My 40 Favorite Music Videos of All Time (Part 1)

10 of the best from the 80s.

Contrary to popular belief, MTV didn’t invent the music video.

In fact, the form was pushing boundaries around artistic expression (and, let’s be honest, sales promotion) as early as the 1890s, when Thomas Edison, among others, staked their claim as the originator of the “music video.”

Flash forward to the latter half of the 20th century, and music videos started to infiltrate the culture more frequently. Serge Gainsbourg, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and, perhaps most famously, Queen all released promo videos for popular singles. Up until the end of the 1970s, most music videos were tethered to some sort of live performance concept, however theatrical.

But let’s not kid ourselves: The modern music video as we know it—both in terms of aesthetic tropes and the always-on consumption model—began on August 1, 1981, when MTV hit the airwaves.

In the 40+ years since then, music videos haven’t seceded from the pop culture conversation. Instead, with hundreds of them now part of the Billion View Club, you could argue that it’s become more essential than ever as a promotional vehicle.

This post—the first of four parts—will walk you through my favorite music videos in this history of the medium, decade by decade. Of course, this list is by no means exhaustive. I could never get to every single influential or culturally significant music video of every decade. That would require a TON of writing.

Today, we’re starting with 10 of my favorites from the 1980s. Before you dive in, if you haven’t subscribed yet or know someone who’d enjoy content like this, I’d love it if you joined or shared the newsletter. It goes a long way to growing this incredible community of music lovers.

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Let’s begin!

1. "Thriller" – Michael Jackson (1983)

Did you really think we were going to start anywhere else?

According to an excellent 2010 Vanity Fair piece by Nancy Griffin, here’s a brief list of the “Thriller” music video’s accomplishments:

• It helped double the eponymous album’s sales, which eventually skyrocketed to over a million copies a week after the video was released.

• It juiced MTV’s viewership numbers tenfold every time they played the video, which, according to former exec Les Garland, was up to five times a day.

• It made such an impression on the A-listers who attended the premiere that director John Landis played it multiple times after being asked for an encore.

• The Vestron (!) physical release sold millions of copies in mere months, making it the biggest-selling home video at that time.

• The behind-the-scenes documentary, Making Michael Jackson's Thriller, also sold north of 10 million VHS and Betamax copies after hitting store shelves.

It also nearly got Michael Jackson excommunicated from the Jehovah’s Witness organization after its leaders said the music video endorsed demonology (hence the disclaimer at the beginning).

Beyond those accolades, it set the early standard for what music videos could be. The makeup effects are still hugely entertaining, as is the extended dance break with choreography that’s been burned into our collective muscle memory over the years.

If there’s a definitive before and after inflection point when music videos became an art form, it’s “Thriller.”

2. "Sledgehammer" – Peter Gabriel (1986)

Speaking of creative standard-setters, there’s Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”

Its pioneering combination of stop-motion animation, claymation, and other visual techniques was an expansion on other videos director Stephen R. Johnson had spearheaded in the past, most notably the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” (more on Byrne and company later) But this slice of surrealist filmmaking is next-level, fitting for an artist who’d been known to push the stylistic envelope going back to his Genesis days. The video became so popular that Gabriel and Johnson tried to recapture some of the magic with the follow-up single “Big Time.”

The singer/songwriter later admitted how much the video helped boost the commercial appeal of “Sledgehammer.” As he said to Rolling Stone, “I think the song would have fared okay,’ cause it did seem to work well on the radio […] But I’m not sure that it would have been as big a hit, and I certainly don’t think the album would have been opened up to as many people without the video. Because I think it had a sense both of humor and of fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me.”

When done this well, sometimes eccentricity can be an iconoclast’s most fun quality.

3. "Take on Me" – a-ha (1985)

I remember when I first saw this music video when I was a kid, I had so many questions.

How does she get pulled into the comic strip? Was it something in the coffee she was drinking? How does no one else in the diner see a damn hand–in black-and-white sketch form, no less—rise up out of a comic strip and beckon for her to join him? Why does she agree to this? Is she that lonely? Or reckless? What is the guy’s deal? What is their deal together?

