The 100 Greatest Music Videos of the 1980s

Spitting Image had been broadcasting on British TV since 1984 — a satirical sketch show built around grotesque latex puppets of world leaders (Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev, Khomeini, the Royal Family). When Genesis approached the show's producer John Lloyd to direct a music video, the result was the most overtly political MTV mainstream rotation video of the decade. The puppets are the same ones from the British show, scaled for production: Reagan in a hotel bed dreaming of Rambo and Liberty; the world leaders at a conference table; nuclear bombs flying; Reagan finally reaching not for the bedside lamp but for the button labeled NUKE.

Phil Collins, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford appear as puppets too — Genesis caricatured alongside the world leaders they're singing about. American director Jim Yukich co-directed with Lloyd; production combined Hightower Productions with the Spitting Image puppet workshop.

The video's significance is twofold. Politically, it pulled British satire — pointed and unforgiving in a way American TV at this point rarely matched — into the country's most-watched cable channel during Reagan's second term. Genesis at their commercial peak releasing a clearly anti-Reagan video alongside Invisible Touch's dominant chart run was an act of artistic position-taking. Awards-wise, it took the 1987 Grammy for Best Concept Music Video and was nominated against Sledgehammer for VMA Video of the Year — which Sledgehammer won, completing the technical-triptych arc that opened this list.

It sits at #11 to open Tier 2 with political voice — the third axis alongside technical revolution (#1–4) and form/auteur (#7–8). Thriller opened the list with cinema. Land of Confusion closes it with satire.

# Tier 2 — 11–30

If the top 10 are the videos no serious history can omit, the next twenty are the ones we'd have fought for if the format permitted twelve slots instead of ten. They fill in what the top 10 left out: the political satire that preceded Land of Confusion, the synth-pop and hair metal grammars MTV was built on, and the directors whose work threaded the decade together.

Three years after Ashes to Ashes had taken Bowie's art-rock vocabulary to its visual peak, David Mallet returned for the photo-negative: a sun-saturated, plain-spoken Australia narrative aimed squarely at MTV. The clip cuts between Bowie performing in a small Carinda pub and an Aboriginal couple in Sydney moving through retail and street scenes that read as commentary on consumer culture's alienating pull on Indigenous experience. The narrative read can be debated; what is not in question is that Let's Dance gave Bowie his most commercially successful clip and pulled him from art-rock auteur into MTV-era pop singular.

It belongs at #12 because Bowie at peak mainstream is part of any honest 80s music-video account, and Mallet's color-shift from the Ashes B&W to Let's Dance's saturated daylight tracks the same director adapting to MTV's commercial language without abandoning his concept-first method.

Two years before Genesis brought Spitting Image puppets to MTV (#11), Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Godley & Creme staged a satirical Cold War: Reagan and the (then-current) Soviet General Secretary Chernenko brawling in a UN-style wrestling ring while world leaders watched from ringside. Patrick Allen — the same voice from the actual UK government Protect and Survive Cold War pamphlets — narrated the bridge. Both the visual conceit and the use of authentic state-document audio gave the video a satirical bite few pop videos in 1984 attempted. The single spent nine weeks at #1 in the UK and won the 1984 Brit Award for Best British Video. It belongs at #13 because it laid the groundwork Land of Confusion completed two years later — and because the same Godley & Creme who shot Every Breath You Take brought their precision to a very different argument.

Russell Mulcahy and Duran Duran took an unprecedented 1982 budget — EMI reportedly invested around $200,000 in the Sri Lanka expedition, though that figure covered three videos shot on the same trip (alongside Save a Prayer and Lonely in Your Nightmare) — and shot a music video that looked like a film: jungle chases through Negombo markets, a mysterious woman, Simon Le Bon as a stand-in Indiana Jones the year after Raiders of the Lost Ark. The cinematic ambition was a deliberate break from the studio-bound performance videos dominating early MTV — and it worked. Hungry Like the Wolf became MTV's introduction-to-the-band moment in the US, a year after the song had stalled there as a single, turning Duran Duran into the first act identified primarily by their videos. It won the inaugural MTV VMA for Best Performance Video in 1984 and established the "travelogue" template that Madonna's La Isla Bonita and a generation of high-budget MTV-era videos would later borrow from. Sits at #14 because location ambition matters less to the medium than the rotoscope/CGI/stop-motion experimentation in the top 10 — but no MTV video before it had treated the camera like a passport.

Annie Lennox in a tailored men's suit, orange-cropped hair, holding a cane in a boardroom while a real cow (named Bo) wandered through the meeting. She also appeared as a cellist; in the famous full-frame red wig; in studio shots with synthesizers as central characters. Each scene worked against the conventions of how women were photographed for music video: no longing close-ups, no soft-focus dance sequences, no leaning over a piano in a slip dress. Sweet Dreams arrived in January 1983 — months before Madonna's Holiday (September 1983) and Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun (October 1983) — and provided the visual grammar for synth-pop as a genre that didn't have to perform its own masculinity or femininity. It belongs at #15 because the female-led pop pillars of the rest of the decade (Lauper, Madonna, Lennox herself) all built on the permission Sweet Dreams claimed first.

John Sayles — the indie-film director who would soon make Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988) — built the Born in the U.S.A. video around the tension that the song itself contains: a stadium anthem about a Vietnam veteran's disillusionment, with a chorus so propulsive it can be heard as patriotic shout if you ignore the verses. Sayles intercut concert footage of Springsteen and the E Street Band with documentary-style imagery of factories, working-class neighborhoods, and aging Americans — visualizing the verses against the chorus's roar. The clip ran heavily on MTV through 1984–85 and gave the song a second visual life, even as Reagan's reelection campaign tried to claim the song's surface meaning.

It belongs at #16 because the album was a cultural axis-event of mid-decade America, and Sayles's video kept the song's argument visible at MTV scale — even when politicians from both parties tried to flatten it into anthem.

