Q List: The Greatest Music Videos of All Time

Recorded as a single in 1978 and first shown in 1980 on Saturday Night Live, the absurdist nature of the narrative combined with chipmunk vocals and unforgettable lyrics such as “Roly-poly fish heads are never seen/Drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants/With Oriental women” only enhanced the lofi approach to the video. The Barnes duo – Robert Haimer and former child actor Bill Mumy – were friends who made tunes for fun. After turning in the song to the Dr. Demento Show, they constructed a video with the late actor Bill Paxton directing and interacting with dressed-up fish heads and spaced-out extras. It is a video that is both hysterical and repulsive. In other words, a certified cult classic. —Amy Hughes

McCartney’s Japanese pot bust in January of 1980 effectively ended his band Wings. However, in the summer months of 1979, he had been on his own, recording demos, bleeps and bloops at his Spirit of Ranachan studio in Campbelltown, Scotland. While the live Wings version of “Coming Up” went to Number 1 in the U.S., it was the “freaky-deeky” version that caught the attention of John Lennon and propelled him back into the studio after a five-year hiatus. The video, directed by Keith McMillan, featured McCartney playing ten roles (including "Beatle Paul") and wife Linda in two characters. Filming took place over two days with a staff of fifty that involved impeccable timing and innovative use of Chroma-key to make the performance look seamless. —A.H.

When MTV launched on August 1, 1981, this was the first video shared with the throngs of eager teens tuning in. The clip is packed to the brim with futuristic Bowiesque imagery and heavy-handed messaging about the technological shift underway in the music industry. For the next two decades, music videos would rule the airwaves as the once-dominant radio industry began its long, slow decline. The video includes visual effects that were cutting edge at the time. Also cutting edge: frontman Trevor Horn’s white horn-rimmed and frizzy hair, while keyboardist Geoff Downes’ stack of synths foreshadowed the electronic sounds that would come to dominate pop music throughout the rest of the decade. —Noah Zucker

Famously featuring a drenched David Byrne dancing spasmodically in suit, bow tie and glasses, this video was made on a near-zero budget and choreographed by Toni Basil (herself a future MTV staple with “Hey Mickey”). Byrne claimed there was nothing hidden in the lyrics except possibly the unconscious, living life on autopilot, where we finally ask, "how did I get here?" The visuals were an inspirational string of global religious rituals (shown via green screen projection) that Byrne incorporated to great effect with his own highly-stylized performance. —A.H.

Arguably the most cinematic of MTV’s early videos, thanks to the efforts of director Russell Mulcahy, who also helmed the video for Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth,” this was a game-changer both for Duran Duran as well as MTV itself. "It’s very hard to think of that song without seeing the pictures from the video, because that really was the video that sort of changed everything for the band," bassist John Taylor told the A.V. Club in 2012. "We went from being sort of like a club band, an underground band, to being, like, 'Wow!'” But when the video showed up at the network, senior executive vice-president Les Garland recalled how “our director of talent and artist relations came running in and said, 'You have got to see this video that's come in.' 'Hungry Like the Wolf' was the greatest video I'd ever seen." As history reveals, more than a few viewers felt the same way. —Will Harris

The daddy of them all. The John Landis-directed 13 minute and 42 second “theatrical short” was supposedly conceived after Jackson saw Landis’ American Werewolf in London, and written around a brief from manager Frank DiLeo’s instruction: “It’s simple – all you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary.” The scariness can be disputed, but the singing – and especially the dancing – is exemplary. An immediate sensation from the moment it debuted on MTV, the video not only cemented Jackson’s status as the biggest star of the 80s, but helped define MTV’s position as a serious cultural force. —Dominic Utton

It’s the simplest of premises – place the focus on a map that has one of those big red “YOU ARE HERE” dots on it, then gradually push closer in it on it – but the execution by director Steve Barron is pretty great, shifting from the map to the actual location, which is still covered by a big red dot. The building, the street, the parked cars... The whole lot of it is completely painted red. Once the camera pushes through the red curtains, however, it’s the Human League, dressed in all black, performing in a white room, and that’s where we mostly remain, barring a brief moment in the middle of the proceedings where we cut to a boy playing outside runs into the red area and suddenly finds himself wearing all red as a result. In an interview with the website The Black Hit of Space, Barron confirmed that the “Keep Feeling (Fascination)” video is the one from his career of which he’s the most proud, but as he also revealed, “I am still banned from the London borough of Peckham to this day for not being able to remove the red paint from the street.” —W.H.

