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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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66

Lady Gaga feat. Beyoncé, “Telephone”

Lady Gaga once again teamed up with Swedish filmmaker Jonas Akerlund to craft a singular piece of pop propaganda, picking up where her crimes in their “Paparazzi” clip ended. A nearly 10-minute-long odyssey, the video shows Gaga headed to prison for murder. A (slightly confused?) Beyoncé breaks her pal out, and the duo take a joyride in the Pussy Wagon from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill before getting revenge in a desert diner by killing model Tyrese Gibson for stealing her honey. “We shot the whole thing in two days, which is pretty incredible,” he told Variety for the clip’s 10-year anniversary. “Beyoncé and Gaga were practicing, like, literally there on the spot, figuring out the choreography while we were waiting. It was crazy.” —J.P.

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65

The Verve, “Bittersweet Symphony”

The premise is simple: Richard Ashcroft walks down a busy London street, aggressively bumps into people headed in the opposite direction, and totally ignores their agitated responses. The original cut showed the Verve frontman getting his comeuppance when a group of thugs beats him to a bloody pulp; the end result, however, he’s simply joined by his bandmates and walks off unscathed. Director Walter A. Stern drew inspiration from the video for Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Symphony,” in which Shara Nelson takes a similar stroll down a Los Angeles street. (Though she didn’t assault anyone, however.) The clip turned “Bittersweet Symphony” into a huge hit, but it also set them up for years of litigation since the song samples a symphonic version of “The Last Time” by The Rolling Stones … and they didn’t exactly have the rights to it. Still, the video remains a time capsule of a moment when Britpop was ascendant, Ashcroft radiated with coolness, and it was OK to randomly assault pedestrians for absolutely no reason at all. —A.G.

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64

Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”

The video for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was shot in just four hours and cost the band only £4,500, but it changed the music industry forever. They created it because they knew the song was a spectacular achievement that needed to be heard by the entire world, but they’d look ridiculous pretending to play it live on shows like Top of the Pops since it’s largely a studio creation. And so they hired director Bruce Gowers and conceived of a video that begins with a re-creation of their pose from the cover of 1974’s Queen II and slowly builds to a climax where they’re playing the finale on a bright soundstage. Along the way, we see a “little silhouetto” of Freddie Mercury and an innovative honeycomb effect that presents multiple images of the band at once. The video helped make the song an enormous international hit, inspiring many other groups to follow their lead and make their own videos. Soon enough, the idea was hatched for a cable channel devoted to nothing but these videos. —A.G.

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63

R.E.M., “Losing My Religion”

What did it feel like to be young and sad in February 1991? Somehow, it felt just like the weirdly gorgeous burnt-umber backdrop for Michael Stipe’s dancing in R.E.M.’s greatest music video. Its mandolin-driven quietude made it an unlikely hit, and the video was an equally improbable candidate for the commercial success it achieved: Director Tarsem Singh shoved playful homoeroticism and art-school pretension (its images were inspired by Caravaggio’s paintings, a Gabriel García Márquez short story, and the photos of the French artists known as Pierre et Gilles) into an MTV mainstream that, just months earlier, had hosted the crass antics of “Cherry Pie” by the hair-farming quintet Warrant. —B.H.

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62

Radiohead, “Just”

Originally written as a short film, this bizarre-even-by-Radiohead-standards clip from Jamie Thraves drew inspiration from Hitchcock movies and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. The band perform the Bends track inside a London flat as they witness chaos unfold from a window: A man has collapsed on the pavement, and no one can figure out why. Through subtitles, he refuses to explain to bystanders why he’s lying on the ground until the very end; he then silently reveals the secret, bringing everyone to their knees. Neither the group nor the director has ever confirmed what the man actually said, leaving fans to speculate for years. “I will probably take the answer to my grave, unless a rich billionaire Radiohead fan wants to buy the secret from me,” Thraves told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s like I stumbled upon the answer to the universe. … Please don’t make me tell you. You don’t want to know.” —A.M.