The video was filmed on the actual streets near Cyndi Lauper's New York neighborhood, with her real mother in the role of Mom and professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano as the perpetually exasperated father. The supporting cast — friends, neighbors, dancers from Lauper's life — was pointedly multi-ethnic and queer-coded in a way 1983 mainstream pop video usually wasn't: a parade of bodies, ages, and styles moving through the streets and into a tiny apartment for a culminating dance scene. The video won the inaugural 1984 MTV VMA Best Female Video and helped push the song to #2 on Billboard. It belongs at #17 because it argued — at the very moment MTV was launching its first VMA ceremony — that pop video could be unapologetic, communal, and visually generous. Madonna's Material Girl was Marilyn-glamour the year after; Girls Just Want to Have Fun showed that you didn't need a cinema reference to be iconic.

Vincent Paterson — the same choreographer who shaped Beat It — returned for Jackson's most architecturally ambitious video. Smooth Criminal takes its visual language from a 1930s speakeasy: white suits, fedoras, gunfire, a piano-and-stand-up-bass score before the song's beat enters. The signature anti-gravity lean — Jackson's body tilting forward at roughly 45° while remaining grounded — was achieved in the video using cables and a body harness rigged from above. The mechanical shoe-and-peg system that allowed the same effect on stage without rigging was patented by Jackson and collaborators in 1993 (US 5,255,452) and used on later live tours. The video was the centerpiece of Moonwalker, Jackson's 1988 anthology film, and runs nearly nine minutes in its complete form; the standalone music-video cut is just over four. It belongs at #18 because while the craft is at top 10 level (the lean mechanism, period world-building, Paterson's most elaborate choreography for Jackson), the cultural moment had moved on: by 1988 MTV had a more crowded video field, and Bad never owned its decade the way Thriller did.

After the saturated Purple Rain spectacle and the kaleidoscopic Raspberry Beret clip, Kiss is Prince at his most visually concentrated: a stark studio, a black backdrop, Prince in cropped trousers and bare midriff, model Monique Mannen casting shadow choreography across the frame, Wendy Melvoin's guitar work as the single counterpoint to the rhythm. Director Rebecca Blake stripped everything that wasn't body, light, or rhythm. The clip rewards the song's stripped-back arrangement (no bass) with stripped-back imagery.

It belongs at #19 because where When Doves Cry and Sign o' the Times show Prince at his cinematic and authorial reach, Kiss shows what he could do with almost nothing — and the result outpaces both videos for sheer concentrated style.

Mallet and Bowie staged the clip as a beach procession at Pett Level on the East Sussex coast — Bowie in full Pierrot costume, an elderly woman walking beside him, surreal cuts to a padded cell and a kitchen drained of color. Mallet ran the footage through video-solarization and color-keying processes that were experimental for 1980. The video is widely cited as the moment 80s music video opened with a deliberate art statement rather than a performance clip — and it framed how the decade's first wave (Mallet, Mulcahy, Godley & Creme) would treat the form.

Mary Lambert had directed Madonna's previous singles (Borderline, Like a Virgin); Material Girl extended their arc by reframing Madonna as a self-aware cinema citation. The premise: Madonna performs a restaging of Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) inside a music video that's also a story about a director (Keith Carradine) watching the staged performance and falling for the "real" Madonna offstage. The frame-within-a-frame structure positioned Madonna as both icon-impersonator and the real person beneath the icon — exactly the duality her career would lean on for the rest of the decade. It belongs at #21 because it locked in both the Lambert-Madonna director arc that culminated in Like a Prayer and Madonna's blueprint as a video performer who could quote cinema without disappearing into it.

Jeff Stein took Alice in Wonderland and put Tom Petty in it as the Mad Hatter — top hat, tea party, dilated pupils — performing for an ensemble of psychedelic creatures while Alice (often identified in credits as "Wish Foley") grew and shrank through the rooms of a wonderland house. The visual conceit allowed for one of the boldest endings in 80s music video: in the final shot, the band collectively cuts and eats Alice as a cake. The image is jarring and deliberately childish — the kind of surrealism that's exactly funny enough to land on MTV in 1985 without being pulled. It belongs at #22 because surrealism in music video usually slides into pretentiousness (art-school posturing) or gimmickry (one-shot weirdness); Stein and Petty hit the rare middle ground where the visuals advance the song's mood rather than substitute for it.

Richard Lowenstein had directed INXS videos throughout the mid-80s, but Need You Tonight / Mediate fused two distinct visual languages into a single video. Need You Tonight is performance-as-kinetic-split-screen, the band's bodies fragmented across multiple frames simultaneously. Mediate — the song's outro extended into its own conceptual sequence — is a direct homage to Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues clip (1965, from D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back): the band holds cue cards with lyrics that flip frame-by-frame in time with the song. It was the first prominent music video to revive that visual gag for MTV-era audiences. The video took Video of the Year at the 1988 VMAs and several additional categories. It belongs at #23 because it represents both Australian rock's MTV breakthrough and one of the decade's most technically precise editing exercises — the cards, the splits, and the band synchronization all required studio choreography of a kind few music videos attempted.

Eighteen years after the Beatles played their final live performance on the roof of Apple Corps in London, U2 and Meiert Avis staged a rooftop concert on a downtown Los Angeles liquor store on March 27, 1987. Traffic stopped on the streets below; thousands of fans gathered; the LAPD arrived to shut down the unauthorized event. The shutdown itself was filmed and became part of the video's narrative — the band playing through their remaining minutes, the police negotiating with crew, the helicopter overhead. The conceit established that performance video could be performance-as-event rather than performance-as-staging. It earned a 1988 VMA nomination for Best Stage Performance in a Video and provided the visual blueprint for U2's stadium-rock-as-televised-spectacle in subsequent decades. It belongs at #24 because the rooftop image — a band playing while a city stops to watch — is the closest 80s music video came to genuine documentary of cultural impact.

In early 1981, months before MTV launched, choreographer Toni Basil and David Byrne built a music video out of body movement that didn't look like dancing. Byrne — drawing on documentary footage he had been studying of religious ecstasy, possessed bodies, and televangelist staging — performs in front of projected backgrounds with deliberately spasmodic motions: head twitches, arm spasms, locked-and-held poses cued to specific lyrics. Basil, who would direct and perform her own Mickey two years later, brought the choreographic precision; Byrne brought the ethnographic concept. The video predates VMA voting and chart-rotation as a measure of importance — it was made for art-house viewers, not MTV programmers. Its lasting marker came from outside the music industry: MoMA accepted it into its film/video collection. It belongs at #25 because it argued — months before MTV existed — that music video could be both formally serious and culturally legible, and that case has held for forty-five years.

