The 100 Greatest Music Videos

No video has ever summed up heavy metal’s anti-authoritarian spirit better than this clip, which complemented Twisted Sister’s fist-pumping ode to fed-up-ness with a barrage of pure visual slapstick. Aggro dad Mark Metcalf (Animal House’s ROTC maniac Doug Neidermeyer) bursts into the room of his guitar-playing son and bellows, “What do you wanna do with your life?!?” The kid magically transforms into the band’s glam-kabuki frontman, Dee Snider, who proceeds to subject the offending patriarch to a hilariously over-the-top sequence of bodily harm. He falls out a window, gets dragged down the stairs, and gets knocked around by a slamming door. The song’s tone was angry, but as Snider explained during a 1985 PMRC hearing after the track was included on Tipper Gore’s infamous “Filthy 15,” actual violence was the last thing he wanted the clip to portray. “The video ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote theme,” he said. “Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons.” —H.S.

Despite everything that Weezer have achieved over the past three decades, the first image that comes to mind when many people think of them is Fonzie and the Happy Days gang dancing to “Buddy Holly” at Arnold’s Drive-In. That’s because the 1994 Spike Jonze–directed video for the song left an indelible impression after countless plays on MTV in 1994 (not to mention the fact that it was included on a Windows 95 CD-ROM the following year that went out to a decent chunk of the population). And even though bringing Weezer back in time to the Happy Days universe seems like an enormous technical feat, the clip was actually filmed in a single day on a Hollywood soundstage that re-created the Arnold’s set, complete with a cameo by Al Molinaro reprising his Arnold character from the show. The hard part was combing through the enormous Happy Days archives to find little bits to intersperse into the video. “My editor and I went through hundreds of episodes,” Jonze told Spin in 2003, “pretty much every one that had anything in Arnold’s. When we found the footage of Fonzie dancing, it was like a gold mine.” —A.G.

Nearly 25 years before their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Run-DMC entered the fictitious “Museum of Rock N’ Roll” to wig-snatch the Beatles, unplug a Jerry Lee Lewis video, and crush Michael Jackson’s bejeweled glove. “I remember people were saying that was kind of prophetic,” DMC said in 2009. No one used rock in hip-hop better to both bolster and upend the sound. And the video, featuring Letterman regular Larry “Bud” Melman saying, “You guys don’t belong in here,” is iconoclastic enough in its idol-busting to make the line, “There’s three of us / But we’re not the Beatles” (somewhat) forgivable. —J.N.

Much like the bricolage that was Beck’s early sound, the video that put him on the map was a jumble of disparate images that somehow hung together. The “Loser” clip’s $300 shooting budget yielded shots of DIY cheerleaders dancing in a graveyard, a Grim Reaper–like figure squeegee-ing a car window with blood, assorted West Coast weirdos strumming acoustic guitars, and a coffin spookily making its way through woods and streets (director Steve Hanft’s nod to Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert). In the midst of it all, Beck boogied in a white suit and stocking cap, wielded a leaf blower onstage, and set his own guitar on fire. The whole thing is completely devoid of narrative, but absolutely brimming with vibe (the shot near the end of a shaggy-haired Beck strolling the beach in half a wetsuit screams “Nineties California”). No matter what state of mind you view it in, it conjures up a hypnotic wake-and-bake haze that you can’t help but sink into like a threadbare crash-pad couch. —H.S.

In case you were wondering whether the video for Kendrick Lamar’s first Number One hit would be as bare-bones as the song, well — the first shot is the rapper dressed as the pope, clad in full regalia and standing in a beam of light. From there, Lamar and director Dave Meyers pile up images like memories in a fever dream: Kendrick on a cash-strewn table; Kendrick teeing off on top of an old hoopty; Kendrick passing Grey Poupon from car to car; Kendrick as Christ in Leonardo’s Last Supper. Part of it could be a jab at the conspicuous consumption of hip-hop videos (not to mention Grey Poupon commercials); part of it is likely Lamar engaging with a Christianity whose dictum of humility might be tough to stick to when you’re the greatest rapper alive. In a 2017 Rolling Stone cover story, Lamar made clear whom he was talking to. “It’s the ego,” he said. “Ultimately, I’m looking in the mirror.” —C.H.

