My 40 Favorite Music Videos of All Time (Part 2)

10 standouts from the 90s.

The music video may have been conceived in the 1980s, but the art form came into its own in the 1990s.

Bigger budgets, the rise of auteurs behind the camera, and increased music globalization led to an explosion in viewership. By the time the decade ended, 68 million households were tuning into MTV in the United States alone. That number swelled to 340 million households in 140 countries across 31 TV channels worldwide.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of exceptional material to choose from.

This post will take a stroll down memory lane and showcase my 10 favorite music videos from the 90s. If you want to throw it back even farther (and watch some dope video content), check out Part 1 in this series, which covered my favorites from the 80s.

Last thing: Don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already, and share this post if you (or someone you know) are a 90s kid in need of a nostalgia dopamine hit.

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Onwards!

11. “Tonight, Tonight” – Smashing Pumpkins (1996)

One of the decade’s finest artistic achievements in music videos is undoubtedly the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” The fourth single off their two-plus-hour opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the video’s heavy rotation on MTV beginning in May 1996 helped the song crack the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100. It also walked away with a half-dozen honors at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards, snagging the statuettes for Art Direction, Special Effects, Cinematography, and Video of the Year.

Those accomplishments are more impressive, considering how niche the music video’s visuals seem now. The aesthetic, supposedly inspired by Georges Méliès’s 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, there’s a capriciousness that’s very of its moment. The central characters encounter hostile aliens, a less-hostile merman, singing sea creatures, and other like-minded adventurers aboard a zeppelin. Sometimes, I forget that I’m watching a Smashing Pumpkins music video instead of a slickly-produced Tim Burton short.

“Tonight, Tonight” is proof that making lo-fi look and feel high-brow requires incredible skill and creativity.

12. “Vogue” – Madonna (1990)

Of all the music videos that added to Madonna’s stature as one of the century’s pre-eminent pop stars, “Vogue” is arguably her most iconic (and controversial).

The visuals were shot on a Burbank soundstage over two intense mid-winter sessions early in 1990. The shoot, which coincided with rehearsals for Madonna’s wildly successful Blond Ambition World Tour in support of both Like a Prayer and her Dick Tracy soundtrack contributions, the latter of which included this song. The stunning black-and-white photography from Pascal Lebegue, the classical direction from David Fincher, recalling pre-World War II film star portraits, and the choreography by voguing legends Luis Camacho and Jose Gutierez are all sublime.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Madonna joint if it didn’t ruffle a few feathers. She refused to edit the video after objections from MTV brass over shots containing partial nudity. She also angered noted portrait photographer Horst P. Horst, who said his work was interpolated without consent or credit.

Detractors aside, this video is an ultra-stylish homage to Hollywood’s golden age.

13. “November Rain” – Guns N’ Roses (1992)

Directed by Andy Morahan at the height of GnR’s fame, the “November Rain” music video is … a lot. The narrative deals with themes including suicide, depression, and the kind of relationship dysfunction that teeters on the edge of violence. Sadly, the latter played out in the tabloids in the ensuing years, with Axl Rose’s then-girlfriend and music video co-star Stephanie Seymour eventually suing him and subpoenaing his ex-wife on domestic abuse allegations.

All this is intercut with live performance footage shot at the Orpheum Theater. The video oozes excess out of its every pore. It features helicopter shots of Slash playing a guitar solo in front of an impossibly small church. This moment somehow works even though the instrument isn’t actually plugged into anything. Physical logic isn’t one of this short film’s strong suits.

At the time, it was one of the most expensive music videos ever made (about $3.3 million when adjusted for inflation). Unsurprisingly, it became the first-ever rock video to surpass a billion YouTube streams in 2018.

14. “Jeremy” – Pearl Jam (1991)

Speaking of dark subject matter, you have the decade’s most visceral music video by a longshot—Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.”

The video most of us know is based on the tragic true story of Jeremy Delle Wade, a then-15-year-old Texas sophomore who killed himself in front of 30 of his peers and a teacher. The video’s ending was initially supposed to be even more graphic, but MTV kiboshed that version. With Vedder’s crazed glances at the camera and eerie refrain of “Jeremy spoke in class today,” this version remains the apex of queasy entertainment in this format.

Interestingly, Vedder’s acquaintance, photographer Chris Cuffaro, shot an entirely different video in 1991 without Epic’s financial support (the label wasn’t interested in releasing the song as a single at that time). Though Epic eventually rejected it for mass distribution, it’s a fascinating double feature with the redo embedded here. You can watch the original on Cuffaro’s website.

When asked about the staying power of the “Jeremy” video, director Mark Pellington stated, “I think that video tapped into something that has always been around and will always be around. You’re always going to have peer pressure, you’re always going to have adolescent rage, you’re always going to have dysfunctional families.”

15. “Sabotage” – Beastie Boys (1994)

Let’s lighten the mood a bit now with arguably the most fun music video of the 90s: “Sabotage.”

Spike Jonze’s hilarious, purposely low-budget homage to cop shows of yesteryear (think the original Hawaii Five-O and Starsky and Hutch) is a blast from start to finish. The rap trio stages a chase through a skeevy motel, speeds through city intersections, and climbs building facades in Los Angeles. The approach, along with the inventive cinematography, adds a ton of kinetic energy to their antics.

“We’d done videos where the production people came up with these elaborate budgets, and it started to feel really awkward on the set,” Yauch told New York Magazine in 1999. “So we asked Spike to work with just a couple of people, so we could fit the whole production in one van. Then we just ran around L.A. without any permits and made everything up as we went along.” “Sabotage” was nominated for Video of the Year at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards but lost to Aerosmith “Cryin’” (puke). Despite that egregious oversight, its influence lives on.