Wayne Isham opened the video in black-and-white with the band backstage — sound check, hugs, locker-room banter — before bursting into color for the chorus and full concert performance. The conceit framed Bon Jovi not as untouchable rock stars but as a working band on the road, which mattered because Slippery When Wet had pushed them from theater openers to arena headliners in a matter of months. Isham's documentary-meets-stadium template — earned intimacy followed by spectacle — became the visual grammar for late-80s arena rock and the model Isham himself would refine across hundreds of clips for the rest of the decade. The video took the 1987 VMA for Best Stage Performance in a Video and helped push the single to #1 on Billboard. It belongs at #26 because no rock band of the era leveraged a music video to define its accessibility-versus-spectacle balance more efficiently than Bon Jovi did with this one.

Nigel Dick — the same director behind Everybody Wants to Rule the World — built the Sweet Child video around a deliberately under-produced premise: an empty California venue, the band rehearsing, their girlfriends and wives sitting on amplifier stacks watching, no narrative, no edits flashier than a slow zoom. The result was a portrait of a band in the moment before they became the most dangerous act in American rock — Axl Rose dancing easily, Slash leaning back into the iconic riff, Duff and Izzy unposed. The song reached #1 on Billboard in September 1988, the band's first US chart-topper, while Appetite for Destruction sat at #1 on the album chart. RetroVideoHits has a long-form Story Behind for this one. It belongs at #27 because the video's deliberate refusal to dress the band up captured a particular kind of late-80s rock authenticity — the moment of access just before the door closes.

Three years before he rotoscoped Take On Me and four before he built the chroma-key crew of Money for Nothing, Steve Barron was already practicing concept-driven music video on Toto's Africa: an ethnologist in a library, an open atlas, a spinning globe, a woman in the pages, and a final lightning strike that brings the bookcase crashing down on him. The premise gave the song's romantic-distance lyric a visual frame without pretending to dramatize African geography. Africa spent a week at #1 on Billboard in February 1983 — though the Grammy hardware that year went to its sister single Rosanna (Record of the Year) and to Toto IV (Album of the Year). The video itself preceded the first VMA ceremony by eighteen months and so collected no MTV awards — but in retrospect it's the early sketch of a directorial vocabulary Barron would push to the front of the form within four years. It belongs at #28 because Barron's early visual concepts here directly seed the top 10 he would reach with Take On Me and Money for Nothing later in the decade.

Nigel Dick took an inverted approach: where most 1985 videos for chart-topping singles loaded up on choreography, narrative, or location-setting, Everybody Wants to Rule the World gave you Curt Smith driving a vintage Austin-Healey through the desert outside Los Angeles — Salton Sea, Cabazon, the long flat stretches of Interstate 10 — inter-cut with bare studio footage of him and Roland Orzabal recording in London. No story. No metaphor. Just a band traveling to a song that happens to be one of the era's largest. The visual restraint matched the song's resigned, observational lyric — and the video became one of the year's most-played MTV clips, helping push the single to #1 on Billboard in June 1985. It won the 1986 Brit Award for Best British Single. Dick would prove three years later, with Guns N' Roses' Sweet Child O' Mine, that he could shoot a band-and-room with the same kind of confident under-production. It belongs at #29 because deliberate restraint in pop video is rarer than spectacle — and this is the cleanest example of how to use it.

Anton Corbijn — already known internationally for his Joy Division and U2 photography — moved into music video direction with a clip that used the Almería desert (where Sergio Leone shot his spaghetti westerns) as both literal and figurative landscape. Dave Gahan and the band appear as gunslingers and preachers in a high-contrast black-and-white-into-sepia treatment that mirrored Corbijn's stills work. The video positioned Depeche Mode — by 1989 a genuinely large band but still framed as "synth pop" by most American critics — as a rock proposition: Western-aesthetic, masculine, biblical. The single became their first US Top 40 hit since "People Are People" five years earlier. More importantly, it began a working relationship between Corbijn and the band that has spanned four decades and shaped Depeche Mode's entire visual identity. It belongs at #30 because it represents a director and a band finding their long-term partnership at exactly the moment the band needed reframing for the American market.

Tina Turner had been written off after her split from Ike Turner — too old (44), too out-of-fashion, too associated with the 60s and 70s — but Capitol's Private Dancer relaunch positioned her as a singular adult-pop voice. The video matched the strategy: Turner walking through Manhattan in a denim jacket and red leather skirt, hair teased high, confident in a way that made the song's lyrics about romantic disenchantment feel earned rather than wounded. The performance is filmed without elaborate set-pieces — just a star moving through a real city — and the visual restraint amplifies rather than mutes Turner's screen presence. The single went to #1 on Billboard in September 1984, won Record of the Year at the 1985 Grammys, and helped Private Dancer sell over 20 million copies worldwide. It belongs at #31 because the comeback narrative could have been packaged as nostalgia or sympathy — instead it argued, on screen, that Turner at 44 was more compelling than most pop acts in their twenties.

A year before MTV launched, Chuck Statler and Devo built a music video around a fake-Western ranch set, the band's signature red plastic "energy dome" hats, and a deliberately absurd narrative involving the singer "whipping" various objects (and the clothing of an unwilling participant — a gag the band was later forced to defend as parody rather than endorsement). The conceit was art-school surrealism translated to a three-minute pop format: deliberately cheap, deliberately funny, deliberately weird. When MTV launched in August 1981, Whip It was already a year old — exactly the kind of pre-existing video the new channel relied on, and it became a staple in MTV's heavy rotation throughout the channel's first year. The single peaked at #14 on Billboard. It belongs at #32 because while the video doesn't attempt the formal innovation of the top 10, it represents the entire pre-MTV new-wave attitude — that music video could be a deliberately small art object — and that attitude shaped what MTV's first year looked like.

