Wall Street scumbag and East Village chick clash in D.J. Webster's legendary 80s clip for 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry." The band's lead singer (a pre-
Magnolia Aimee Mann) appears as a musician dating a violent Reaganite who demands that she change her outré look for his benefit. A stinging indictment of 80s greed culture, "Voices Carry" ends on a literal and figurative high note. At the opera, Mann defies cultured society and shakes off the shackles of her Barbie Doll enslavement with one liberating howl. This anti-
American Psycho also uses spoken dialogue to interrupt the video's musical groove when Mann's boyfriend demands, "Do something for
me!"
David A. Stewart himself directed this classic clip for his band's hit single "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)." Before the Sunderland native signed with Chris Blackwell's Ireland Music label in 1968, he and his cinephille brother were taking in Fellini, Pasolini and Antonioni at the local cinemas. In an article published in Premiere France, Stewart shared with writer Nicolas Schaller his thoughts on the stateside success of the Eurythmics. "At this time, people were making videos where the band would be miming a song, just normal playing. But our videos [were] like little films. That's why, in America for instance, we suddenly became very successful," said Stewart. What with the unexplained cow, Annie Lennox's blazing androgyny and its rumination on impossible desire, the clip's obvious point of reference is Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's
Un Chien Andalou. Though "Sweet Dreams" hasn't aged as well as Buñuel and Dali's silent masterpiece, it remains one of the more daring and experimental music videos of its time.
The Art of Noise's 1984 album
(Who's Afraid Of?) The Art Of Noise! was a brash blend of experimental rock and new wave that was way ahead of its time. The album's biggest hit, "Close (To The Edit)," was a signpost of the era, and its avant garde video, which featured a crimson-haired little girl dressed in punk attire, took the group's deconstruction of traditional forms of music to a literal level.
The pitch must have read something like a Lifetime movie of the week: father rapes daughter, mother finds out, daughter shoots father in the head. In David Fincher's hands, though, the noirish clip for "Janie's Got A Gun" is a gorgeous amalgam of bopping police lights and dramatic overheads, inviting comparisons to the director's film
Se7en. A moving corpse and a series of out-of-focus close-ups suggest Janie's got more than a gun; camp goddess Leslie Anne Warren keeps things together as shocked mother hen and possible accomplice. Extra points for Steve Tyler keeping his clothes on.
Photographer Maria Mochnacz met Polly Jean Harvey when the future rocker was still struggling to churn out the raw material for her first album. Mochnacz has directed over ten videos for Harvey over years, none more memorable than this clip for 1994's "Down By The Water," a cut from her critically acclaimed masterpiece
To Bring You My Love. Throughout the years, Mochnacz has used Harvey's unconventional beauty to challenge the way females have been represented in media. "Down By The Water" is Mochnacz's anti-"Addicted To Love," a grotesque representation of dolled-up female eroticism where the female actually has her own voice. If the song is indeed about a botched abortion, Harvey is both a regretful mother and a fetus suspended in the video's water-cum-amniotic-fluid.
Director Michel Gondry evoked the concept of a "visual palindrome" via his split screen narrative for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" clip. Within their respective frames, Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda rise out of bed and take sugar water showers. The women exchange a threatening note between frames before a black cat enters the picture and prophesies a vehicular accident. Perhaps more so than any other music video ever made, "Sugar Water" demands multiple sittings in order to tease out its many ambiguities. The palindrome structure is merely a point of departure here. In four short minutes, Gondry both contemplates a cosmic relationship between cause and effect and the existential connection between Hatori and Honda themselves.
Placing his absolute trust in the audience, Michael Stipe allows hungry hands to carry his weight across a sea of people. Streams of light and water seemingly flow from outstretched hands and bopping heads. Peter Care's gorgeous black-and-white photography mirrors the song's mechanical eroticism. This is Zen and the Art of Moshing.
Here's a Spike Jonze video that transcends both concept and irony. A gymnast (Jonze's director-wife Sofia Coppola) chooses funk anthem "Elektrobank" as the musical backdrop for her tumbling routine. The subtext-rich clip pits Coppola's shy gymnast against a competitor whose confident yet antagonizing gaze screams Mother Russia. Though there's no apparent conflict between the gymnast and her very Bela Karolyi coach, Jonze heightens performance pressure via a series of calculated cutaways that contemplate the girl's sordid family life. Her dad is noticeably overeager and her mother shows up midway through her routine with a younger man by her side. This is a work of simple yet suggestive genius. If anything, Jonze makes for an unlikely commentator on the physical rigors and emotional pressures faced by his young female athlete.
Massive Attack's "Teardrop" was met with an equally minimal and gorgeous video clip courtesy of Walter Stern. The Bristol group's thud-and-clack percussion provides the heartbeat of a lip-synching fetus in utero. Particles float through the amniotic fluid as the unborn child responds subtly to light and sound, patiently waiting for the moment it will emerge from the womb, perhaps as soon as the simple yet beautiful "Teardrop" ends.
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl makes for an unlikely master of disguise in this clip for the band's hit "Learn To Fly." Tenacious D smuggles what looks like heroin (in an Entertainment Weekly interview, Grohl called it "erotic world-domination sleeping powder or something") onto a domestic flight via the airplane's kitchen coffeepot. Grohl appears as himself though he also casts himself as an effete flight attendant, an adoring fan (Alanis Morissette anyone?), the plane's pilot and an obese female passenger. Fellow band mates Taylor Hawkins and Nate Mendal also appear in various roles. When the drugs kick in, so do the libidos. Like the good boys that they are, the Foo Fighters skip the caffeine and their sobriety positions them as the clip's unlikely heroes. Grohl's facial ticks are as disturbing as Taylor Hawkins' sexy stewardess. This ode to self-love is easily the funniest music video ever made.
