Spike Jonze's clip for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" initially appears as smug and superfluous as the director's overrated video for the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage." Jonze shot Weezer performing on the original Arnold's Drive-In set and cut between images of the band and vintage "Happy Days" footage. The marriage of old-school and new-school footage is ultimately less remarkable than Jonze's suggestion that it's all about the Fonz. When Henry Winkler enters frame, he dances for the crowd and Weezer is soon forgotten, so much so that it's as if they never existed. In the end, "Buddy Holly" becomes a riveting paean to nostalgia itself.
Directed and expertly choreographed by Toni Basil herself, "Mickey" was a supreme "fuck you" to the Mickey of her dreams. Basil's cheerleader is a far cry from the typical airhead who'll shed a tear or two when the captain of the football team forsakes her for another girl. For whom the cheerleader cheers; she cheers for herself.
Working with Hype Williams has become an obligatory rite of passage for the up-and-coming hip-hop artist. Williams remains one of the most prolific and sought after music video directors, not because of his innovations per se (if anything, his videos are all derivative of each other) but because he's earned the unconditional loyalty of the hip-hop community—think of him as the black Mark Romanek. Though he's directed hundreds of clips for artists as varied as PM Dawn and Ja Rule, only a handful of these creations stand apart from the rest. Glossier than Nas's "Sweet Dreams" and more politically charged than Wu Tang Clang's "Can It Be All So Simple," Williams' clips for "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" and "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" succeed mainly because they bear the unmistakable energy of Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott, respectively. Co-directed by Rhymes himself, "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" is a delirious evocation of African decadence that took its inspiration from the 1988 Eddie Murphy vehicle
Coming to America and Jean-Jacques Annaud's
Quest for Fire. From a dark princess rising from an opulent pool to a group of body-painted primitives dancing by a bonfire, the video is set to the track's addictive tribal electronic beats and traces the strange and uncertain de-evolvement of African iconography. Williams has gratuitously abused the fish-eye lens throughout his short career but never has this gimmick worked better than it does here and in "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)," a clip that ceremoniously introduced Missy Elliott to the world. Williams' now tiresome fish-eye frame grotesquely exaggerates Elliott's too-freaky personality. As exemplified here and in his sexy clip for Blackstreet's "No Diggity," Williams knows how to cut an image to a beat. Even the distracting and uninspired presence of various hip-hop artists (P. Diddy, Da Brat, Timbaland) can't take away from Elliott's inspired ability to move to Elliott's own sounds.
Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris pay tribute to the tedium of suburban life in their video for the Smashing Pumpkins' "1979." Dayon and Faris's use of the fish-eye lens has an uncanny way of evoking the drunkenness and free-spiritedness of the video's subjects. Like a surrogate chaperon, Billy Corgan tails a group of angst-ridden middle-class teens as they experience the joys of house parties, toilet-papering the neighborhood, pool-hopping and extra-large slurpies. Suburban teen boredom never tasted so sweet.
In his memorable home video clip for Fatboy Slim's "Praise You," Spike Jonze appears as Richard Koufey, choreographer for the fictional Torrence Community Dance group. No doubt hoping to incite controversy, Jonze & Co. put on a show before a line of people about to enter a movie theater. The theater's manager greets the performance with unscripted rage, angrily turning off the boombox which blares Fatboy's anthem. It is here that "Praise You" takes on a life of its own, questioning our refusal to tolerate street art that does not conform to elitist expectations. The only irony here may be that Jonze's
Being John Malkovich isn't featured on the marquee.
Directed by the design duo H5 (Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain), Royksopp's "Remind Me" may just be the most depressing video ever made. Four minutes of diagrammatic sequences chart an anonymous British woman's daily activities, from the second her eardrum perceives the sound of her alarm clock to the moment when her workweek ends. These graphical representations evoke the systematic nature of human activity and the inextricable means by which all life on Earth is interconnected. The clip's overhead presentation suggests the presence of a higher being carefully plotting the mechanism that will make the world turn and, ultimately, strip humanity of its individuality.
Possibly the most daring music video of its time, the ultra-realist "Smalltown Boy" depicted a brutal gay bashing in provincial Britain. Bronski Beat's Jimmy Somerville makes a pass at a man he presumes to be gay at a local pool. Later that day, his object of affection bashes him in a dingy alley. Forced to come out to his parents, a rejected Somerville runs away from home on a train to nowhere. Bernard Rose's direction hauntingly evokes Somerville's overwhelming sense of loss and devastation. In England, Somerville became a vocal spokesperson for gay rights while Rose found acclaim as a motion picture director with the release of 1992's
Candyman.
One of Madonna's least conceptually complicated videos, "Ray Of Light" finds the MTV icon gyrating before a backdrop of rapid-fire images inspired by Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film
Koyaanisqatsi. Both song and video served as a celebration of Madonna's newfound spirituality and appreciation for life. She wails, "I feel like I just got home!" throughout but it's the latter nighttime portion of the video—in which Maddy morphs through a traffic tunnel and lands at the heart of a San Francisco dancefloor—that truly feels like a homecoming for the video veteran.