Adam Dubin and Ric Menello built the video around a frat-party home-invasion: three guys in suits crash a buttoned-up dinner party, beer cans appear, the cast erupts into a pie-fight finale. It was filmed as deliberate parody — the Beasties were satirizing the same "white college boy" archetype they were being mistaken for — but the parody was missed by exactly the audience it skewered. By the mid-90s, with Paul's Boutique, Check Your Head, and Ill Communication behind them, the band publicly disavowed the video as their defining cultural moment and distanced themselves from the frat-rock image. The single reached #7 on Billboard, and Licensed to Ill became the first hip-hop album to top the US album chart. It belongs at #33 not because it's their best video — by their own later measure it isn't — but because few clips of the era better illustrate how a satirical music video can be received literally and define a band's image against their will.

Brian Grant built a set that looked more like a Piet Mondrian painting than a music video stage: bright primary colors, geometric framing, sliding doors that opened to reveal Houston in different rooms and outfits. The aesthetic was deliberately graphic and constructed — a contrast to the documentary intimacy other 1985 videos were leaning toward — and matched the song's pop-leaning sensibility. The video helped break a barrier MTV had been criticized for: throughout 1981-84 the channel had rotated Black artists thinly (a complaint David Bowie publicly raised in his 1983 on-camera MTV interview with Mark Goodman), and Houston's heavy rotation alongside Michael Jackson's Thriller-era clips was part of the network's slow correction. The single went to #1 on Billboard in February 1986 and won Best Female Video at the 1986 MTV VMAs. It belongs at #34 because while the formal ambition is moderate, the cultural impact — placing a young Black female pop star in MTV's center-screen rotation — was significant.

Two years after co-directing and choreographing Talking Heads' Once in a Lifetime, Toni Basil pointed the camera at herself. Mickey opens on a high school football field with Basil and a backing line of cheerleaders performing a tightly drilled routine — pom-poms, kicks, formations — set to one of the most insistent pop hooks of 1982. The video's premise inverts most music-video conventions of its moment: instead of a star with anonymous backup dancers, Basil is the dancer first and the singer second, and the choreography itself is the song's argument. Her experience as a working choreographer (she had also worked on films including American Graffiti) shows in every formation. The single went to #1 on Billboard in December 1982. It belongs at #35 because the choreographer-as-artist trajectory was rare in 80s pop — Basil's Mickey was both a #1 hit and a continuation of a working choreographic career, and the bridge between her uncredited work for other acts and her own pop persona deserves placement on this list.

Scorsese took an 18-minute West Side Story-inspired narrative and built it around Darryl, a Harlem prep-school student confronting his old neighborhood crew about who he's become. Michael Chapman shot the gang-confrontation segments in stark black-and-white; the moment Darryl breaks into the title-track choreography, the film converts to color. Wesley Snipes — two years before New Jack City would make him a star — plays Mini Max as the pivot of the conflict. The video belongs at #36 because Scorsese applied his full feature-film grammar to a music video, and the form briefly held.

Lambert built the clip around an idea that struck her in pre-production — that the most arresting image she could find for the song was Madonna in a wedding dress riding a Venetian gondola while a lion paced the streets nearby. The result superimposes religious imagery, sexuality, and white bridal iconography in a way that read as deliberate provocation in 1984 — and as the cleanest distillation of Madonna's entire visual project across the decade. It belongs at #37 because the Lambert/Madonna partnership defined how a female pop star could orchestrate her own iconography on screen.

Steve Barron — two years before Billie Jean and four before Take On Me — staged Don't You Want Me as a cinematic dual-POV narrative: Phil Oakey as the male lead and Susanne Sulley as the female lead playing out a relationship-as-film-shoot in real-time, with both characters filming each other. Released three months after MTV's August 1981 launch, the clip became an immediate signature of the channel's first programming year and one of the first music videos to attempt sustained narrative cinema — a feature-film grammar applied to a four-minute pop single. The visual ambition matches the song's lyric specificity (a couple's mutual-recrimination dialogue). Belongs at #38 because it documents synth-pop at its most narratively ambitious in the decade's first year, and because the Barron arc — the most consistent director thread on this list — begins here.

Jean-Baptiste Mondino — French, before this a director at Polydor with European pop credits — built The Boys of Summer around the song's central image: a man driving past the dead Cadillac of his youth, knowing the summer is over. Three actors play the same person at three ages: a child, a teenager driving alongside a girl, and Don Henley himself looking back. The B&W register, the long-lens highway shots, and the choice to never show the band performing took the clip out of MTV's default rock-video grammar entirely. The video won 1985 MTV Video of the Year — a vote that signaled the medium had room for adult-pop literacy alongside the rock and synth-pop spectacle that had dominated the channel's first three years. It belongs at #39 because it set the template for the Building the Perfect Beast / I Won't Back Down / Free Fallin' generation of MTV's mid-decade — videos for grown-ups who had grown out of Hungry Like the Wolf.

Fincher took a song built around domestic abuse and the abuse-survivor's response, and built it as a noir crime piece with fragmented time and procedural restraint — closer to Se7en (1995) in temperament than to a 1989 hard-rock video. The clip is one of the first MTV-era pieces to treat incest as explicit subject rather than coded metaphor. The song won the 1990 Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It belongs at #40 because — together with Express Yourself — it marks the moment Fincher began moving from director-of-Madonna-and-Aerosmith to director-of-features, and the arc of late-80s MTV into 90s cinema crystallized.

Fincher's first collaboration with Madonna built a vast Metropolis-inspired industrial set: chained workers below, Madonna as the pinstriped executive above, the song's lyric about romantic agency reframed as class-war allegory. The reported $5 million budget made it among the most expensive music videos produced to that point in 1989. It belongs at #41 because the clip marks the moment a music video could be a feature director's portfolio piece, with full set construction and full thematic ambition — and Fincher's transition to features (Alien 3, 1992) followed within three years.