Of course, the more times I saw the music video, the less all that mattered. This short film isn’t supposed to follow any sort of understandable logic. It’s a complete flight of fancy, replete with so many dazzling visuals it’s hard to pick one standout. There’s also a cinematic quality that builds an underrated amount of tension for a music video. When the waitress crumples up the comic strip, and the two main characters are being chased by the bad guys, you get sucked into the drama, no matter how many times you’ve seen it before.

Unfortunately, this track was a-ha’s only stateside hit, though they produced a ton of great synth-pop and new wave music over the years, including a spooky sequel to this video. If there’s any band on this list that warrants more investigation, it might be them.

4. “Opposites Attract” — Paula Abdul (1989)

Yes, there’s a Who Framed Roger Rabbit level of silliness here, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

The video features Paula Abdul dancing alongside an animated counterpart in MC Skat Cat, the results of rotoscoping animation done over Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers’ dance moves. The idea of Paula strutting alongside a cartoon apparently came from an old Gene Kelly film Anchors Aweigh, where the film legend executes a routine that includes Tom and Jerry. The music video oozes charm and fun, two qualities that shone through decades later when she recreated it on James Corden’s late-night TV show.

It’s worth noting that “Opposites Attract” also represents Paula Abdul at her peak as a solo artist (though she arguably became more famous later as an American Idol judge). At that point, she’d already had multiple hit singles off her debut album, Forever Your Girl, including “Straight Up” and “Cold Hearted.” This track nabbed her a Grammy for Best Music Video in 1990, cresting on a wave of commercial success and industry validation that she’d never quite top in the ensuing years.

5. “I Want to Break Free” — Queen (1984)

Few music videos put a definitive spin on a song’s lyrics quite like Queen’s “I Want to Break Free.”

The 1984 video, directed by David Mallet, is a send-up of the popular British soap opera Coronation Street and features the band going through day’s mundanities in a set resembling a tacky suburban home. The idea supposedly came from drummer Roger Taylor, who proclaimed that Queen should do a music video in drag in part because “the Stones have done it.” In spirit, the style and choreography follow a great English tradition of comedy sketches featuring men dressed up as women for absurdity’s sake (see Monty Python).

Unfortunately, the reaction was totally polarized on either side of the Atlantic. British fans took it as the joke it was meant to be, peaking at No. 3 on the UK singles chart and cracking the Top 10 in several other European and Latin American markets. In the United States, Mercury’s “open display of transvestism” was the primary reason MTV chose to ban the video from its airwaves, severely limiting its reach for a mid-80s youth audience that was, by that point, was gobbling up its content in huge quantities.

There’s a whole separate conversation to be had about MTV’s checkered reputation when it comes to censorship. For now, let’s agree it was a miss at the time, and thanks to platforms like YouTube, it is even more satisfying to know this terrific music video eventually found its people.

6. “Rhythm Nation” – Janet Jackson (1989)

This music video, the final (and most breathtaking) segment in the eponymous short film Jackson released as an accompaniment to the album of the same name, lies in its precise execution. Everything, from the militaristic choreography to the androgynous uniforms, was carefully assembled for maximum aesthetic and thematic impact. “The foggy, smoky street and the dark, black-and-white tone, that was all intentional,” Jackson said. “When you've done a lot of videos, it can be difficult to keep it fresh and new. You have to try something you've never done, in fear of looking like something you've already created.”

Originally, her record label didn’t want to commit the idea to film out of concern the concept didn’t have enough mainstream appeal. Of course, they were wrong and Jackson’s conviction was so incredibly right. From the industrial, dystopian setting to a dance routine that’s been routinely cited among the best ever, it’s hard to overstate just how far-reaching its pop culture influence has grown over the years. Many female pop stars, from Rihanna to Beyoncé, have liberally borrowed from or updated the music video’s version of cool for new generations.

Perhaps more than its multiple Grammy wins, it’s that level of reverence that makes this video exceptional.

