVPs. A red 1933 Ford coupe and a silver set of keys would change all of that. The first of a series of videos featuring ZZ Top as mystical guardian angels, ever-ready to transform wallflowers into bombshells or help nerds lose their virginity to leggy models, this clip helped rebrand the band for the Reagan era and turned their 1983 album, Eliminator, into a smash. They’d add elements as they went along — see: the furry, rotating guitars of the “Legs” video — but “Gimme All Your Lovin’” established the template that would turn ZZ Top into Top 40 superstars. “The videos made them bigger than life,” director Tim Newman says in the 2012 oral history I Want My MTV. “When they started, they were a hugely successful touring band. By the time we were done with those videos, they were international.” —D.F.

There are some who despise Kanye West’s intentionally bad video for this, his most commercial track on his 2013 album, Yeezus. But how you gon’ be mad on vacation? Kanye laces his clip with green screens that make The Room look like Gravity, landscapes reminiscent of knockoff motivational posters, and a topless Kim Kardashian, who became the scourge of motorcycle safety enthusiasts everywhere. The result is Kanye distorting and subverting the form by embracing the artificial, and doing it on a level big enough to inspire postmodern parodies and memes galore. “I wanted to take white-trash T-shirts and make it into a video,” he said at the time. Mission accomplished. —J.N.

If there’s one video that manages to nearly encompass the vivid, early Lady Gaga aesthetic, it’s 2009’s “Bad Romance.” Part Kubrickian techno-horror, part avant-garde fashion show, and part Michael Jackson dance homage, “Bad Romance” — directed by Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games, I Am Legend) with art direction by the singer’s own Haus of Gaga — spills her unfettered imagination all over the screen. There’s a loose narrative about Gaga being abducted by supermodels and sold to the (very handsome) Russian mafia before she exacts her fiery revenge, but it’s easy to overlook it for all the gloriously bespoke details: the razor-blade sunglasses, the latex wolf suits, the Alexander McQueen heels, the jerky, “Thriller”-derived choreography. It’s an unholy, head-spinning collision of style, sex, and showbiz that’ll have you saying, Rah, rah, ah-ah-ah. —J.F.

The video for Drake’s 2015 smash has generated nearly 2 billion YouTube views, countless memes, and an SNL parody starring a former president, but at its heart it’s just one lonely superstar dancing his pain away. Drake’s morose pleas to an ex are countered by the reggae-tinged spryness of the music and by the slightly dorky expressiveness of his dancing; you get the sense the man knows he is gifting the world thousands of memes and is enjoying every minute of it. Julien Christian Lutz — a.k.a. Director X — was inspired by the art of James Turrell, whose work was a hallmark of the Light and Space art movement of the Sixties and Seventies, and renowned choreographer Tanisha Scott appears in the video. Drake’s dancing, though, came from deep inside the man himself. “That’s him going for it,” Director X told Rolling Stone. “You can’t choreograph that. That’s just a man dancing.” —C.H.

When Madonna picked Jonas Åkerlund to direct the video for the title single off her 1998 album, he had just come off the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.” But instead of following one person through a drug-fueled night out, Madonna’s clip — which won a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, and a VMA for Best Female Video — streams through a day in the life of the entire planet, shuttling through cities from New York to Stockholm as Madonna dances over the footage chanting upbeat lyrics (adapted from the 1971 Curtiss Maldoon song “Sepheryn”) that reflect her then-newfound love of motherhood, yoga, and Kabbalah. “The ‘Ray of Light’ video is basically a day in the life of the earth to show that we are rushing forward toward the end of the 20th century at full speed,” Madonna said at the time. “I think Jonas made an excellent interpretation of the song, even though he forced me to dance like crazy for two days. He’s a tough director.” —E.G.P.

Here she was: the girl next door with a twist. This Nigel Dick–directed clip introduced the globe to a 16-year-old Britney Spears, who would quickly become pop’s reigning princess. Spears herself pitched the idea of filming the video in a school, where she’s seen sporting a series of the most iconic outfits in Nineties pop-culture history. Bored in class, Spears impatiently awaits the moment when she can take to the school’s hallway and gymnasium to dance away her heartbreak. Amping up the legacy of the video’s setting, Dick shot it at Venice High School, the same place where Grease was filmed. “…Baby One More Time” was essential to MTV’s TRL era, and when the show went off the air in 2008, it was the final video played on the program. —B.S. 