Lee filmed the video as an extension of his feature Do the Right Thing, organizing a thousand-person block-party march down Bedford-Stuyvesant's Stuyvesant Avenue with Public Enemy performing on a flatbed truck and the Bomb Squad's production filling the soundtrack. The signage, the crowd, the mid-summer haze — all of it operates as moving political tableau, not as conventional music-video staging. It belongs at #42 because the video and the film were built as a single cultural artifact, and few music videos of the era did more to position hip-hop as the political voice of its generation.

Sena placed Janet and her dancers in a stark industrial soundstage and shot in high-contrast black-and-white — uniforms, regimented unison choreography, no narrative escape from the frame. The styling and movement created a template for political dance-R&B that artists from Britney to Beyoncé to Ciara would draw on through the next two decades. It belongs at #43 because the clip is the cleanest argument made on screen for choreography as political language — restraint of color and setting forcing the viewer to read the dance itself as the message.

Godley & Creme built the clip around approximately one thousand lit candles arranged in a labyrinth pattern, with Sting walking through them as the song's power-shift between mentor and apprentice plays out. The video's closing image — Sting vanishing from the frame as the candles topple in cascading sequence — is one of the most-quoted endings in 80s music video. It belongs at #44 because the G&C-Sting partnership produced three clips that argued for music video as art-direction-first medium, and Wrapped Around Your Finger is the densest distillation of that argument.

Morahan stripped the staging to almost nothing — a chrome jukebox, a guitar, neon edge-lighting — and let George Michael construct his post-Wham! solo identity in a single visual take. The styling (jeans, leather jacket, sunglasses, stubble) was the deliberate antithesis of the choreographed-pop-duo image of Wake Me Up (#63) and Last Christmas three years earlier. The single went to #1 on Billboard in December 1987 and the album won the 1989 Grammy for Album of the Year. It belongs at #45 because the rebranding worked — the chrome-jukebox image is what most listeners now associate with George Michael, not the Day-Glo aerobics.

Simple Minds had refused the song twice. Producer Keith Forsey had written Don't You (Forget About Me) for The Breakfast Club and offered it first to Bryan Ferry, then to Billy Idol — both passed. By the time it reached Simple Minds, Jim Kerr was reportedly so reluctant to record someone else's song that the band recorded it in a single afternoon and considered keeping it off their next album. Daniel Kleinman's video built the clip around John Hughes's film: scenes of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and the rest of the Breakfast Club cast intercut with Simple Minds performance footage. The combination became the Breakfast Club hymn; the song the band wanted least became the song they would be remembered for. It belongs at #46 because the soundtrack-and-video combination defined how 80s film and MTV could amplify each other — and because the clip made Don't You (Forget About Me) one of the decade's most reflexively 80s things.

The clip alternates Barron's tightly-shot performance segments — Morten Harket and the band performing in monochrome studio space — with action footage Glen had already shot for the Bond feature itself. This is one of the few 80s music videos where the film and the music clip were built as deliberate co-products with shared directorial credit, rather than a music video assembled from leftover film footage. It belongs at #47 because the construction itself argues for music video as cross-media artifact — and because Barron, by 1987, had matured into a director who could collaborate inside a Hollywood production rather than purely outside it.

Pope had been shooting The Cure's videos since 1982, mostly in the band's gothic-claustrophobic register — but for Just Like Heaven he and Smith opened the frame onto an English clifftop, dressed Smith's longtime girlfriend Mary Poole (whom he would marry the following year) as the ethereal female figure, and let the wind do most of the choreography. The clip's brightness is unusual for the era's Cure work and matches the song's pop directness. It belongs at #48 because Pope demonstrated — across his Cure, Talk Talk, and Soft Cell collaborations — that a single director could move between gothic-pop, anti-pop, and romantic-pop without losing visual signature.

Bruce Gowers — who had directed Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 — applied the same "build to a single emotional climax" structure to I Want to Know What Love Is a decade later. The clip opens in muted register, Lou Gramm singing the verse to camera in restrained close-up; as the bridge approaches, the New Jersey Mass Choir fills the frame, and the final chorus turns the song into a cathedral. The choir had never been on MTV before. The structural lesson — that an arena-rock band could end a video as a religious gathering — went on to shape every "stadium-power-ballad" clip from We Are the Champions-style finales through Aerosmith's late-80s tearjerkers. It belongs at #49 because the video proved a hard-rock band could earn the gospel-choir register, and the formal trick (two-thirds restraint, one-third explosion) became MTV's power-ballad blueprint for the rest of the decade.

George Michael was seventeen when he wrote Careless Whisper on a bus in 1981, on his way to a DJ gig — Andrew Ridgeley contributed the chord sequence — and the song became, three years later, his path out of Wham!'s teen-pop frame and into the solo career Faith would launch in 1987. Duncan Gibbins shot the clip in Miami: George at piano, on the yacht, in hotel corridors, the saxophone signature carrying the emotional weight while a romantic-betrayal narrative plays out across split locations. The single was credited as "Wham! featuring George Michael" in the UK and as "George Michael" solo in the US — a billing choice that telegraphed the inevitable solo turn. The song hit #1 in twenty-five countries. It belongs at #50 because it documents one of the decade's great solo-departure moves caught in mid-air — a singer leaving his pop duo from inside a clip he made with the same director who would shoot the duo's own Last Christmas five months later.

After Like a Virgin and Material Girl, Madonna and Mary Lambert seemed locked into a single visual register. Papa Don't Preach — directed by James Foley, not Lambert — broke it. Madonna cut her hair short, dyed it platinum, dressed in striped tops echoing Marlon Brando's On the Waterfront costume, and starred in a narrative about a teenage girl telling her father she was pregnant and keeping the baby. Danny Aiello played the father; Staten Island and Manhattan locations grounded the setting. The song was a #1 hit and immediately politically contested: Planned Parenthood objected to what they read as anti-abortion framing, while broader Catholic critics parsed the pro-life surface differently, and the song's actual sympathies were left ambiguous on purpose. It belongs at #51 because it documents the first Madonna pivot — from Lambert's romantic-imagistic register to Foley's narrative-political register — and because the visual rebrand (cropped hair, Brando stripes) reset her image for the rest of the decade.