Long before
Bowling For Columbine, Pearl Jam and director Mark Pellington explored the "evil" stirring within America's youth. The song "Jeremy" was the more direct, sober sibling of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but the video smacked with equally potent, if not more indelible imagery. Questioning "science vs. emotion" and "nature vs. nurture," the clip all but discards theories of environmental stress and hereditary factors and places explicit blame on the negligence of Jeremy's parents, presented here theatrically and abstractly (giant photographs of a man's suit and a woman's dress) as the gluttonous Adam and Eve of parenting.
A brunette being pursued by a gun-toting thug rides a sleek automobile along a twisty highway and ends up inside a hillside mansion. This isn't
Mulholland Drive but rather Steve Barron's film-within-a-film-within-a-video for Human League's "Don't You Want Me," the band's classic ode to love gone bad. Superior to No Doubt's similarly themed "Don't Speak," this heady video explores the band's sticky on-set romances and pent-up hostilities with nary a hint of self-indulgence. Barron's camera constantly unravels a new layer beneath the collection of stone-faced glances and suggests that nothing can ever be taken at face value.
One of the first music videos to include spoken dialogue ("If you leave this house, you can just forget about coming back!" Pat Benatar's father shouts as the troubled teen storms out of the house in a gargantuan huff), "Love Is A Battlefield" was a youth-empowerment mini-musical of operatic proportions. Benatar flees for the city to pursue her dream of sleeping with men for money. She writes home to her younger brother, who pines for his sister and struggles to hide his secret desire of becoming a hustler. Benatar's pimp mistreats her, inspiring her to form a troupe of angry, dancing hookers who take on the night like a bunch of Raggedy Annes with a suspicious amount of choreography experience under their torn belts. They dance off into the trashy sunset and Benatar hops on a Greyhound bus home. In short, a classic.
A symphony of images cued to Queen and David Bowie's now-classic anthem "Under Pressure." This socially conscious slideshow is pieced together entirely from silent film and documentary stock footage. Stinging yet hopeful, the clip celebrates the pressure-cooker mentality of a culture willing to wage war against political machines. This is propaganda worthy of Sergei Eisenstein, the unofficial father of the music video and whose
Battleship Potemkin is a main source of inspiration here.
Imagine a group of gentleman from the Moulin Rouge era enjoying a night on the town inside your daughter's favorite music box. Striving for the same vintage look that made Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" video a hit one year earlier, photographer Mark Seliger and designer Fred Woodward evoked a bygone era of prostitution with a whorish Courtney Love as a wailer of female pain. The clip's jaw-dropping visuals are trumped only by Love's ability to turn make-up smearing into an art form.
Photographer and commercial director Melodie McDaniel hit pay dirt with the release of two black-and-white gems, one for The Cranberries breakout single "Linger" and one for Madonna's "Secret." McDaniel's images are less body-horrific than those of Cindy Sherman's yet they're every bit as consumed with the way femininity is represented in modern art. McDaniel channeled the spirit of Sherman and John Cassavettes for "Linger," an abstract video diary that follows Dolores O'Riordan through a seedy hotel with two lookalikes by her side. O'Riordan codifies and displaces her "self" via her doubles, no doubt as a reaction to the way the males in the video choose to consume her. McDaniel's "Secret" is a more straightforward account of female performance. Though her
Bedtime Stories album was an apologia of sorts for her
Erotica debacle, the videos Madonna produced for the former showcase a subversive need on the singer's part to question the authenticity of how she's chosen to represent herself as a cultural mutt. Madonna's incessant posing has forever complicated her true intentions and, throughout the years, cultural critics like Bell Hooks have criticized Madonna for the way she's chosen to commodify and appropriate black culture into her iconography. In "Secret," Madonna plays a white chanteuse in Harlem with a hankering for brown sugar. That she keeps a relative distance between herself and everyone else in the video suggests the singer's earnest belief that a white girl's intimacy with someone from an "other" culture is one that must be carefully earned. Her "secret" is the video's trump card, a way for Madonna to sadly legitimize her place in the video's retro Harlem milieu. "Secret" is a less problematic text than "Like A Prayer" because it directly addresses Madonna's own conflict as a cultural riddle. She seemingly responds to Hooks and declares that she's no plantation mistress but a soul sister at heart.
One of the first superstar artists to shun his image-driven fame, George Michael refused to appear in any of the videos from his second solo album
Listen Without Prejudice. The irony-laced "Freedom 90," directed by David Fincher, featured a bevy of top models (Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell) lip-synching to Michael's pointed words. The video, like the album, was intended to be an artistic rebirth for the former Wham! singer; the jukebox from "Faith" and his trademark leather jacket and guitar were ceremoniously burned and destroyed by video's end. Michael would go on to employ models for his videos many times throughout his career, but "Freedom" was the only one to utilize more than their blank expressions. The video dug beneath surface facades and blurred the lines of gender and image while pushing the music video form as a whole.
As a witch lost in an unidentified desert landscape, Madonna gets to turn into a scary-as-shit Doberman and a flock of crows in a matter of minutes. She also gets to float in the air, dance with herself in triplicate and summon a cosmic storm with the twirl of her Henna-covered hand. The overriding theme is isolation but, as directed by Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy"), the effect is not unlike stepping into the ravishing, apocalyptic hellfire of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" and "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."
Never has a music video character been embraced so empathetically. The trials, tribulations and joys of The Bee Girl (Heather DeLoach, now 19) resonated with millions of outcasts across America, making Blind Melon's Buzz Bin hit "No Rain" a true MTV classic.