The Louvre-set clip for “Apeshit” — a track from Everything Is Love, Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s collaborative 2018 album as the Carters — is clearly a visual feast. But the video, directed by Ricky Saiz, is also an achievement in sheer concept. The implications of the couple renting out the museum are multi-pronged. Here, two black American artists take over one of the West’s most coveted institutions, and in the process offer a provocative critique of the lingering impact of colonialism on our view of art. All the while, Bey and her dancers create their own masterpiece in motion. Jay-Z playing cool while cavorting next to millions of dollars’ worth of paintings and sculptures is just icing on the cake. A music video can complement a song, and it can also refigure perspectives on the world. Here, Beyoncé and Jay-Z manage to have it both ways. Is it any surprise that the Louvre shattered all previous attendance records following the clip’s release? —J.I.

Music-video hall-of-famer Jonathan Glazer claimed that his eerie, unsettling (and award-winning) clip for “Rabbit in Your Headlights” was initially born out of a frustration regarding his work on a previous assignment, for Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” The director felt he hadn’t quite achieved his goal of doing “something hypnotic and dramatic from one perspective” for that clip, but when he took on the gig of providing British trip-hop/electronica duo Unkle with a visual counterpart for this moody track, Glazer finally cracked the code. (The fact that Thom Yorke sings on both songs was just a lovely coincidence.) French actor Denis Levant is walking down the middle of a busy roadway, with cars whizzing by him as he mutters to himself. A passing vehicles hits him. He goes down. He gets back up again, still ranting. Another car hits him. He gets up again. The scenario keeps repeating … until he removes his parka and Glazer throws us a curveball. The video is a prime example of sustaining a sense of mounting dread and delivering an odd yet thrilling payoff. And the filmmaker finally found that Venn diagram center of creepy and ecstatic he’d been chasing. —D.F.

This one’s not just a music video — it’s a messianic West Coast origin myth. Pan all the way out to the Compton Swap Meet circa 1995, then zoom in tight on a face in the crowd: eight-year-old Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, perched on his father’s shoulders, craning his neck to get a better look at two of his heroes on set. Years later, Kendrick would remember the moment like it was yesterday: “These motorcycle cops trying to conduct traffic but one almost scraped the car, and Pac stood up on the passenger seat, like, ‘Yo, what the fuck!’ ” he told Rolling Stone‘s Josh Eells. “Yelling at the police, just like on his motherfucking songs. He gave us what we wanted.” But even if it hadn’t helped inspire one of the greatest musicians of his generation to follow his hip-hop dreams, the two-part De Mille epic that Hype Williams conjured up for “California Love” and its remix would still be a high point. Juxtaposing wildly vivid imagery of an apocalyptic Mad Max desert rumble and a luxurious pool party, Pac and Dre sum up the unmatched grandiosity of the peak Death Row era. —S.V.L.

Look, we all love the theme song to House, but this Massive Attack tune’s most enduring impact will always be a latex fetus lip-syncing Cocteau Twins singer Elisabeth Fraser’s haunting vocals. Walter Stern, whose previous work for the Prodigy looked like the love child of coke and meth, celebrates life centering on what Massive Attack’s 3D would later lovingly call “a primitive animatronic half-creature in a puddle of rotten latex.” A joyful combination of terrifying and life-affirming. —J.N.

“One” was such an important song for U2 that they hired three directors to make three completely different videos for it. Mark Pellington made an arty one that was little more than black-and-white images of running buffalo, while Rattle and Hum director Phil Joanou shot a glammed-up Bono lip-syncing the song in a bar. The third one, directed by the band’s longtime photographer Anton Corbijn, is clearly the keeper. It features the band in drag, stark images of Bono’s father, Bob, the band playing at Berlin’s Hansa studio, and two Trabant cars traveling around the city and ultimately colliding. But the band ultimately felt it was best to take the Corbijn clip out of rotation, since proceeds from the song were going to AIDS charities, and they felt like their dress might be read as a link between AIDS and sexuality. “They replaced it with a video of Bono in a bar surrounded by models, which I particularly didn’t like,” Corbijn later told The Guardian. “But once the song had died in the charts a few months later they got MTV to start running my video instead. That’s why I like working with U2: They have stayed very loyal to me, which is rare in music.” —A.G.