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61

The Go-Go’s, “Our Lips Are Sealed”

A day in the life of the Go-Go’s: The five coolest punk-rock girls in town hop into a convertible and cruise in the Southern California sunshine, until it’s time to go splash in the fountain. It was impossible to watch the “Our Lips Are Sealed” video and not wish you were one of the Go-Go’s. It captures all the band’s different personalities, from Belinda Carlisle’s cheerleader-gone-bad to Gina Schock’s punk enforcer. Best moment: Jane Wiedlin sits alone in the car to sing the “hush now darling” bridge, then Gina playfully drums on Jane’s head. It was a vision of a feminist New Wave utopia that made every other band look hopelessly boring. —R.S.

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60

Janet Jackson feat. Q-Tip and Joni Mitchell, “Got ‘Til It’s Gone”

Janet Jackson and director Mark Romanek re-create an apartheid-era South African lounge in this jubilant paean to Afrocentricity. With a nattily-clad Q-Tip in tow, Romanek’s stylistic choices — including sharp clothing and use of African dance — channel Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, while Jackson’s portrayal of a lounge singer evokes an effortless cool that stands in sharp contrast to her Rhythm Nation 1814 militarism. Even Joni Mitchell, whose song “Big Yellow Taxi” was sampled for the track, said that the video “had dignity, and it was full of life.” And Joni Mitchell never lies. —J.N.

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59

Kylie Minogue, “Come Into My World”

Combining the unique vision of director Michel Gondry with peak-form Kylie Minogue was bound to produce something extraordinary. This 2002 video initially appears to be fairly no-frills — a quick stroll around a Parisian neighborhood for the Aussie pop star, set to her blissed-out disco tune. A couple argues, kids zoom down the sidewalks on skateboards, lovers embrace in this quaint little scene. Then Minogue walks by her starting point, and new iterations of the singer keep appearing every time she doubles back, all following similar yet distinct paths. Meanwhile, the chaos in the background multiplies to comical proportions, from four identical sets of motorists in physical altercations to four identical men frantically slapping posters on a building wall. It’s a marvel of planning and meticulous choreography, making repeat viewings to scan for lapses in continuity half of the fun. Long live the Kylie multiverse! —J.F.

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58

Van Halen, “Jump”

When Van Halen went to film their “Jump” video, they had one collective request: no clichés. “This thing of standing next to the Venetian blinds with the light coming through, making bars on your face,” David Lee Roth told Rolling Stone. “How many times have you seen that in the last two hours on MTV?” So they made this low-budget minimalist masterpiece themselves, with a 16mm hand-held camera. No special effects, no concept, no lasers, no dancing girls. Just personality — more than enough of it to make your TV explode. From Diamond Dave’s slapstick leaps to Edward’s grin to the whole band’s eye contact, “Jump” captures all the sex and swagger of the original Van Halen. The way Dave rolls his eyes in that first “cantchoo see what I meeean?” is a three-second rock-star charisma seminar. —R.S.

57

Nine Inch Nails, “Closer”

“Closer” likely never would have badgered its way into the mainstream if it weren’t for director Mark Romanek’s disturbing video, filled with imagery of Trent Reznor in various bondage positions, a crucified monkey (next to a Jack Nicholson poster), and a nude woman spinning eggs on her fingers, among other surrealistic frights and delights. ​”Trent said, ​’Fuck it … If MTV won’t show it, fuck MTV,’” Romanek once recalled. The clip, which blends the vibe of David Lynch’s Erasherhead with the voyeurism of Blue Velvet, was just so weird that the channel couldn’t help but play it — albeit in a heavily censored version with “scenes missing.” But the truth was while most of the uncanny imagery was indeed real (yes, that’s a decapitated pig’s head), they kept things professional (the monkey was supervised and not harmed). And Romanek shot the video with a hand-cranked camera from 1919 and distressed the film by hand with cigarette lighters and aerosol shellac, adding to the mood. “[The video] set a tone that made the song sound better to me,” Reznor said, “and I think that’s an achievement.” —K.G.

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56

Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way”

As the lead single for Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, “I Want It That Way” would usher in a powerful era for boy bands and pop music. Directed by Wayne Isham, the video takes place at LAX, with the boys in matching white or black outfits, dancing and slow-walking throughout the airport. As they prepare to board their plane, they’re surrounded by screaming girls with loads of headshots and merch for the group to sign. It’s one of the most popular visuals in the boy-band canon, embodying the type of fervent fandom that acts like BSB bask in. The clip became so popular and pervasive in the late Nineties that Blink-182 parodied it for what would become their equally iconic “All the Small Things” video. —B.S.

