No music video director has ever called as much attention to the process of filmmaking as Michel Gondry does with his legendary clip for "Lucas With The Lid Off." Robert Altman and Orson Welles (in
Touch of Evil and
The Player, respectively) called attention to their film's opening long takes, and Alfred Hitchcock went as far as to use clever camera tricks to give the illusion that his film
Rope was shot in one continuous take. "Lucas With The Lid Off" represents a fascinating point of departure because Gondry's goal is to call attention away from his remarkable technical achievement. In the video, Lucas plays a recording artist supervising his own creative process and subsequent success. Though the entire video was shot in one long take, the action presented in the video does not transpire in real time. A series of numbered frames indicates where Gondry's camera will need to stop before recording the next movement in the video's action. More importantly, though, these stoppage points evoke passages in time and call attention to the very nature of the recording process. This rigorous, head-trippy experiment evokes the human mind's own subjective ability to perceive and edit the world around it with as little as a blink of an eye.
Never before had a music video, a largely artless marketing tool up until that point, employed plot, costume and cinema style so expansively as Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Despite its ghoulish subject matter, the clip possessed an innocence not unlike that of its famous star. Black actors were transplanted into a 1950s setting for the video's opening film-within-a-film. Jackson and his date exit the theater and take a detour through a graveyard, awakening a troupe of pelvic-thrusting zombies. To give the video its authentically creepy quality, Jackson enlisted director John Landis and Academy Award-winning make-up artist Rick Baker, both hot off 1981's
An American Werewolf in London. The video's dancing zombie sequence, choreographed by Jackson and Michael Peters, has yet to be topped.
The video for "The Roof," a standout track from Mariah Carey's 1997 album
Butterfly, tells the sophisticated tale of a sexy rooftop encounter and finds the singer at her least artificial. Boomboxes, break-dancers, blow pops and snug Sergio Valentes abound, the video effectively transplants Carey to an NYC rooftop circa 1983. Submerged—and ultimately soaked—in her fleeting moment of sexual liberation, Carey displays a stark innocence and authentic vulnerability that had been missing from much of her previous work. Shot in a seedy hotel room and a dark limousine, the gritty images did plenty to redeem the singer of her bubblegum pop past. When Carey rises through the limo's sunroof and relishes the warm November rain, she's not drunk on the bubbly but on the memory of past delights.
Destiny plucks Björk from the obscurity of her forest home and her success story is exploited and re-exploited to where reality is no longer discernible from its aesthetic representation. With each staged adaptation of Björk's bestselling book,
My Story, we move further and further away from the truth of the forest nymph's origins, so much so that it becomes someone else's story. These reproductions turn on themselves, falling into an existential vortex that ushers in Björk's return to nature. Björk cries, "I'm a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl!" Destiny rewrites itself and words disintegrate, as does the flesh.
The Consumption of the Female Body and the Male Gaze. Professor: Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. Hours: Fridays and Saturdays from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. Materials needed: (1) shirt, (1) tie, (2) wigs (colors optional) and (3) boxes of Kleenex.
When Cyndi Lauper hit the scene in 1984, her catchy pop anthems and strange behavior earned her a legion of fans. While Madonna was busy summoning the confusion of 80s feminists, Lauper cleverly and successfully hid her views of female sexuality behind her "unusual" behavior. The "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" video functions as an extension of the song itself, a delirious and forceful acknowledgement that woman want to do more than simply wash dishes. A companion piece to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," "Time After Time" allowed Lauper to contemplate the threat of her feminist codas. Here, she incurs the scorn of her loser boyfriend, bids farewell to her parents and heads off for unidentified and uncharted territories. Girls just want to have fun but the comedown sucks big time. Lauper quickly reached her expiration date but "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Time After Time" remain two of the most memorable and authoritative pop anthems ever produced.