Few videos from the early 2000s capture the duality of that era’s NYC rock revival — the way songs of intense emotional turmoil were often met with impassive, crossed-arms crowds — better than the one that accompanied Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ tumultuous Fever to Tell torch song. In the clip, the band play on a film set in what looks like a high-school cafeteria, facing down rows of indifferent, seated spectators. As a stony-faced Nick Zinner teases that haunting melody out of his guitar and drummer Brian Chase bashes out the song’s primal rhythm, Karen O visibly tears up as she sings, “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.” As it turns out, the frontwoman didn’t have to act. “They were real tears,” the singer admitted to NME. “My boyfriend at the time [Liars’ Angus Andrew] was supposed to come to the shoot — he was three hours late and I was just about to leave for tour. I didn’t think he was even going to come and this was the song that was written for him. He eventually showed up and I got myself in a real emotional state.” —B.E.

Jay-Z didn’t love the videos for his first two Black Album singles, so he tapped Mark Romanek to film Brooklyn at its bleakest and grimiest for the most brutally stark clip of his career. “You know how a photographer can make a pissy wall look like art?” the rapper said at the time. “That’s what I wanted.” Romanek shoots the black and white video in a series of dizzying, handheld images that careen from the Brooklyn Bridge to Marcy Houses to Bed-Stuy. Jay’s murder at the end was so shocking to MTV, the network aired a bowdlerized version with a disclaimer discouraging gun imagery in videos. —J.N.

When life gives you an uncooperative rap star, make an iconic music video for him about how difficult it was to make a video at all. “Narrated” by co-director Ryan Staake, “Wyclef Jean” makes a feast with the scraps left behind when Young Thug never stepped foot in front of the camera for the video’s $100,000 shoot day. Strategic editing, clever quips of text, and dry sense of humor fuel the video instead. “I wonder if [Young Thug] is pissed off at me or if he’s like, ‘This guy really pulled something out of his ass and it worked out pretty damn well’ and is psyched about it,” Staake pondered in an interview with Rolling Stone at the time. “I think it’s just as much making a mockery out of the production world and the industry of music and celebrity.” —M.C.

Suited-up businessman hangs his head wearily in a hotel lobby, only stirring to life when he starts to hear music — and before you know it, he’s shimmying, tap-dancing and bunny-hopping all around the building. Cute idea — but when the song is Fatboy Slim/Bootsy Collins electro-funk and the dancer is Christopher Walken (who turns out to have a touch of Saturday-night fever in him), you’ve entered music-video fantasia. The second hookup of Fatboy and director Spike Jonze, “Weapon of Choice” was even more surreal, especially when Walken (who rarely flashes more than his usual eerie deadpan stare) began flying around the lobby of the L.A. hotel where it was shot. The clip speaks to those moments when we all want to break free from everyday constraints and let it rip — at least until the music ends and Walken (like all of us) returns to that chair, trying to figure out what to do next. —D.B.

“You wanna hear a good joke? Nobody speak, nobody get choked.” The crate-digging genius responsible for giving the world Entroducing….. returns, enlisting Run the Jewels to drop dense, insult-heavy rhymes (about the Peanuts gang, about Trump, about your mom) over one serious banger of a beat. Director Sam Pilling’s music video then ups the ante: It puts all of El-P and Killer Mike’s shit-talking threats in the mouths of old, white-guy politicians at a United Nations–style summit, while various lackeys (including RTJ and DJ Shadow, rocking a grade-Z toupee) look on. Soon, tables are hopped, punches are thrown, a pig scurries through, and a full-blown bipartisan battle royale is in effect. Someone nearly stabs someone through the heart with an American flag, because symbolism. “We wanted to make a positive, life-affirming video that captures politicians at their election-year best,” Shadow said. “We got this instead.” —D.F.

When Thom Yorke asked Swedish cartoonist Magnus Carlsson to create a video for “Paranoid Android,” he purposely gave him only an instrumental rendition of the OK Computer track for guidance. Yorke was a big fan of Carlsson’s twisted cartoon show Robin and wanted the video to feature the characters, but he didn’t want it to include Gucci little piggies, androids, or anything else taken directly from the lyrics. What he got was a typically bizarre adventure between Robin and his buddy Benjamin where they encounter a nude prostitute, bare-breasted mermaids, a sweaty, balding EU representative who hacks off his own limbs with an ax, and a man with a grotesque head protruding from his belly. “It is really about the violence around [Robin], which is exactly like the song,” Yorke said. “Not the same specific violence as in the lyrics, but everything going on around him is deeply troubling and violent, but he’s just drinking himself into oblivion. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s why it works.” —A.G.