Mötley Crüe may have been in an extremely dark place when they shot the video for their 1985 power ballad “Home Sweet Home” thanks to bassist Nikki Sixx’s severe heroin addiction and the recent aftermath of Vince Neil’s car accident that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle, but you’d never know it from watching the end product. It begins with Neil at the beach, guitarist Mick Mars at a spooky castle, Sixx at a bar, and drummer Tommy Lee at a party. They all answer a phone call by saying, “I’m on my way,” and are immediately transported to a magical arena concert where the female fans need to be physically restrained from lunging themselves onto the stage. This was the height of the hair-metal movement, and the video ran on MTV for several months in heavy rotation. Looking back on that era, Lee told Stereogum, “We were coming off the success of the video for ‘Home Sweet Home,’ of which they made the ‘Mötley Crüe rule’ for over at MTV. We’d held the top position for requests for so long that they were like, ‘This isn’t fair.’” —A.G.

Have you ever lapdanced with the devil in the pale moonlight? Lil Nas X co-directed (alongside Tanu Muino) the clip for the title track of his 2021 album, and it’s a riot of color, historical allusions (from Genesis to Revelations, Greco-Roman architecture to medieval artwork), sound, fury, ecstasy, and vision. But what grabbed the most attention was our man Montero — the artist’s real first name — sliding down a pole into hell and giving Satan (also played by Lil Nas X) the single hottest crotch grind that the Prince of Darkness has likely ever experienced. Though satanists seem to give the video one sign-of-the-beast up, the far right predictably went nuts. (We’re not even going to go into the whole thing with Nike.) There was a method to Lil Nas X’s baroque madness, however. “I wanted to use these things that have been around for so long to tell my own story,” he declared, “and the story of so many other people in the community — or people who have been outcast in general through history. It’s the same thing over and over.” You can’t say Lil Nas X doesn’t have a point. And haters: You can’t ever call him a one-hit wonder again. —D.F.

Courtney Love has never been one to shy away from autobiographical themes, and in this video from Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, she leans into her past, from childhood ballet classes to her time spent working as a stripper. As she explained at the time, the clip’s visual feel drew on “acid flashbacks, old film stock.” Helmed by Rolling Stone’s then–chief photographer Mark Seliger and art director Fred Woodward, the sepia-drenched video takes place in a Victorian-era theater, cutting between young ballerinas and scantily clad women as Love sings about a lover who abandoned her (likely Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan). “I wanted to degrade stripping,” she continued of the intent behind the video. “Rather than all of the videos that have put stripping or half-naked women on a pedestal, I wanted to sort of show the degrading experience that it is.” —E.G.P.

To say that the Replacements, arguably Minnesota’s finest (and inarguably its drunkest) punk band of the 1980s, hated MTV would be an understatement: They bad-mouthed the channel at every opportunity, and devoted a whole song on their 1984 masterpiece, Let It Be (“Seen Your Video”), to slagging bands who preened for the camera. ”If we do a video,” singer Paul Westerberg said, ”we want to do one that nobody would want to watch all the way through, much less twice.” Still, for their major-label debut, Tim, they decided to make an exception regarding their no-video policy, albeit completely on their own terms. Which is why none of the Replacements appear in this exercise-in-minimalism clip — instead, we get a single-shot close-up of a speaker in director Jeff Skinner’s living room playing the song. The camera eventually zooms out just in time to capture a disgruntled, unidentified listener kicking the speaker over. It was a beautiful fuck you from a band known for their eloquent kiss-offs. The irony: 120 Minutes started playing the clip regularly and turned it into an audience favorite. They watched it all the way through, even twice. Joke’s on you, gents. —D.F.

Sonic Youth’s video summed up everything cool about the summer of 1994 — it was the essence of mainstream rock, which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. (Or a few years later, unfortunately.) Kim Gordon stars as the extremely pregnant punk matriarch, showing off her collection of fearsome glares. Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna co-stars as the kid-sister agent of chaos, dancing with the band in her high-tops and pigtails, disrupting all their rock moves. She also surprises Kim with a distinctly un-filial kiss on the cheek. Directed by Tamra Davis, “Bull in the Heather” reaches across generations, genders, genres — everything sparkles with revolution-grrrl-style-now energy. —R.S.

By the time of Taylor Swift’s synth-pop pivot 1989, the star found her life both exhaustively documented and unfairly critiqued in the public eye. As Swift put it at the time, the media characterized her as a perpetually jilted lover who “goes to her evil lair and writes songs about it for revenge.” So on “Blank Space,” helmed by her frequent collaborator Joseph Kahn, she had some fun with the commentary on her dating life and love-obsessed image by playing a perfect girlfriend in a picturesque relationship who goes full Swimfan in the mansion she shares with her partner. She stabs a blood-filled cake, cries mascara tears, drops an iPhone in a fountain, and destroys the decor, all with a wink at both her fans and detractors. —B.S.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.