David Mallet — Bowie's signature video collaborator across Ashes to Ashes, Let's Dance, and China Girl — directed Under Pressure without either artist on set: the clip is built entirely from stock footage of explosions, traffic, and crowd-control imagery cut against the song's tension. Neither Queen nor Bowie appears in the video. The structural choice has been read as a meta-commentary on the song itself (about pressure rather than performers) and as a logistical accommodation (touring schedules made joint filming impossible). It belongs at #52 because the absence of artist footage makes it formally distinct from almost every other major-label clip of the decade — a video built from the editing room rather than the soundstage.

Callner staged the clip as a power-inversion: Cher in a black fishnet bodystocking and leather boots performing on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri before hundreds of dress-uniform Navy sailors. MTV initially banned the clip outright, then reversed to a watershed-rotation policy — the video ran after 9pm rather than throughout the day. The Navy issued a permanent decree banning music-video shoots aboard US ships afterward. It belongs at #53 because the clip is one of the cleanest pieces of late-80s gendered-power staging on screen, and because the regulatory response (initial ban → watershed rotation → permanent Navy ban) shaped how MTV would handle controversial content for the rest of its mainstream peak.

Sinclair staged the clip on a Mississippi-steamboat set built on the Thames, dressed the cast in 1870s-American period costume, and let Boy George's deliberate gender ambiguity sit at the visual center — pickpocket subplot, riverside ball, plantation-era costume drama, all of it openly costumed rather than naturalistic. The historical-American framing read as deliberate counter-image to the band's manifestly British-and-androgynous 1983 identity. It belongs at #54 because few mainstream pop clips of the era used costume drama this confidently to stage a queer-coded persona for a mass audience.

Mulcahy and a small crew shot the bulk of Vienna at Covent Garden's Royal Opera House and then flew to Wien for a single day's location work — fog, gas-lamp light, men walking past stone facades, all of it deliberately Third Man-evocative. The video predates MTV's August 1981 launch by months, which is part of the point: it's frequently cited as the first genuinely cinematic music video, and it sketches the visual vocabulary Mulcahy would carry through Hungry Like the Wolf (1982) and beyond. It belongs at #55 because the decade's eventual director-as-auteur model has its earliest documented expression here.

Two years before they would shoot Every Breath You Take and one before Two Tribes, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme built Rockit around the kinetic sculpture of British artist Jim Whiting: a spare studio populated by robotic mannequins — disembodied legs walking, severed torsos turning, mechanical heads pivoting in time to the beat — with Hancock himself appearing only on a small TV screen propped on a chair. The clip was unlike anything MTV had aired in mid-1983, and it won five of the eight VMAs at the channel's first awards ceremony in 1984 (a sweep no video has matched in a single night, even Sledgehammer's nine-VMA peak was spread across more categories). For Hancock — a jazz musician with a turntablist crossover song — it was his first MTV foothold. For hip-hop, its kinetic-collage aesthetic anticipated the visual register Yo! MTV Raps would adopt five years later. It belongs at #56 because Godley & Creme's experimental method — concept-driven animation built around a single visual idea — established the template they would refine across the rest of the decade.

After James Foley's narrative-political Papa Don't Preach earlier the same year, Madonna paired with Jean-Baptiste Mondino — fresh off The Boys of Summer for Don Henley — to push the visual register further. The clip stages a peep-show booth: Madonna in gold-trimmed corset, garters, and exaggerated lipstick performing for a row of paying older men, intercut with a young boy (around eight years old) waiting outside the establishment. The video closes with Madonna in dressed-down boyish clothing escaping with the boy, leaving the peep-show world behind. The corset alone — Mondino's costume choice — became one of the decade's most-imitated single images. The boundary-pushing combination of sex-work imagery and child protagonist generated controversy, but the visual ambition placed Madonna firmly outside the pop-girl frame she had occupied since Like a Virgin. It belongs at #57 because it documents Madonna in mid-pivot — her image now mutable across a single year (Lambert romantic, Foley narrative, Mondino provocative) — and because Mondino's gold-corset framing became one of the decade's most reproduced costumes.

Pope's clip placed Marc Almond in a deliberately camp toga-on-Olympus tableau and let the song's synth arrangement (the cover that essentially defined "British synth-pop" for American audiences) carry the rest. The video was in MTV's earliest rotation when the channel launched in August 1981 — making Tainted Love one of the videos that shaped the channel's first-month identity as a synth-pop showcase. It belongs at #58 because the song's commercial run was extraordinary, and because Pope's debut Soft Cell collaboration is the entry point to one of the decade's most prolific director-band-network arcs.

Wilhelm Reich was the Austrian psychoanalyst whose pseudoscientific cloud-busting machine — designed to force rain by manipulating "orgone energy" — became the centerpiece of a long FDA dispute that culminated in Reich being arrested in 1956 for violating a court injunction against his orgone-accumulator work, with his books and research materials burned by federal authorities across 1956–1960. His son Peter wrote a memoir about that ruined research, A Book of Dreams (1973), which Kate Bush had read and built her song around. Terry Gilliam contributed to the concept; Julian Doyle directed the clip itself. Donald Sutherland was secured as Reich for two days of filming. The clip stages Reich's last day with his son on Dragon Hill in Oxfordshire before government agents arrive — Bush playing Peter Reich, intercutting hilltop footage with the destruction of his father's writings. At six minutes the video is the longest in this list outside the Tier 1 cinematic clips, and the most overtly art-cinema in its register. Where Sledgehammer used animation to extend the form, Cloudbusting used narrative cinema. It belongs at #59 because critics from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork have repeatedly cited it among the decade's most artistically ambitious music videos, and because Gilliam's involvement (uncredited co-conception) marks one of the rare moments when a major film director helped build a clip from concept stage.