"Material Girl" is an epithet Madonna has never been able to live down. The video for her 1985 hit finds Madonna deconstructing femininity, sexuality and, of course, materialism in a postmodern fashion that set the stage for much of her career. The video was an homage to Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" number from the 1953 film
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes set to the bling-bling of the Reagan Era. But Madonna's character was savvier than Monroe's Lorelei Lee, eliminating the other women from the original number and mocking her own power over men. Of course, a self-parodying Madonna was only masquerading as a gold-digger; she simply wanted some good old-fashioned love inside a pick-up truck.
How fucking cool was Michael Jackson that he could light up a sidewalk with the tap of his foot? In this legendary video for the Grammy-winning smash single "Billie Jean," Jackson plays an urban Dorothy who walks on down the road and challenges an ex-fling's restraining order...or something to that effect. In a 1999 interview with MTV, Jackson could barely remember who directed the clip though he did reveal that the best part of the video was entirely his idea. Director Steve Barron didn't want any dancing in the video but what he didn't know then was that to prevent Michael Jackson from dancing was not unlike dangling a baby from a fourth-floor balcony.
The second in a trilogy of videos directed by David Fincher and influenced by Old Hollywood, Madonna's "Oh Father" directly draws on images from
Citizen Kane. The song itself, one of Madonna's greatest achievements as a songwriter, is an homage to Simon & Garfunkel and tells the story of an abused child. Though not wholly autobiographical, "Oh Father" is, perhaps, her most personal work to date; the video alludes to the singer's devout Catholic upbringing, the death of her mother and her abusive marriage to Sean Penn. From a small girl struggling to reach a giant doorknob to an embalmed woman's stitched lips, Fincher's images are nothing less than striking. "Oh Father" stands as one of the director's (and Madonna's) greatest achievements in the music video form.
Though it was the winner of VH1's "Most Stylish Video" award in 1997, Janet Jackson's "Got 'Til It's Gone" has as much substance as it does style. Set in South Africa during the time of apartheid, the video is a celebration of the music and rhythms that helped sustain black culture under the weight of segregation. As for style, Janet, who dons little-to-no make-up and a bead of sweat on her brow, has never looked so sexy.
"'Spark' is about a girl having a really bad day," Tori Amos says in the "Tori Stories" promotional booklet which accompanied her 1998 album
From The Choirgirl Hotel. But the video is much more than that. Amos's musical images are potent and rarely sufficiently enhanced by the music video format, but "Spark" is a beautiful exception. Amos plays a blindfolded kidnap victim who squirms her way out of her captor's car trunk and must trust her instincts to guide her through a dense forest. Her character tiptoes her way toward a river's edge, submerging—and subsequently unshackling—herself beneath the murky water. Of the two supposed "angels" who drive by slowly and subsequently abandon her, Amos says quite matter-of-factly, "When the wolf is at your door, there is no insurance."
Life sucks, especially when the government milks you dry and doesn't so much as give you a wider sidewalk for your troubles. Walter Stern's video for The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" begins on a fascinating note. Disenchanted that life has reduced him to an emotional zombie, ex-Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft chooses to move only to the beat of his own drum. One may ask, "Who's to say that they're not bumping into
him?" Which is precisely the point of the video. Ashcroft's subjective reality declares that the world should move for him and not the other way around. This is his passive response. Both song and video pessimistically acknowledge humanity's smallness and oppression by big business and government. But it's not until the song's hopeful bridge, precisely when Ashcroft stares at his reflection on a car window, that he's forced to acknowledge his responsibility to the world around him and his disenchantment turns into something entirely more hopeful.
The only video on our list that propels us to say: they just don't make 'em like they used to! Twenty years after videos for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" supposedly broke all sorts of new ground (one because it featured headless robots, the other because it lazily took us inside a digital factory and made one infamous shout-out to MTV), "You Might Think" is one of several 80s relics that have truly stood the test of time. This colorful clip is a melange of corny yet innocent visual puns, goofy sight gags and cutout digital effects. In just over three minutes, director Jeff Stein brings to mind both Michael Snow and Andy Warhol's negotiated personal conflict via a postmodern reality. Because of its underlying romantic spirit, "You Might Think" is more liberating than Snow's
Wavelength (not to mention
*corpus callosum) and less preening than anything Warhol ever produced. In the name of love, Ric Ocasek repeatedly presents and repackages himself as a desperate romantic figure.