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55

LL Cool J, “Going Back to Cali”

Ric Menello, a college dorm security guard and film savant who befriended Rick Rubin at NYU, had already co-directed the insanity of Beasties’ “Fight for Your Right” video. Now, taking cues from his favorite films Touch of Evil and Rebel Without a Cause, Menello turned LL Cool J’s ambivalence about moving cross-country into rap’s greatest arthouse video. Mimicking the song’s unhurried pace, images of LL slowly cruising in his Corvette and Automaton dancers robotically dancing remain indelible more than three decades later. LL originally hated the video. He has since gone on to embrace it as the masterpiece that it is. —J.N.

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54

Madonna, “Material Girl”

Not everyone can out-icon Marilyn Monroe, but Madonna just about pulled it off with this 1984 clip — nearly a shot-by-shot remake of Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. While Monroe swooned over sparkles, however, Madonna is after something deeper: financial security and, sure, love. During the course of the video, she’s wooed by a rich director (played by Keith Carradine) who pretends to be poor to win her heart; in the end, she’s more impressed with his humble daisies than a fleet of suited men laden with bling. Shot by Mary Lambert — who also directed the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary — “Material Girl” would become the blueprint for feminist videos for decades to come. —B.E.

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53

Janet Jackson, “Rhythm Nation”

If this video made you want to suit up and join the fight against … well, anything, you were not alone. Militarism has never seemed so cool as when Janet — Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty — began executing her precision moves with an army of stone-faced dancers behind her, all clad in matching uniforms, gloves, and boots. (Janet’s in particular now lives in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) Filmed in smoky black and white and set in what appears to be an abandoned power plant, the video announces the singer and her crew as soldiers of social justice, as she sings about breaking color lines and joining our voices in protest. Does the title track of her 1989 concept album, Rhythm Nation 1814, propose that we can end racism through dance and music? Yes. Is that incorrect? Patently. But there is no denying that it snapped a bunch of people the hell awake. —M.F.

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52

Herbie Hancock, “Rockit”

It’s the scratching that gets you first — that needle-on-the-record squeal that still sounded novel enough in 1983 to stop you in your tracks. No sooner had GrandMixer DXT’s work on the wheels of steel kicked in then: Boom! We’re transported to an apartment full of robots, each jittering and whirring along to the beat. Three pairs of legs kick in sync over a couch. Two mannequin heads, rocking an admirably vintage Carl Sagan look, watch something mechanical splashing in a soapy sink. A robo-wife hits her robo-husband at a robo-brekafast table. And when the camera pans past a tiny TV set, you can glimpse a pair of hands — human hands — plinking out a keyboard line. Without MTV O.G.s Kevin Godley and Lol Creme’s video for Herbie Hancock’s unclassifiable melding of jazz, electro-funk, and early hip-hop, it might have been just another musical gumbo from a longtime fusion pioneer. With it, the song became the soundtrack to some sort of techno-utopian future and a genuine WTF mindblower. You’d never seen anything like it. You still haven’t seen anything like it. —D.F.

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51

Run the Jewels, “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)”

The twentysomething African-American everyman looks battered and exhausted. So does the white cop, who’s yelling, “Don’t you fucking move!” as the other man turns and runs. They tussle in the street, punch-drunk and exhausted. Day turns to night. They move the fight to an apartment, eventually sitting on opposite ends of a bed, catching their breath. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. It won’t be the last. Filmed in black and white and featuring Lakeith Stanfield and Boardwalk Empire‘s Shea Wigham, this video for Run the Jewels’ standout RTJ2 track (featuring an incendiary verse from Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha, who makes a cameo alongside the rap duo) turns the hot-button issue of police violence against the black community into an endless rinse-repeat cycle of agony. Whoever wins, we all lose. “This video represents the futile and exhausting existence of a purgatory-like law enforcement system,” Killer Mike said in a statement after the video hit the internet. “There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world.” —D.F.