Prince was made for music video, and it was made for him: The Purple One was MTV’s first American superstar, before Madonna or Michael Jackson. As soon as he dropped “1999” in 1982 — a song that radio was too scared to play — it became so ubiquitous on MTV, the network used it for its own stereo-demonstration ads. And the video for this 1986 hit off his Parade album features Prince at his most playful and perverse, frolicking with guitar hero Wendy Melvoin and dancer Monique Manning. At a time when censorship groups were on the attack, Prince turned “Kiss” into a pro-sex burlesque too funny to fight, with an irresistible invitation: “Maybe we could do the twirl?” —R.S.

Nobody reveled in the wild early days of MTV like Duran Duran. “Video to us is like stereo was to Pink Floyd,” synth wizard Nick Rhodes told Rolling Stone in 1984. “It was new, it was just happening. And we saw we could do a lot with it.” Five androgynous boys on film, surrendering to the female gaze. They pounced on the new format with flair and wit, jet-setting to locales like Sri Lanka and Antigua with director Russell Mulcahy. “Hungry Like the Wolf” kicked off their Rio trilogy, capped by “Rio” and “Save a Prayer.” Simon Le Bon runs through the rain forest, searching for a muse (Bermudian model Sheila Ming) who leaves her claw marks on his throat. Meanwhile, John Taylor steals the show with the sensible fashion choice of a white blazer he refuses to button. —R.S.

“The Rain” wasn’t just Missy Elliott’s debut single; it also was the first time the rap icon worked with acclaimed director Hype Williams. At this early stage, the pair were already comfortable enough with each other to create something that would set a precedent for the future of music videos and set the tone for the rest of Missy’s forward-thinking career. Featuring a slew of cameos (Lil Kim, Diddy, Da Brat, and the song’s producer Timbaland, among others), the clip makes heavy use of a fisheye lens as the rapper moves through a number of surreal scenes. The most iconic of them is Missy in a black trash-bag–like inflated jumpsuit — a popular Halloween costume for decades to come. “The outfit was a symbol of power,” Elliott later told Elle. “I loved the idea of feeling like a hip-hop Michelin woman. I knew I could have on a blow-up suit and still have people talking.” —B.S.

Michel Gondry, having gained a reputation as a video magician for Daft Punk’s “Around the World” and the Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar,” pulled his most whimsical trick yet by turning the White Stripes duo into … Lego bricks. Back in 2002, the sheer nerve of painstakingly capturing the Stripes in color-blocked stop-motion was enough to make the video iconic. (Third Man even now sells a “Fell in Love With a Girl” Block Kit, with which you can reproduce the effect yourself.) It’s still an impressive feat, considering how uncanny Jack and Meg’s likenesses are captured in 2D, and it would only be matched by Gondry and the Stripes’ further collaborations like “The Denial Twist” and “The Hardest Button to Button.” —C.S.

The scene: a lonely girl sits in a diner, reading her comic book, about the adventures of the dashing Norwegian synth-pop trio A-ha. But the young woman (played by the singer’s real-life girlfriend) is shocked when the comic-book hero winks at her, then lures her into his pencil-sketch cartoon world. The lovers romp in the land of rotoscoped animation, until they get chased by wrench-toting bad guys. Finally, the singer bravely fights to escape the cartoon and join her in the flesh-and-blood world. Directed by Steve Barron (of “Billie Jean” fame), “Take on Me” remains a music video milestone — a dazzling technical achievement that never gets old. Sad footnote: A-ha did a bummer sequel, “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” where the couple break up and he goes back to his comic book. Totally unrelated fact: A-ha never had another U.S. hit. —R.S.