If any artist deserves two entries on this list, it’s Jackson. The first video by a Black artist to receive serious rotation on MTV, “Billie Jean” lacks the obvious storytelling and big-budget choreography of follow-ups “Beat It” or “Thriller,” but instead places Jackson almost alone in an eerie, post-apocalyptic landscape that perfectly captures the unsettling undercurrent behind the song’s infectious groove. It’s arguably far spookier than “Thriller” – and in the paving slabs that illuminate as he dances on them, provides an image that remains iconic four decades later. —D.U.

Another narrative masterclass, this video not only propelled the Norwegian three-piece into global stars (and singer Morten Harket onto the walls of a million teenage bedrooms), it also set a new standard for the pop promo being something smarter than a montage of live performances or a bunch of guys larging it on a yacht somewhere. The storyline itself is sweet and perfectly timed, but the visual inventiveness with which it’s brought to life is nothing short of dazzling: the video’s blend of pencil-sketched graphics and glossy film footage was revolutionary at the time – and still seems so nearly 40 years later. —D.U.

There are many memorable videos in the Cure’s back catalog, and virtually all of them have been helmed by the same director: Tim Pope. This one almost always ends up near the top of the list of the band’s best, owing to the slightly nightmarish scenario of having the band all piled into a wardrobe, only for it to plunge off a cliff and into the water below. As Robert Smith said in a video interview, “We had the stupidity to mention to [Pope] that we thought it’d be a good idea if we did something similar to a wardrobe, something that simulates claustrophobia. He took it literally, because he likes to induce pain.” —W.H.

The Los Angeles Times once said of “Bastards of Young” that “it may not be the best rock video ever made, but it’s certainly the ultimate rock video.” That’s because it starts on a close-up of a speaker, pulls back to reveal a makeshift stereo cabinet and a few albums, then a cigarette-smoking someone walks into the shot, sits down on a couch, remains there for a bit, and then stands up and kicks in the speaker before walking away. The end. That the ‘Mats weren’t keen on playing the music-video game even as newly-minted major label artists shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows the Minneapolis band’s back story, but it may surprise you that even the smoker – whose face is never seen – isn’t a member of the band. Per ‘Mats biographer Bob Mehr in his book Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements, “Though they were both on set, neither Westerberg nor Stinson was willing, even with their back to the camera. In the end, set production designer Robert Fox took the part, though Westerberg did allow his pack of cigarettes to appear.” —W.H.

A metaphorical take on sex, Gabriel’s groundbreaking video (complete with vegetables, fruits and animated vehicles put together utilizing stop-motion animation) won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987 (a record still held to this day) and showed the public a playful, humorous side of Gabriel not seen since he left Genesis in 1975. The sixteen hours spent painstakingly matching Gabriel (who was under a sheet of glass and later remarked "It took a lot of hard work. I was thinking at the time, 'If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them'") to the objects was not without its hazards, as the produce and dead, featherless, headless chickens rotted under the hot lights. Remarkably, it worked out beautifully in the end, and Gabriel was unexpectedly rewarded with his first No. 1 in the U.S. —A.H.

So controversial was Madge’s 1989 promo that it provoked protests from the Vatican – with no less a music critic than the Pope himself calling for a boycott of her Blond Ambition tour. Not that Madonna cared. Into an uncompromising visual bombardment of racial prejudice, police brutality and the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan, the video depicts her prostrate in a church… before embracing a Black Jesus-like figure and dancing around the altar with a gospel choir. The result is every bit as brilliant and uplifting and defiantly original as Madonna herself.—D.U.

It was her 1986 album Control that allowed Janet Jackson to finally step out of the shadow of her older brother musically, and it was the clockwork choreography and instantly iconic wardrobe choices that accompanied the lead-off single to its follow-up that established Janet as a seismic multimedia force in her own right. When Beyonce dresses up as you for Halloween decades later, it’s safe to say you’ve done something very, very right. —Andrew Barker

Prior to this video, Metallica were possibly the biggest band in the world whose music you couldn’t hear on the radio or MTV. A few years later, it would be difficult to turn on the radio or MTV and not hear them, and it’s remarkable that a video this somber and serious-minded was the one that broke the dam. Relying heavily on clips (and long stretches of dialogue) taken from Dalton Trumbo’s 1971 anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun, “One” states its case with all the subtlety of a landmine, but just as explosive are the evocatively-shot performance sequences of the band itself, introduced to TV audiences here for the first time. —A.B.