Celebrator's clip for Sigur Rós's "Vidrar Vel Til Loftárasa" is a daring, fairy-tale paean to impossible love, which observes the complicated relationship between two schoolboys in rural Iceland. Shot entirely in slow motion, this lyrical seven-minute clip fits the band's signature brand of yoga-rock like a glove. Celebrator's use of symbols (porcelain dolls, the Holy Bible) tragically evokes rituals of denial. At a school soccer-match, a preacher's son returns a set of misbegotten dolls to a young boy tormented by his blue-collar father. The boy pleases his dad when he scores a goal but shocks the crowd by ceremoniously kissing his young lover on the lips.
Madonna's "Rain," her first video with director Mark Romanek, is one of the singer's most beautiful. Madonna is primped and positioned on a futuristic Japanese soundstage for the video's shoot-within-a-shoot. The water-logged clip was a simple and refreshing break from the singer's visually sex-drenched
Erotica period. However innocent the video's look, though, it's difficult to separate the images from the song's double entendres.
The Cardigans' "My Favorite Game" and U.N.K.L.E.'s "Rabbit In Your Headlight," directed by Jonas Åkerlund and Jonathan Glazer, respectively, perfectly embodied the pre-millennium tension of the late 90s. "My Favorite Game" follows leading Cardigan Nina Persson driving her red beater convertible recklessly through the desert on a crash course to self-annihilation. She seemingly takes control by putting her life (and the lives of others) in her own hands but, alas, her fate is eventually determined by a completely random act. Similarly themed but in a much darker vein is "Rabbit In Your Headlight" by U.N.K.L.E. (James Lavelle and DJ Shadow featuring Thom Yorke), in which a mumbling, incoherent man (
Beau Travail's Denis Lavant) stumbles through a traffic tunnel while cars dodge and occasionally hit him. Seemingly empowered by the cruel motorists that repeatedly crash into him, the man fabulously and instantaneously allows his body to transform itself into a powerful machine that subsequently lashes back at his enemy.
Like every aspect of the band's all-too-brief creative output, the worth of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was arguably elevated in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death. In retrospect, however, the clip's twisted pep rally images (anarchist cheerleaders, dancing custodians) have become signposts of the grunge era. Cobain, as always, seems both apathetic and lightly buzzed, the anointed saint of early 90s teen angst.
"[It's] about my childhood and how I turned into an asshole," says Billy Corgan of his song "Disarm," a cut from the Smashing Pumpkins' breakthrough album
Siamese Dream. Corgan called director Jake Scott and told him that he wanted to make a video of the band flying through the air. The resulting clip was every bit as haunting and deceptively simple as the song itself. The band does indeed fly through the air, though a bit unconventionally. Above expressionistic storybook backdrops that evoke childhood dreamscapes, the Smashing Pumpkins come to resemble angels lost in time, convening over Corgan's uncomfortably vague recollection of his troubled past. The video's texture is every bit as hazy as memory itself.
Wide-eyed and presumably possessed by her desire, despair and other said demons, Annie Lennox takes center stage at a Moulin Rouge-style brothel in "No More I Love You's." Like many of Lennox's videos, "No More I Love You's" is drunk on high drama and pushes the boundaries of socio-sexual norms. The clip was inspired by the work of 19th century French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; like his piece "At the Moulin Rouge," the video is darkly textured but its characters' faces are lit with the warm glow of life.
This video directed by Kier McFarlane gave Tom Petty his biggest hit in years and made him cool to a whole new generation. It also did wonders for Kim Basinger, who—in her best performance to date—appears in the video as a corpse brought home by Petty's mortician for some wining, dining, dancing and possibly some romancing. Far more impressive than the delirious mise en scene is the mournfulness that overwhelms the video. In courting Basinger and setting her adrift in the ocean by his gothic abode, Petty seemingly suggests that he may never light up again.
Sprung from NYC's then-thriving club scene, the members of Deee-Lite joined forces with guest artists like Maceo Parker and legendary funkateer Bootsy Collins for "Groove Is In The Heart," a retro-visual feast of "Laugh-In" proportions. Kazoos, fake fur and Q-Tip, oh my!
Andy Morahan collaborated with Guns N' Roses on more than a half dozen videos. "Estranged" was the band's most pretentious and self-involved creation to date. This, though, was part of the video's genius. More so than any other Guns N' Roses video, the evocative "Estranged" was a frank look at Axl Rose's celebrity, his obsessive need for control and a haunting foreshadowing of the band's expiration. Rose's transcendent communication with the video's dolphins suggests that the he was more than aware of his delusions of grandeur and evokes the singer's isolation within his self-imposed spotlight.
In the post-Nirvana landscape, Live seemed poised to take the alt-rock crown. Their 1994 album,
Throwing Copper, sold 8 million copies, fueled in part by the anthem "Lightning Crashes" and its striking video. A young woman dies during childbirth, leaving a baby to be watched over by a bald, female angel. Silver coins are placed over the eyes of the dead woman, a cross-cultural custom meant to protect the soul of the deceased. Years later, a second woman (the baby perhaps) gives birth without complication, the angel once again presiding over the event. Superstitions aside, its message is a visceral one: the body may cease to exist but the spirit gets a second chance.