The tapping Converse All-Star hightop. The punk cheerleaders with anarchy symbols on their uniforms. Kurt Cobain’s striped tee, worn over a long-sleeve shirt. Those opening chords, the unruly teens, that build-up from quiet to deafening and unhinged. Director Samuel Bayer swears that Nirvana, the trio from Seattle that no one at Geffen Records expected to do much in regards to their major-label debut, picked him to helm the video for the opening track off 1991’s Nevermind because he had the worst reel out of all the candidates. “[He] wanted to do all this story, narrative stuff,” Nirvana’s soundman Craig Montgomery is quoted as saying in the seminal grunge history Everybody Loves Our Town. “Kurt just wanted to have the band playing and kids going nuts.” Grainy and grimy-looking, Bayer’s pep-rally-run-amuck video ends with one of the most ecstatic examples of mosh-pit liberation ever. It’s cliché to say “and the rest is history.” But it’s impossible to underestimate the sea change that happened once “Smells Like Teen Spirit” took over the radio, and, after a premiere on 120 Minutes, MTV decided to add the clip into heavy rotation. The single was already garnering buzz for Nirvana. But the video caused everything to go nuclear for the group, helped sell the notion of alternative rock to the masses, and officially ushered in the Grunge Era. Here we are now. Entertain us. —D.F.

Beyoncé nearly made the impossible attainable when she dedicated the “Single Ladies” video to three minutes and 18 seconds of pure choreography, in your face and plain as day, with only two dancers by her side. See, performing at Beyoncé’s capacity is unrealistic for most of us, but when “Single Ladies” dropped, so did YouTube dance tutorials and presentations of the material from ordinary dancers. You can so easily pause, rewind, and pay attention to Beyoncé’s moves that everyone learned some of them, from Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live to President Barack Obama at an inaugural concert. —M.C.

George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice era was all about tearing down the public’s previous conceptions of his work — including his reputation as a charismatic, aggressively heterosexual MTV heartthrob. In that respect, the video for “Freedom! ‘90” leaves hardly any room for interpretation, with Michael bringing back the rock & roll iconography from his “Faith” video — leather jacket, jukebox, guitar — only to have it literally burst into flames. But that’s not what everyone remembers about “Freedom! ‘90.” Directed by David Fincher, in what would be one of two breakout projects for him in 1990 along with Madonna’s “Vogue,” the video takes the ballsiest possible route and leaves Michael himself entirely offscreen, replacing him with five of the most famous supermodels in the world (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Tatjana Patitz), who lip-sync to the song in a diamond-hued London warehouse. Pompous? Yes. But, anchored by Michael’s lyrics — which hint at a personal coming-out for him as much as a professional one — ”Freedom! ‘90” transformed into a complete artistic statement, the kind that still feels rare in the world of music videos. —C.S.

“Billie Jean” was the video that shocked the world — a revelation of how far the art form could go. It showcased Michael Jackson at the moment when he could glide on air, dancing on a light-up sidewalk in an homage to the musical An American in Paris. His voice, his face, his body all seem haunted by something otherworldly. He’s so fragile until he starts to dance — which is when he suddenly makes anything seem possible.MTV had a long history of playing edgy, uncategorizable black artists from around the globe: Peter Tosh, Grace Jones, Joan Armatrading, Phil Lynott, Tina Turner, that guy Prince. Yet there was no precedent for a video this radical from such a huge star. “Billie Jean” became an overnight MTV sensation and stayed in constant rotation for years. (An exec at MJ’s label made the unconvincing claim he coerced MTV into playing it, but the channel always insisted they rushed it onto the air, and the evidence seems to back them up.) His follow-up, “Beat It,” was equally stunning, innovative, classic; both videos still cast that spell, no matter how horrifying the story got later. And “Thriller” was the big-budgeted, 13-minute epic that was treated as an event, though it’s really just a John Landis ego trip with not enough music and not enough Michael. But “Billie Jean” is the one. It still defines music video at its peak of cultural and emotional impact. —R.S.

During the making of “November Rain,” somebody asked Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum what his role was. “I don’t know, man,” he replies. “You have to ask Ax. This whole video is in his mind.” That’s not entirely true — Axl Rose had loosely based the clip on “Without You,” a short story by pal Del James. But the clip feels like a fever dream: Rose stages a wedding for then-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour, best man Slash forgets the rings, best bassist Duff McKagan produces them on his leather-gloved pinkie, Slash shreds in a churchyard, they all yuk it up at a reception, the reception is rained out(!), and inexplicably Seymour’s character dies. In the clip’s most melodramatic scene, Seymour tosses her bouquet to the wedding guests and the flowers land on her own coffin. None of it makes much sense and it doesn’t have to, since it evokes the song’s mood, continued in GN’R’s “Estranged” video. “‘November Rain’ is a song about not wanting to be in a state of having to deal with unrequited love,” Rose once said. “‘Estranged’ is acknowledging [that state] and being there and having to figure out what the fuck to do.” —K.G.