7. “Rio” – Duran Duran (1982)

An underrated aspect of music video culture is the aspirational imagery. These are pop stars that, beyond lip-syncing along to a hit song, must look the part. The latest fashions, exotic locations, attractive hangers-on—all in the name of selling some aspect of craving the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

“Rio,” the fourth and final single off Duran Duran’s eponymous LP, works overtime to create an alluring atmosphere drenched in crystal blues and striking, saturated pastels. Filmed over the course of three days in Antigua in May 1982, it’s a deliriously giddy mashup of the juvenile and the ultra-cool, as if the cast from Weekend at Bernie’s descended upon a tropical island Bond film set. There are cocktails poured into glasses perched upon fleshy navels, as well as even taller cocktails sipped underwater. And that’s before paint starts splattering onto unsuspecting sunbathers.

Is it the deepest music video ever created? Not by a long shot. But, like the band’s greatest hits, it’s an incredibly fun window into the excesses and materialism of the times. On that note, the yacht used in the video (named Eileen) was “rescued” by Panerai CEO Angelo Bonati and, according to reports, is once again seaworthy. If you make the right friends, perhaps a remake of this video could be in your future.

8. “Bastards of Young” – The Replacements (1985)

Sometimes the driving force behind a great music video is unrestrained anti-establishment energy.

Case in point for the Replacements’ mid-80s video for “Bastards of Young,” the most memorable cultural contribution from their first major label LP, Tim. The lyrics, which drip with alienation and disillusionment, are captured perfectly in the visual choices by Randy Skinner and Jeff Ayeroff’s larger concept. The slow zoom-out off the speaker, the out-of-focus hand cradling a cigarette, the violent, sudden ending—it’s never anything less than mesmerizing.

What’s arguably more interesting is the video’s commentary on the state of the art form and its biggest platform, MTV. Singer Paul Westerberg famously hated the latter, at one point devoting an entire song (”Seen Your Video”) to taking down bands who prioritized camera-ready performance gimmicks over their actual songs. “If we do a video, we want to do one that nobody would want to watch all the way through, much less twice,” he once said. The irony is that quite the opposite ended up happening. “Bastards of Young” earned regular rotation on the program 120 Minutes, which helped it become a cult classic.

9. “Once in a Lifetime” – Talking Heads (1980)

Co-directed and choreographed by Toni Basil of “Mickey” fame, “Once in a Lifetime” is arguably the finest music video from a group that produced several of them.

I’ll emphasize the word “choreographed” because, amazingly, David Byrne’s iconic, often spastic dance moves in front of a blue screen aren’t wayward improvisations. Apparently, he and Basil studied footage of various religious rituals, some of which ended up projected behind Byrne in the final cut. “We watched the footage together, examined the movements, and discussed how to incorporate it into his performance,” Basil explained to Uncut. “Technically, I was the choreographer, but David kind of choreographed himself.”

Shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles with little more than a digital camera and a couple of lights, this low-budget masterpiece leaned into that aesthetic for maximum effect. “I used a real old-fashioned zoom lens to make [Byrne’s] jerky movements even more pronounced,” Basil said. “It's about as low-tech as you could get and still be broadcastable.” Ultimately, it ended up being much more than that. The “Once in a Lifetime” video won multiple awards, was exhibited in the New York Museum Of Modern Art, and played on MTV for many years, despite debuting a full year before the channel came into existence.

To quote Byrne directly, the Talking Heads’ brilliant, unique brand of quirky fun remains the same as it ever was …

10. “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” – Kate Bush (1985)

Forget the unforgettable atmospherics at play here—the lighting, the colors, the balletlike camera movements—let’s appreciate the degree of difficulty associated with learning this kind of classical choreography. It’s not your garden-variety shimmying from side to side, that’s for sure.

In interviews, Bush stated her reasoning behind crafting such an all-encompassing artistic statement stemmed from how few music videos took advantage of the opportunities dance could afford them. “[Dance] was being used quite trivially,” she said at the time. “It was being exploited: haphazard images, busy, lots of dances, without really the serious expression, and wonderful expression, that dance can give. So we felt how interesting it would be to make a very simple routine between two people, almost classic, and very simply filmed. So that's what we tried, really, to do a serious piece of dance.”

Bush had to train for the better part of a year to get in the kind of physical shape you need to keep up with demanding choreography, and it shows. Her performance is so graceful and elegant that it’s absolutely spellbinding. Not to sound like an old crank, but today’s twerk-centric music videos could learn a thing or two about dance choreography from “Hill.”

Let’s bring this style back, please and thank you.