My Top Ten Music Videos

I've been toying with writing up this list for a while, but was always discouraged by all the old excuses. I haven't watched enough music videos to know what I'm talking about. I only really watched them regularly during my early 20s, when I would habitually turn on the VH1 countdowns and compilation shows on weekend mornings. I have a heavy, heavy bias towards certain musical genres and artists, and couldn't be remotely objective about my picks.

And all of this is okay. It recently dawned on me how many music videos I actually have watched over the years, how many of the major directors I was familiar with, and how much I really do love the music video form. As a film nerd, I know that music videos have always been one of the best platforms for innovative filmmaking, and a great launching pad for talent. And most of the videos on this list are ones that I've obsessed over, watched dozens of times on repeat, and have never forgotten.

So, below, find my ten favorite music videos, unranked and ordered by premiere date. It's almost all rock videos and there's an awful lot of animation. Please note that one major criteria that knocked a lot of videos off the list is that I have to actually like the song. Sorry, "Sledgehammer."



"Take On Me" by A-ha (1985) - dir. Steve Barron - Out of all the older videos I remember glimpsing as a kid, this is the one that stuck. It features fabulous hand-drawn animation, it's beautifully conceived and designed, and it's so very, very '80s. I just learned today that the climactic finale was an extended reference to Ken Russell's "Altered States," which makes so much sense. Also, director Steve Barron went on to be involved with many projects I loved over the years, including Jim Henson's "Storyteller" and the "Merlin" miniseries.

"Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (1994) - dir. Mark Romanek - I didn't actually see the full video for this one until I was well into my twenties, and immediately became obsessed with it, with Romanek's entire body of work, and with tracking down all the various influences for the imagery in the video. Hello Francis Bacon, and Hello Brothers Quay. I'm still kind of ticked off that the "Making of" video isn't included in the "Director's Label: The Work of Director Mark Romanek" DVD I bought specifically so I could see the uncensored cut of "Closer," pre-Youtube.

"Around the World" by Daft Punk (1997) - dir. Michel Gondry - I had to have a Gondry video, and I nearly picked the White Stripes' "Hardest Button to Button." However, I like the Daft Punk song better. I like the goofiness and simplicity of the video's concept. Let's have some dancing skeletons! Robots! People with teeny fake heads! And I just love the visual representation of how the music actually functions, with the different groups acting as the bass line and vocals and synthesizers, all interacting and recurring. It's more hypnotic the longer you watch it.

"Do the Evolution" by Pearl Jam (1998) - dir. Kevin Altieri and Todd McFarlane - This was such a big deal in my little corner of the media world when it was released. You had guys responsible for "Batman: The Animated Series" and "Spawn" collaborating on this really dark, nihilistic piece of mature animation. In hindsight, it's not nearly as incendiary as I thought it was as a teenager, but some of those images still make my skin crawl. As with many groups from this era, I didn't become a fan of Pearl Jam and their music until much, much later.

"Intergalactic" by The Beastie Boys (1998) - dir. MCA - There's a reason the Beastie Boys's music video collection has a Criterion release. I considered the beloved "Sabotage," of course, but "Intergalactic" was always more fun to sing, and I am such a sucker for kaiju monster battles. The homage is so silly, and yet so loving. This is one of the few heavily Japanese influenced pieces of Western media that doesn't immediately make me cringe, probably because the aesthetics put all the emphasis on the wonderful, wacky kaiju battle universe.

"Weapon of Choice" by Fatboy Slim (2001) - dir. Spike Jonze - Why yes, I will watch this music video with Christopher Walken dancing and flying around an empty hotel lobby over and over and over again. Jonze is one of the key music video auteurs, whose work has been hugely influential, and I'm glad that I managed to get at least one of his videos on his list. Also, this is one of the videos that first sparked my interest in the medium in the first place, sending me down a rabbit hole of lists and compilations as I tried to play catch-up on a couple decades of content.

"Hurt" by Johnny Cash (2003) - dir. Mark Romanek - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash were well before my time, but the video gets across the weight of all those tumultuous years together and the extent of their fame and reputation as musicians. The lyrics of the NIN song are gutting enough, but the contrast between the archival footage of Cash in his prime, and the decaying House of Cash museum is so unsparing, and so wrenching. Even without the context of Cash's death only months after the video premiered, it's a fantastic, elegeic career capper.

"Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz (2005) - dir. Pete Candeland and Jamie Hewlett - I was a big Gorillaz fan for a couple of years, peaking with the release of their "Demon Days" album and all the related material. "Feel Good Inc." and its sequel video "El Mañana" still strike me as their most impressive achievements, because they evoke this deep sadness and despair, even in a Miyazaki-inspired fantasy context. The adventures of the Gorillaz as fictional characters were always sort of piecemeal and never added up to anything too coherent, but for a moment it felt like they did.

"Touch My Body" by Mariah Carey (2008) - dir. Brett Ratner - I'm not really a fan of Mariah Carey. I've never really understood the charms of "30 Rock." And the less said of my opinions toward the work of Brett Ratner, the better. But there's just something irresistible about the combination of this particular coochie-coo track with the weirdly wholesome nerd-love fantasies of Jack McBrayer's IT guy. It just thrills me how much Carey gets into it, and then there's laser tag and a unicorn and frisbee. Don't we all wish we could find somebody to be this uncool with?

"This is America" by Childish Gambino (2018) - dir. Hiro Murai - And after about a solid decade of mostly ignoring or only glancing over music videos, suddenly Donald Glover and company go and throw this grenade into the middle of the American culture war. For the first time in ages, I found myself watching a music video over and over again on repeat, marvelling at all the layers of symbolism and detail, and then trying to track down the influences and references. It's a good reminder that videos like this can still have power - and boy can they still have teeth.

Okay, that was less rock than I thought there was.

Honorable mentions:

“Sabotage” by Beastie Boys (1994)
"Frozen" by Madonna (1998)
"The Hardest Button to Button" by The White Stripes (2003)
"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day (2004)
"White and Nerdy" by Weird Al (2006)
"Pork and Beans" by Weezer (2008)
“Here It Goes Again” by OK Go (2009)

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