“I’m not sure [‘Sledgehammer’] would have been as big a hit … without the video,” Peter Gabriel told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I think [the clip] had a sense both of humor and of fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me.” Although Gabriel loved surrealism (just look up his Genesis costumes), the “Sledgehammer” video overflowed with rare whimsy from the singer. He even managed to smile throughout the excruciatingly slow stop-motion shoot, which found steam trains chugging in front of his face, happy bumper cars tussling his cotton-candy hair, a Giuseppe Arcimboldo tribute (fruit shaped like Gabriel’s face singing), Claymation sledgehammers bashing an Adam out of his head, and of course two supermarket chickens dancing (animated by the same folks who later made Chicken Run). Somehow director Stephen Johnson shot everything in a week’s time. The clip went on to win nine VMAs, including Video of the Year, and, according to Gabriel’s website, it’s the most-aired video in MTV’s history. —K.G.

As famous one-shots go, there’s the Copa entrance in Goodfellas, Danny riding his tricycle down the halls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, and this — a doctor’s-office-close examination of D’Angelo’s glistening naked body in the eye-popping, breath-stopping 2000 video for the juggernaut track off his sophomore album, Voodoo. Starting a whisper away from the back of the singer’s head, directors Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier slowly trace the contours of his hair, his ears, and his face, before spending the remaining three minutes and 30 seconds objectifying the ever-living shit out of his insanely chiseled torso. (Is this the entire reason men’s magazines became fixated on telling guys how to get V-shaped abs?) The concept is at once a creative shrug and a stroke of genius: In truth, the song — an ode to Prince layered with raw, tender vocals and almost filthy grooves — does all the work. What better way to mirror its intimacy than to strip down its maker and let him move us. —M.F.

Whhhooooaaaa!!!! Seventies nostalgia saturated pop culture in the 1990s: Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks, That ’70s Show, everything by the Black Crowes, and, of course, the Beastie Boys’ groovy “Sabotage” video. Fashioned like the opening credits of a vintage primetime TV series, the clip features the trio living out their by cop-drama fantasies wearing fake mustaches, aviators, and ill-fitting Me Decade duds; jumping an old sedan with a cherry light over a hill and leaping between buildings; and taking a doughnut break in between interrogating perps. “We all watched VHS videotapes of Streets of San Francisco and other shows,” Mike D once said, “and we were like, ‘That would be awesome, if we could actually pull off our own version of that.’” They pulled it off by really getting into it: MCA plays two roles (“Sir Stewart Wallace as Himself” and “Nathan Wind as Cochese”), while Ad-Rock portrays “Vic Colfari as Bobby, ‘The Rookie,’” and Mike D calls shots as “Alasondro Alegré as ‘The Chief.’” It’s goofy fun, and it perfectly complements the group’s punk-rap screamathon so well that it inspired Danny Boyle’s “Lust for Life” chase intro in Trainspotting. —K.G.

“When you’re filming a band or an artist,” Jonathan Demme said, “you aspire to, and ideally become part of the band.” The director was talking about Stop Making Sense, but he might have been referring to his 1985 clip for New Order’s “Perfect Kiss” as well. The Manchester quartet would specialize in music videos that veered from faux-verité (that Arthur Baker–assisted, downtown-NYC disco romp in “Confusion”) to abstract AF (the attack-of-the-screen-savers imagery of “Bizarre Love Triangle”). For this highlight of the group’s 1985 album, Low-Life, Demme had them set up in their studio and play the track live. That’s it. Bernard Sumner looks like he might throw up before he starts his vocal track. Peter Hook attacks his bass strings as if they insulted his mom. Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert look at something below the frame with the intense concentration of math students solving an equation while the clock runs out. (They’re playing synthesizers.) The camera, meanwhile, gets right in their faces — Demme makes for a pesky, perseverant fifth member. Clocking in at a whopping 10 minutes, it’s a masterpiece of physical exertion and performance-capturing: a volley of fingers moving over fretboards and tapping keyboards, drumsticks hitting pads and cowbells, Sumner’s head tilted toward his mic. Arguably the most humanistic American filmmaker of the 1980s, Demme never lets you forget that there are people playing this song. The sound is synthesized, but the act of watching four people make that sound gives it soul. And no matter how many times you see that Joy Division poster behind Sumner’s head, it still brings a tear to your eye. —D.F.

