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The 100 Greatest Music Videos

From Adele to ZZ Top — our ranked list of the best music videos of all time

Photo illustration by Griffin Lotz. Images using in illustration via Scanrail/Adobe Stock; Youtube

In the wee hours of August 1st, 1981, someone flipping through their channels might have come across the image of a rocket blasting into space. The familiar sight of Neil Armstrong exiting his lunar module and walking on the moon would fill the TV screen. And then they’d hear a voiceover, with all the smooth patter of an FM disc jockey: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock & roll.” Cue power chords, and a flag with a network logo — something called MTV — that rapidly changed colors and patterns. This wasn’t a news channel; it was “Music Television.” If they kept tuning in, they’d see clips and hear VJs talk about bringing you the latest in music videos. At this point, viewers might have a few questions, like: Is this like a radio station on TV? What is a “VJ”? And what the hell is a “music video”?

A year later, no one was asking that last question. Virtually everyone knew what a music video was, and they wanted their MTV. The network revolutionized the music industry, inspired a multitude of copycat programming, made many careers, and broke more than a few. Entire genres and subgenres — from hip-hop to grunge to boy-band pop to nu metal — became part of the mainstream. The format proved so durable that when MTV decided to switch things up and devote its air time to game shows, reality TV, and scripted series, thus shutting down the primary pipeline for these promos, artists still kept making them. The internet soon stepped in to fill the void. Four decades after the channel’s launch and long after it stopped playing them, music videos still complement songs, create mythologies, and cause chatter and controversy. We no longer want our MTV. We continue to want our music videos.

In honor of MTV’s 40th anniversary, we’ve decided to rank the top 100 music videos of all time. You’ll notice some significant changes from the last time we did this. (Yes, Michael Jackson is on here. No, “Thriller” is not.) A few pre-date the channel; several have never played on MTV at all. But all of these picks are perfect examples of how pairing sound and vision created an entire artistic vocabulary, gave us a handful of miniature-movie masterpieces, and changed how we heard (and saw) music. From Adele’s “Hello” to ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’” — these are the videos that continue to thrill us, delight us, disturb us, and remind us just how much you can do in three to four minutes with a song, a camera, a concept, a pose, some mood lighting, and an iconic hand gesture or two.

From Rolling Stone US

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4

Childish Gambino, “This Is America”

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.

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3

Madonna, “Vogue”

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.

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2

Johnny Cash, “Hurt”

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.

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1

Beyoncé, “Formation”

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.