Although it looks like the opening credits to the best ‘70s cop show never made, the video for this classic track came out of a series of photos the Beasties took of themselves dressed as undercover cops, eating donuts. Instead, as Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz) revealed in Apple TV+’s Beastie Boys Story, they decided to do a video instead. “Spike [Jonze] came over, and we played dress-up like we usually do, just running around like maniacs with no proper permits or cops or fire department or anything.” The end result was a video which – believe it or not – failed to win any of the five MTV Video Music Awards for which it was nominated. Its legacy, however, cannot be understated: as Amy Poehler wrote in the 2018 Beastie Boys Book, “There would be no Anchorman, no Wes Anderson, no Lonely Island, and no channel called Adult Swim if this video did not exist.” Hyperbole? Maybe. But we’ll allow it. —W.H.

The early years of the modern music video offer a treasure trove of boomer icons uneasily attempting to grapple with this new, suddenly mandatory requirement of music stardom, often practically straining themselves to appear as young and hip as possible. As usual, Leonard Cohen went his own way in this (second) video for his 1984 single, performing in full vintage supper club mode while elderly couples dance and pose in front of images of their younger selves. It’s alternately sweet, haunting and heartbreaking, and couldn’t be more defiantly out-of-step with MTV’s youth-at-any-cost mantra. —A.B.

The Seattle grunge movement provided no shortage of endlessly interpretable videos, from the bleak storytelling of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” to the pep rally riot of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But none were as evocative as the surreally apocalyptic visuals for Soundgarden’s unexpected crossover hit, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the band’s repeated insistence that there was no great meaning behind them at all. In fact, Soundgarden were hardly enthused about the concept of the shoot, as frontman Chris Cornell recalled telling director Howard Greenhalgh: “We’re not going to do anything. You’re not going to get anything out of us. We’re just going to stand there because we don’t want to do this anymore.” Apparently that was all the help he needed. —A.B.

The most ingenious of Spike Jonze’s early music videos, this spot for the first single from the Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia relies on a deceptively simple conceit. The foursome dance and maraud their way around Downtown LA backwards (while also rapping the song backwards), with the footage itself then played backwards, thus allowing for such strange phenomena as a water puddle sucking itself back up into the sky, cartoonish leaps onto the tops of nearby vans, and a stray Beastie Boy winding his bicycle through the crew in reverse. In lesser hands, this premise might have been cute, but with the group’s background as dancers and Jonze’s puckish skate video instincts working in perfect sync, it becomes a genuinely joyful work of art. —A.B.

The walls, the furniture... Arguably the most surprising thing about this occasionally mindbogglingly moving video is that there was nothing virtual about the way it was pulled off by director Jonathan Glazer. "No computer trickery was used," Glazer told EW. "What we did was put the whole set on wheels and attach the camera to one wall. The furniture also had little wheels, and we had guys moving the set and the furniture [outside of the frame]. The floor never moved. It was like a magician's trick." “I didn’t get it,” admitted Jay Kay in the making-of video posted on the official Jamiroquai YouTube channel last year. “I couldn’t quite understand. And he said, ‘You’ll see when you get to the set.’” It still took him a bit, but eventually it clicked. “I said, “Oh, I get it. This is cool.” —W.H.

Hype Williams was already hip-hop’s most in-demand video helmer long before he first crossed paths with Busta Rhymes, but it was here that the director’s style truly came into its own. The hyperactive cutting, the lysergic splashes of color and the signature fisheye lens are all present and accounted for, and it’s hard to imagine a more perfect foil for the director than the eternally-animated Busta… —A.B.

…at least, until he met Missy Elliott. Famous for pushing Hype Williams’ aesthetic to its most hallucinatory extremes, as well as the billowing garbage-bag outfit that the star dons throughout, what’s most brilliant about this video is the degree to which Timbaland’s deliriously off-kilter beat seems to imbue every cut and every movement on screen with some sort of supernatural synchronicity, until the raw footage itself seems to contract and expand with every snare hit and synth pulse. Elliott would go on to make bigger, more elaborate videos, but this was the kick-in-the-door introduction that set the stage for one of the most innovative stars of the late-1990s. —A.B.

For all his skills as a director, Paul Thomas Anderson is not necessarily known for his work on music videos. Indeed, the one he did for Michael Penn’s “Try” was, in fact, the first one he ever did. That said, since he’d been a film director for a decent while before that, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he turned in some extremely memorable work here, utilizing the longest corridor in America and filming it in one unbroken Steadicam take. As Ross Birks wrote on Dim the House Lights, “Given its brief running time, it’s amazing how much visual information Anderson manages to squeeze into this thing: an army of extras, camera trickery, lighting changes, pyrotechnics, a snow machine, not to mention the extended homage to Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Even at three minutes, this is unmistakably a P.T. Anderson picture.” —W.H.