Where Where the Streets Have No Name — the next single from The Joshua Tree — would take U2 to a Los Angeles rooftop and turn the band into a stadium-rock spectacle, With or Without You turned in the opposite direction: filmed at Ardmore Studios outside Dublin, with single-source lamp lighting and Bono in confessional mode singing the chorus across multiple takes (Matt Mahurin contributed additional imagery). Meiert Avis — U2's most-frequent video director, with Gloria, New Year's Day, and The Unforgettable Fire already in his arc — reduced the visual to face, light, and shadow. The clip's intimacy was a deliberate counterpoint to U2's increasingly arena-scale rock identity, and gave the song's signature crescendo a chamber-cinematic frame. The single became U2's first US #1 — the moment a band that had been an MTV staple since 1983 finally crossed into commercial-pop dominance. It belongs at #60 because the Avis arc spans U2's transition from political-anthem-rock to the crossover commercial moment of 1987, and because the choice to film the Joshua Tree's most romantic ballad as confessional B&W rather than landscape-rock proved you could make U2 intimate.

Prince directed the clip himself as a stage-performance-as-music-video — typography projected onto darkened backdrops, silhouetted band figures, no narrative scaffold beyond the song's litany of late-80s anxieties. The conceit doubles as a prequel to his self-directed Sign o' the Times concert film released later in 1987. The video is one of the cleaner examples of an artist using music video and concert film as a single integrated visual project rather than two separate forms. It belongs at #61 because Prince — who treated the camera with the same authorial control he gave the studio — pushed the music-video format to function as part of a concert-film practice rather than as promotional add-on.

Griles built the clip as a cinematic five-minute short — Lauper as a young woman in a small-town diner, packing her things, breaking up with her boyfriend, and leaving on a train to return home to a mother who needs her. The video sits on the narrative side of 1984 pop video (where most contemporaries were performance-driven or surreal), and the emotional restraint of the staging gave the song's chorus an earned weight. It belongs at #62 because Griles and Lauper produced — across Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time and She Bop — three videos in one calendar year that defined what mainstream MTV could do with a self-contained female protagonist.

Morahan built a deliberately bright, deliberately silly clip — Wham! in white Choose Life t-shirts (Katharine Hamnett's anti-nuclear slogan, repurposed for pop), neon set design, aerobic-dance choreography. The styling is a precise distillation of how 1984 commercial pop wanted to look on screen. NME's later "50 Worst Music Videos" inclusion is part of why the clip earns its place: it documents — fully committed — exactly the aesthetic the late-decade indie press would react against. It belongs at #63 because the visual is canonical British pop circa 1984, and because the critical backlash is part of the cultural record we're documenting.

Morahan filmed the clip at Saas-Fee in Switzerland, framed as a chalet-house party with a thin breakup-narrative running through it: George Michael recognizes his ex from the previous year, the song's lyric playing through scenes of group dinner, ski-lift rides and present-exchange. Subsequent re-readings of the clip — particularly post-Michael's 1998 coming-out — have noted the all-male group dynamic and the romantic ambiguity of the lost-love narrative as gay-coded subtext that survived 1984's commercial framing. It belongs at #64 because the holiday-perennial rotation has made it one of the most-watched music videos in history, and the textual ambiguity built into Morahan's staging is part of why it has held cultural traction across four decades.

Richardson staged the clip on the grounds of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire — a 19th-century English country estate. Curt Smith sings from a window inside; Roland Orzabal dances alone on the lawn outside, the only person whose movements aren't synchronized with the surrounding gathering. The visual conceit — that the song's narrator is dissociated from the world the camera is showing — is a precise match for the lyric's depressive perspective, and the location's stillness amplifies it. It belongs at #65 because few 1982 videos staged a depressive perspective with this much spatial intelligence — and the clip's reading as a quiet, deliberate set-piece is correct.

Four years after the death of Ricky Wilson — guitarist and Cindy Wilson's brother — had paused the B-52's, the band returned with Cosmic Thing and a single, Love Shack, that became their biggest commercial hit. Adam Bernstein staged the video as a roadside party at the titular Love Shack: vintage convertible pulling up to a hand-painted clapboard, multi-generational dance crowd inside, fluorescent makeup, and a young pre-fame RuPaul as one of the dancing guests (the future drag superstar's first major MTV appearance). The clip ran heavily on MTV through fall 1989, became a sing-along anthem at weddings and parties for the next thirty years, and capped one of the decade's most welcome comeback stories. It belongs at #66 because the video's joyous-Athens-GA-collective-dance register completes the arc that began with Talking Heads (#25) — both bands proving the South's college-town scene could produce visually distinct mainstream pop, and because the clip's pure-celebration mode is the closing-decade counterpoint to the more anxious 80s registers of the political and the romantic.

Jeff Stein — fresh off the Mad Hatter cake-eating controversy of Don't Come Around Here No More — built Out of Touch around a different surrealism: a stage populated by giant musical instruments at theatrical scale, with Daryl Hall and John Oates performing in front of and around them. The drum kit is twelve feet tall. The synthesizer keys are torso-length. The visual gag — pop duo dwarfed by their own instruments — landed during a year when MTV's sets were getting visually denser anyway, but Stein's particular oversized-prop register stood out as a single gesture rather than a backdrop. The single went to #1 in December 1984, ending a run of six US #1s for Hall & Oates between 1981 and 1984 — more than any other duo of the decade. It belongs at #67 because it captures Hall & Oates at peak commercial reach, with a director who was simultaneously rewriting Tom Petty's visual identity in the same year, and because the giant-instrument concept anticipated the late-80s spectacle-clip aesthetic that videos like Aerosmith's Janie's Got a Gun would push further.

Weis built the clip around a populist conceit: instead of staging the band as the visual focus, he documented ordinary New Yorkers — cashiers, cab drivers, teenagers, tourists — doing the song's distinctive arm-position move, with brief cutaways to images of world leaders (Diana, Gaddafi, others) in the same pose via simple optical work. The aesthetic — folk-meme rather than fashion-show — was the precise opposite of the era's high-concept video work, and it helped the song become a year-long dance phenomenon. It belongs at #68 because few mainstream pop clips of the era leaned this fully into vernacular comedy as visual strategy.

