Some videos did not illustrate a song. They taught the screen a new grammar. These ten are still being quoted.
10OK Go – “Here It Goes Again” The 2006 treadmill film, one take, no plot except precision, showed that a video could be a viral machine and a dance score at once. YouTube was young. The language of the shared stunt starts here, with four men and a gym.
9Missy Elliott – “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” Hype Williams, 1997, put Elliott in an inflated black suit against a fisheye future. The trash-bag look became a sentence. Hip-hop video learned it could be surreal without dropping the swagger. The suit is still the logo.
8Dire Straits – “Money for Nothing” In 1985 early computer animation turned a store worker’s complaint into blocky men who lived inside the television. The CGI is crude now. Then it was a new room. MTV had a clip that looked like the medium looking at itself.
7a-ha – “Take On Me” Steve Barron’s 1985 rotoscoped chase, pencil lines swallowing a live face, is still the clip people mean when they say a video can be a comic. The song is a hit. The drawing is the language. Sketch and flesh in the same frame, and pop understood sequence.
6Madonna – “Like a Prayer” The 1989 video, with burning crosses and a Black saint, made the clip a scandal with a theology. Pepsi flinched. The images did not. After this, a pop video could be a thesis, not a smile, and the argument would sell the single anyway.
5Peter Gabriel – “Sledgehammer” Stephen R. Johnson’s 1986 stop-motion, fruit, clay, a train of chickens, proved a face could be a canvas for a whole studio of tricks. It dominated early MTV. The language is accumulation: one idea per second, none of them shy.
4Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Samuel Bayer’s 1991 gym, the janitor, the cheerleaders, the chaos at the end, gave the decade its sullen face. It looks like a school riot because it is staged as one. Grunge video, after this, had a uniform it could wear or refuse.
3David Bowie – “Ashes to Ashes” David Mallet, 1980, solarised Pierrot on a beach, a bulldozer, a sky the wrong colour. Bowie buried Major Tom in pictures as carefully as in the lyric. The new-romantic look took notes. The clip is a costume drama for a song about relapse.
2Queen – “Bohemian Rhapsody” Bruce Gowers filmed the 1975 promo in a few hours, the faces in diamonds, the opera faces, no story except the song’s own. It is the clip that taught bands a video could be the single’s body, not a commercial glued on afterward.
1Michael Jackson – “Thriller” John Landis, 1983, fourteen minutes, a budget like a short film, Vincent Price, a dance that streets still copy. After Thriller a video could be an event with a premiere. The language of the pop clip as cinema starts in that graveyard, red jacket and all.