In 2023, it can be hard to watch Britney Spears’ debut video with fresh eyes, knowing the sort of hell that this early brush with hyper-sexualization would later come to unleash on the young singer’s psyche. But it’s just as hard to think of a video that could have single-handedly turned an unknown 16-year-old into a global superstar as quickly as Nigel Dick’s TRL-breaking 1998 video, which signaled the teenage takeover of pop music in earnest. —A.B.

This single shot video is at once deeply disturbing and incredibly uplifting. In principle it seems simple enough – a close-up of Thom Yorke’s head encased in an astronaut’s helmet, singing as it slowly fills with water – but the reality of filming it was later described by director Grant Gee as “a horror show… repeated torture.” On the two-minute mark Yorke becomes completely submerged – and remains so for another minute, until the song’s finale. The effect is mesmerizing: that same tension between the nursery-rhyme quality of the music and the bleakness of its lyrics that makes “No Surprises” so unsettling is rendered almost unbearable by the fact we’re watching a man trapped, unable to breathe and staring right down the camera at us. And then the look of absolute triumph in Yorke’s eyes when the water level drops again… shivers down the spine, every time. —D.U.

Blink-182 made a giant parody of Total Request Live-era music videos to accompany the biggest single of their career. The group’s adolescent sense of humor was front and center as they poked lighthearted fun at boy bands like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and pop divas like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, with clear references to chart-topping tracks like “I Want It That Way” and “Genie in a Bottle.” That’s why in hindsight it comes off as a dense time capsule of turn of the century pop culture. But bassist Mark Hoppus said he wasn’t familiar with the source material when Blink-182 was working on the clip with director Marcos Siega. Ironically, “All the Small Things” saw enormous success on TRL. It was retired after more than two months on the show’s countdown. —N.Z.

It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking video, but it’s a flashback to the days in the mid-1980s when videos were all about the fun the artists were having. This feel like the spiritual successor to the stuff David Lee Roth was doing with his early solo videos, with the members of Foo Fighters playing multiple roles – airline pilots, flight attendants, and passengers – with the assistance of prosthetics, and it’s additionally aided by bringing in Tenacious D (Jack Black and Kyle Glass) as incompetent drug-smuggling luggage handlers. The end result: director Jesse Peretz won the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video in 2001. —W.H.

As with Spears, the breakthrough video from D’Angelo’s second album would also come to haunt the star in later years, with the man previously regarded as the likeliest heir to Marvin Gaye understandably disturbed to find himself reduced to eye-candy in the popular imagination, and a decade-long retreat from the spotlight would soon follow. But also as with Spears, it’s impossible to deny the immediacy and intensity of this one-shot clip, which gradually pushes the song’s gentle, slow-burning come-ons into supernova territory. —A.B.

MTV notoriety and anti-capitalist fury don’t usually go together, but Rage Against the Machine managed to bridge that gap with this raucous music video. The clip directed by filmmaker and activist Michael Moore features the band playing in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Police officers can be seen desperately trying to stop the concert. Between glimpses of the chaos, there are shots of a satirical game show based off the program Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Because Moore didn’t get a permit for the shoot, he was eventually taken away by police, and the video ends with the crowd storming the stock exchange. Officials responded by shuttering the building’s riot doors and ending trading early for the day. The 2000 clip made headlines again in 2016 after viewers realized one attendee was holding a “Donald J Trump for President” sign. —N.Z.

The eminently playful French auteur Michel Gondry had already built up an estimable resume of mind-bending videos (especially the half dozen he directed for Bjork) before he tried his hand at features, but this literally dizzying confection for Kylie Minogue may be his most purely delightful. Circling an eventful Paris intersection in what appears to be a single shot as one Kylie becomes two, then three, then four, you start off trying to figure out exactly how he pulled it off, only to quickly surrender to the spectacle. —A.B.

Directed by Mark Romanek, this may be the only country video on our list, but it’s arguably the most moving of the whole bunch, thanks to the combination of the song’s lyrics, the age and health of Cash as he’s singing, and the archival clips surrounding the current-day footage which show him in his prime. Romanek set the video in the House of Cash museum, which was in a state of disrepair after having been closed for some time. “That's when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny's health,” Romanek told Rolling Stone, “as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs.” By the time it reaches its powerful conclusion, the viewer is almost as emotionally drained as Cash is physically. Now that’s a good video. —W.H.