It starts with a man playing a guitar, and a gunshot — then the music video that launched a thousand think pieces turns a warehouse space into a vaudeville stage, a riot-in-progress, and a waking nightmare. Donald Glover’s musical alter ego Childish Gambino struts, shuffles, and shimmies his way through a tableau of dancing kids, angry cops, and scenes of both social unrest and unfettered black joy. References to everything from viral dance videos to the 2015 shooting in a Charleston church, minstrelsy to Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” car dance, collide into each other, and given the way director Hiro Murai fills each frame with lots of moving parts and background business, it’s a clip that rewards dozens of viewings. But the gut-punch impact remains no matter how many times you see it. “The video is really a confluence of tone changes,” Murai told The New York Times. “Obviously we’re dealing with very provocative images, so it’s a total tightrope walk.”And in the middle of all this is Gambino, wandering from scene to scene in nothing but tight gray slacks, wearily stopping to light up a joint when he’s not shooting people or dancing up a storm. “It was important to have D. shirtless, because it’s like, yeah, that’s how we dance,” producer and Gambino collaborator Ibra Ake noted. “That’s like your uncle in Nigeria who drinks Harp. … That’s expressing yourself. Our goal [was] normalizing blackness.” All of this in four minutes, plus a semiotics-filled state of the nation that ends with the singer running desperately for his life, because, well … this is America. You can pick from almost four centuries’ worth of reasons as to why.—D.F.

Hands, hands. Face. Body. “Come on, vogue” — Madonna commands it, and the world listened. Voguing was an outlandish, nonviolent way of “fighting” in New York’s queer, underground ballroom culture — and was often more athletic, involving contortions and martial arts influences. (See: Jennie Livingston’s landmark documentary Paris Is Burning.) But in the video — Madonna’s third collaboration with director David Fincher, following on the heels of the equally exhilarating “Express Yourself” — the dance was a refined form of feminist posturing and a statement of sexual defiance. “We cut this thing together as quickly as we could,” recalls Fincher. “We shot the video in, like, 16 hours, that was it. She got on the plane and went on her world tour.” The video was choreographed by classically trained dancer José Gutierrez and his best friend Luis Camacho, both members of the House of Extravaganza and two of the seven male dancers who’d also join her on the legendary Blonde Ambition tour. Although accusations of appropriation have plagued Madonna ever since, there’s no denying that she successfully elevated ballroom to the mainstream, creating a global fanbase. We can never forget to thank the blonde bombshell’s iconic video for inspiring countless queer kids to “strike a pose.” —J.P.

The way director Mark Romanek tells it, the emotional backbone of his music video for Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” — the Man in Black’s last major appearance on film — was purely accidental. Romanek was concerned, initially, that scenes of a 71-year-old Cash performing the somber Nine Inch Nails cover in his home, surrounded by a still life of rotting fruit and flowers, wouldn’t be enough to carry a full story. For B-roll, the director and his crew visited the derelict House of Cash museum, where curators lent the filmmakers a swath of archival footage from Cash’s life. On a whim, Romanek’s editor Robert Duffy dropped a clip of a young Johnny Cash riding a steam train into the rough cut. “We got chills running up our spine,” Romanek would recall later. “There was something about the juxtaposition of Johnny as a young, vibrant man, and Johnny near the end of his life.” Cash would be dead seven months later, but he left the last word on his own mortality with “Hurt.” Trent Reznor observed that as soon as he watched Romanek’s video, “It really, then, wasn’t my song anymore.” —C.S.

If Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album established her as one of the greatest artists of all time, her surprise-released “Formation” video (and ensuing album Lemonade) marked her as one of the most important. She partnered with directer Melina Matsoukas, who culled inspiration from the likes of Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison in a striking commentary on significant moments in black American history. In under five minutes, Beyoncé moves from a plantation-style house where the black denizens are the masters not the slaves to the top of a sinking police car. Notably, she released the video in the first week of Black History Month 2016, the day in between what would’ve been Trayvon Martin’s and Sandra Bland’s birthdays. Days later, she would perform the song at the Super Bowl, surrounded by dancers in outfits inspired by the Black Panthers. “I wanted to show — this is black people,” Matsoukas told The New Yorker. “We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” —B.S.