Doo Wop originated in the late 40s and evolved throughout the 50s and 60s as a blend of jazz and rhythm n' blues characterized by group harmonies and nonsensical syllables. Before Lauryn Hill uncomfortably aired her emotional baggage on "MTV Unplugged," she produced one of the most socially and spiritually provocative albums of the last ten years,
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. In their video for the album's first single, "Doo Wop (That Thing)," British directing team Andy Delaney and Monty Whitebloom (a.k.a. Big TV!) used split-screen imaging to evoke a city's undying affection for the sound of its culture. As the video's cross-generational chanteuse, Hill revitalizes Doo Wop and acknowledges its influence on modern R&B. "Doo Wop" is not so much about blackness itself as it is about the pride that keeps that blackness alive.
Björk's videos often fall short of the artist's musical genius, partly because her songs, much like Tori Amos's, conjure a rich and intense imagery all on their own. So it's no surprise that the Icelandic singer's best video—and one of the greatest of all time—is as simple as they come. The celebratory "Big Time Sensuality," from the former Sugarcube's solo
Debut, finds Björk cavorting playfully on the back of an 18-wheeler driving through Manhattan. Her famous childlike disposition is on unbridled display here as she makes New York her own personal playground.
In 1990, voguing enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame with the release of Jennie Livingston's riveting anthropological exposé
Paris is Burning and David Fincher's ferocious clip for Madonna's "Vogue." In the late 80s, "voguing balls" became rituals of empowerment for Harlem's black and Latino transsexual communities. The city's bitch queens created "houses" to promote solidarity in the ranks and hosted competitions to prove their ability to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the world. Their weapon was attitude, though Madonna would go on to refer to it as "giving face." At first glance, the purposefully sanitized look of "Vogue" seemed to negate the down-and-dirty politics of voguing itself, but the people at Harlem's vogue balls had a way of quickly forgetting the power of their dance in the heat of competition. Madonna appropriated both voguing and the ghosts of classic Hollywood to create a song and video that extolled the power of attitude. Though she was criticized by some for commodifying a subculture's movement (the main gripe was that Livingston and Madonna—both white women—were explaining "other" behavior), Madonna truly understood the politics of voguing and used her postmodern power to expose this movement to white America. This was the House of Madonna. It had a white voice, but the black, Latino and female faces that decorate the video follow Madonna not as slaves but as empowered disciples.
If Chris Isaak's sex appeal is a force stronger than a tropical monsoon, his decision to enlist the dearly departed Herb Ritts to direct his video for "Wicked Game" was a match made in the most powerful erogenous zone imaginable. Ritts's clips for Madonna, Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey pale in comparison to this libidinal ode to Isaak's stinging sense of loss for Helena Christensen's sand princess. Curiously, it's the sensitive clash of Isaak's conservative masculinity and Ritt's signature homoerotic gaze that makes "Wicked Game" more akin to a Bruce Weber creation. This is the definitive picture-perfect postcard of a sexy paradise lost.
One of the most successfully executed concept videos of the early MTV era, A-Ha's "Take On Me" would go on to influence both music video (Incubus's "Drive") and film (Richard Linklater's
Waking Life). Using rotoscopic animation, "Take On Me" told the tale of a teenage girl who is literally drawn into her newspaper's comic section and falls in love with a cartoon hero. When a disgruntled waitress tears and discards the newspaper, the comic's panel walls begin to deteriorate. Pages are pressed together and barriers are broken as different realities clash and characters from other stories enter the couple's world. The dramatic conclusion finds the hero in a collision course between fantasy and reality, a fine line music video makers would walk for years to come.