That the Arctic Monkeys should open their debut LP with the lyric “Anticipation has the habit to set you up for disappointment” is brilliant enough in itself, but the video that accompanied this song is something else entirely. So what happens? Well… nothing and everything. A young man in a parka and hoody smashes the bejaysus out of his drums in the courtyard of a housing estate for what seems to be two days and two nights, enduring bleeding hands and chip-throwing roadmen (as well as the ministrations of a schoolgirl guardian angel) before being visited by a menacing figure with a baseball bat – who swings at his head at the song’s climax. It’s been claimed that the whole thing is a retelling of the story of the Buddha enduring torments in search of nirvana: make of that what you will, but what it most definitely does do is capture perfectly the spirit of those early Arctics songs – at once thrilling and dangerous and, it has to be said, anchored by some outstanding drumming. —D.U.

Punk stardom has never appeared more glamorous than it did in this cynical and deeply meta music video, in which Fall Out Boy loses all pretense of scene authenticity with gratuitous product placements for brands like Nokia and TAG Body Spray. Kim Kardashian’s cameo as Pete Wentz’s love interest didn’t help their case either. But the clip’s narrative about the woes of filming a high-budget music video still managed to shred the major label world Fall Out Boy had stepped into, with almost everyone working on the set alongside the band portrayed as a witless monkey wearing trendy clothing. Throughout the clip, Wentz and the director (a monkey in a fedora) compete for Kardashian’s attention. In the last scene, the bassist destroys the set after the monkey makes a move on the reality TV star. —N.Z.

All a band needs to make a memorable music video is a good idea...and lots of empty beer cans. At the beginning of this clip, the stoner rock band Red Fang encounters a group of nerdy live action role players practicing their dueling skills in the forest. After insulting the LARPers, the band goes home to drink an unthinkable amount of beer. But instead of trashing their empties, Red Fang cuts up the cans and uses them to build several elaborate suits of beer-themed armor. The band goes back to the woods and challenges the LARPers to a fight, only for the group of highly skilled nerds to end up massacring the band in cartoonishly bloody fashion. The video shows how much can be accomplished with a shoestring budget. —N.Z.

What at first seems to be the deceptively simple tale of a French Open tennis clash between two rival DJs (yeah, we know, just stick with it) is in actual fact a four-minute masterpiece of the storytelling art. It’s got the lot: a villain, a hero, a love interest, comedy, tension, crisis, redemption, Novak Djokovic (I told you, stick with it), and best of all, a devastating twist right at the end. They should show this video in creative writing classes as an example of how to construct the perfect narrative arc – and of course it helps that the song’s an absolute banger too. —D.U.

Despite being the fourth single released from his landmark 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” certainly had the longest afterlife, later adopted as a de facto anthem by the Black Lives Matter movement and appearing everywhere from anti-Donald Trump protests to the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Director Collin Tilley’s black-and-white video anticipates much of that, with its stark yet ultimately uplifting imagery delving into the nightmarish iconography of police brutality and governmental neglect, while also allowing Lamar to literally rise above it, however temporarily. —A.B.

In truth, we could have picked at least half a dozen Beyonce videos for this list: the pot-stirring revolutionary chic of “Formation,” the how-did-she-not-break-her-ankles? opening dance move in “Crazy in Love,” the endlessly referenced choreography of “Single Ladies”…not since Michael Jackson has one star packed as many time-capsule moments into a single videography. But the “visual album” accompaniment to Lemonade was Beyonce’s crowning multimedia achievement, and no image from that remarkable project has lodged itself as indelibly in the cultural memory as the star in that yellow dress, Louisville Slugger in hand, wreaking joyful destruction as the world’s most serene avenging angel. —A.B.

Restoring a much-needed sense of fun to the video format, "Juice" features Lizzo placing herself into various scenarios that one might find when flipping up and down the TV dial back in the day, playing a plethora of different characters, from aerobics instructor to talk show guest to hand lotion spokesmodel. "There's such a nostalgia with channel-surfing that I had as a kid, like going through Nickelodeon and going to Cartoon Network," Lizzo told MTV. "And then the late-night, like 3 a.m. when you can't sleep, where it was like Mama's House was playing, or Seinfeld. I wanted to be Mrs. Rogers from Mrs. Rogers' Neighborhood. We was gonna do a Good Times scene. Like, we definitely were gonna go for it. We wanted to do a futuristic alien sci-fi show, but, you know, we didn't have the budget... or the time." —W.H.