“There would be no Anchorman, no Wes Anderson, no Lonely Island, and no channel called Adult Swim if this video did not exist,” wrote Amy Poehler in 2018’s *Beastie Boys Book.*

16. “Praise You” – Fatboy Slim (1998)

If you thought “Sabotage” was quirky and impossibly DIY, Jonze topped himself later that decade with his work on Fatboy Slim’s video for “Praise You.”

The footage was shot without permits in front of the Fox Bruin Theater in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. That’s a heavily made-up Jonze at the center of the flash mob, directing the fictitious “Torrance Community Dancers” through a series of corny dance moves that aren’t all that far-fetched if you’re like me, and you’ve seen one of these awkward impromptu routines break out in a public space.

The video for “Praise You” cost $800, which was a bit of a slap in the face to the expensive, glossy videos that flooded the MTV playlists back then. The idea for it was borne out of a jokey gift Jonze sent to Fatboy Slim after the duo couldn’t work together on the “Rockafeller Skank” video, which the world-renowned DJ reportedly hated anyway. The anti-establishment move to greenlight this odd little gem was a stroke of genius for both men. It walked away with Breakthrough Video honors at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, along with a couple of other pieces of hardware.

The look on Madonna’s face as the group strides up to the podium says it all.

PS: For a peek behind the scenes of “Praise You,” check out this interesting documentary on Vimeo.

17. “Da Funk” – Daft Punk (1997)

I remember seeing this music video and thinking, for the first time in my life, “I’d watch a feature-length version of this story.” It’s an odd reaction to a short film that Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter claimed had nothing going on beneath the surface. “There’s no story. It is just a man-dog walking with a ghetto blaster in New York,” he said in a 1997 interview. “The rest is not meant to say anything. People are trying to explain it: Is it about human tolerance? Integration? Urbanism? There’s really no message.”

The electronic music duo, who’ve historically been reticent about appearing in their own music videos, turned to Spike Jonze to work his magic and what a result it is. There’s a humanism here, especially in the video’s second half with the unrequited love subplot. The anthropomorphic dog character Charles (played by That Dog drummer and frequent Jonze collaborator Tony Maxwell) somehow becomes a proxy for anyone who’s felt like a fish out of water in a new city, struggling to forge human connections as the opportunities whiz by you in blurs.

You feel for Charles. Every time I watch the video, I want to know what happens to him when it ends. If he ever reconnects with Beatrice. If he ever finds happiness. This is the cinematic universe we really should be exploring more.

18. “Just” – Radiohead (1995)

Imagine being Jamie Thraves in 1995. You’re a few years out of art school, and Radiohead approaches you to direct the music video for “Just,” the second US single off their sophomore album, The Bends. What do you do? Go the conventional route, mixing performance footage with an on-the-nose narrative that directly reflects the lyrics? Or do you run in the opposite direction and, maybe without realizing it at first, create a unique, incredibly compelling short film?

Thankfully, Thraves chose the latter. He told Rolling Stone that he based the video’s look on “[Alfred] Hitchcock movies and [Bernardo] Bertolucci’s movie The Conformist.” However, there’s also a touch of Italian and French classics like L’avventura and Last Year at Marienbad, where the lack of closure becomes the device that drives the story, despite being asked repeatedly in the years since Thraves has steadfastly refused to reveal the crucial detail that unlocks the story’s mystery.

“I haven’t told anyone in 25 years,” he explained. “To reveal the answer would kill the video. There’s a very real logical and simple answer though, a concept, however — no matter how good the idea is, it will always disappoint someone if revealed.” Sometimes, saying nothing is truly the best policy.

19. “Gimme Some More” – Busta Rhymes (1998)

Directed by the great Hype Williams, whose stylistic preferences seem tailor-made for one of hip-hop’s most eccentric personalities, the video for “Gimme Some More” is exhilarating.

Shot entirely with a fisheye lens in fast motion, the visuals have an eerie, absurdist quality. Cartoonish settings, which include a hokey suburban front lawn and an Old West milieu where Busta does his best Yosemite Sam impersonation, ping pong from innocent-seeming to nightmarish and back again with such conviction, you never really know where it’s going next. With the New York native, you can never entirely be sure.

A quick note about the lack of representation on this portion of my favorite music videos list from hip-hop’s golden age: there’s no denying there are delightful entries in the canon that almost made the cut (see here and here). Ask me next week, and maybe I’ll feel compelled to change the rankings. Who knows, but right now, I wouldn’t know which of the other nine to cut.

Also, I’m not in any headspace to give Diddy face time in this post.

Bonus bit of trivia: A VHS tape of the music video came free with a purchase of the album E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front, a cultural artifact I now kick myself for not owning.

20. “Virtual Insanity” – Jamiroquai (1996)

Let’s close with one of this list’s most impressive technical achievements, “Virtual Insanity.” I couldn’t figure out how they pulled some of the visual trickery off the first time I saw it. Years later, while studying film production for my university degree, I could pinpoint the cuts and timing they used to execute the complex choreography in front of and behind the camera. But, like a good magic trick, your eyes still can’t quite believe what they’re seeing, even if you know how it’s done.

Besides giving Jamiroquai’s career a significant boost, this video also helped director Jonathan Glazer rise to prominence, paving the way for his entry into Hollywood’s upper echelon of filmmakers. The “Virtual Insanity” video deservedly walked away with four MTV Video Music Awards—Breakthrough Video, Best Special Effects, Best Cinematography, and Video of the Year. I won’t spoil the explanation of how exactly they did everything, but Glazer later confirmed that “no computer trickery was used.”

Props to him and the team who gifted us with this masterpiece.