Barron came back to a-ha months after Take On Me and built a deliberately quieter clip: black-and-white footage in a London church, naked mannequins arranged in pews and aisles, the band performing as if the mannequins were the congregation. The visual conceit — that the mannequin eyes gradually open across the runtime — gives the clip a slow uncanny tension that pays off in the final frames. It belongs at #69 because it documents what a director does after a definitional hit: not the same trick again, but a deliberate move into a different visual register that retains the recognizable signature.

Mulcahy took a song that was already in transition from new wave to adult pop and matched it with a deliberately gentle visual register — water reflections layered over performance footage, pastel-cream suit styling, soft interior lighting, no narrative scaffold. The effect is one of the cleanest visual definitions of "new romantic" as commercial pop aesthetic, separate from the harder synth-driven version of the genre. It belongs at #70 because the styling here became reference-image for how mid-80s adult pop wanted to look — and Mulcahy, who had built Vienna in colder cinematic register two years earlier, demonstrated full range across the same decade.

Derek Jarman — the British art-film director of Sebastiane (1976), Caravaggio (1986), and The Last of England (1988) — directed It's a Sin as his first Pet Shop Boys collaboration. The clip stages the song's catholic-guilt lyric as a medieval inquisition: robed inquisitors, religious imagery, candle-lit interiors, Neil Tennant himself in priestly robes facing his accusers. The combination of Jarman's auteurist religious imagery and the song's chart-topping synth-pop production produced one of the rare MTV-era videos where a major art-film director's signature register applied directly to a #1 single. Where West End Girls had been Eric Watson's documentary tour of London's social classes, It's a Sin was Jarman's high-art reading of the song's catholic-guilt subject. It belongs at #71 because it documents the only sustained collaboration between a major British art-film director and a chart-topping synth-pop duo across the decade — and because the religious-iconography frame anticipated the wider 90s queer-cinema register Jarman would push into in Edward II (1991) and beyond.

Grant filmed Turner alone in a single dim hall, intercut with brief glimpses of the men whose money is the song's subject. Where What's Love Got to Do with It had been Turner's comeback single — released a year earlier as the album's lead single — Private Dancer came at the end of the album cycle as its fifth single, with Turner now established at 44 as a multi-platinum solo artist. The clip plays her as solitary witness rather than wry survivor. Belongs at #72 because the visual restraint matches the song's resigned tone, and because the title-track clip documents the second visual register of Turner's mid-decade peak.

Donovan — the British photographer best known for fashion work — staged the clip with Palmer in a black suit "performing" with a five-piece band of identical models in tight black dresses, slicked-dark hair, pale skin, and bright red lipstick. The models hold instruments without playing them. The visual joke is the substitution of fashion-shoot stillness for rock-band physicality. The clip became one of the decade's most parodied single images (Shania Twain's Man! I Feel Like a Woman!, Robot Chicken, the Love Actually recreation). Belongs at #73 because Donovan's photographic-stillness register translated to MTV better than most fashion-photographer attempts at music video.

Giraldi — fresh off Beat It the year before — built the Hello clip around a narrative: Lionel Richie as a sympathetic music teacher, a blind sculpture student (played by Laura Carrington) modeling clay into what turns out to be a sculpture of Richie's own face. The clay-bust reveal at the end has been mocked for decades (the sculpture famously looks nothing like Richie), but the clip's emotional grammar — the long sympathetic teacher-student build — was an unusual register for a male R&B chart-topper in 1984. Belongs at #74 because Giraldi applied the same narrative-driven craft he had brought to Beat It to a softer subject, and the result was a #1 single carried by the video's emotional setup.

Angelus and Roth built the clip as a fully realized comedic mini-feature: a young schoolboy daydreams that his algebra teacher is a stripper, and the band performs alongside kid-version doppelgängers in a deliberately silly, deliberately camera-aware register. The conceit is proto-high-concept rock comedy — closer to the music-video-as-skit register that would dominate hair-metal video later in the decade. It belongs at #75 because Angelus and Roth's collaborative authorship — director-and-frontman as co-directors — was unusual for 1984 mainstream rock video and pre-dated the auteur-frontman model that became conventional with later Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi clips.

Proyas — eight years before The Crow and twelve before Dark City — staged the clip as a sleepwalking corridor: Neil Finn moving through doorways while bandmates perform routine domestic tasks, the camera floating in slow-motion gimbal work. The Australian production company Meaningful Eye Contact handled it. Belongs at #76 because the visual surrealism is recognizably Proyas-arc-prequel — the same authorial signature that would carry into his feature work.

Three months after Let's Dance, Mallet returned for China Girl — staging the song's romantic narrative with New Zealand-born actress Geeling Ng as Bowie's love interest. The closing beach-scene homage to From Here to Eternity generated controversy from its release: Bowie defended the clip as a parody of "racist tourist mentalities" while critics read it as an Orientalist romance. The 1984 VMA committee handed it Best Male Video despite the debate. Belongs at #77 because the controversy itself is part of the era's video-criticism record, and because Mallet's continued arc with Bowie (after Ashes to Ashes and Let's Dance) is one of the decade's tightest director-artist pairings.

Donald Cammell — the British co-director of Performance (1970, with Nicolas Roeg) and director of Demon Seed (1977) — directed his first and only U2 video for Pride: the band performing at SFX Hall (St. Francis Xavier Hall) in Dublin, intercut with shots of the Dublin docks and the Poolbeg towers. Cammell's previous film work was art-cinema-experimental, and his presence on a U2 video signaled the band's mid-decade ambition to position itself outside the synth-pop and hair-metal frames dominating MTV — Pride was also the first U2 clip not directed by Meiert Avis. The single became U2's first US Top 40, opening the path With or Without You would later complete to #1. Belongs at #78 because the Cammell connection is one of the decade's most-overlooked director-pairings — and because Pride is the U2 clip that pulled the band into MTV's American mainstream.

Jonathan Demme — three years before Married to the Mob and five before The Silence of the Lambs — directed Wild Wild Life as an extension of David Byrne's True Stories feature film: a roadside bar where ordinary patrons take turns lip-synching the song's lines, intercut with brief Byrne and Tina Weymouth performances. The lip-sync-relay structure became a recurring 1980s-90s comedy device (later refined by Spike Jonze in the 1990s). Belongs at #79 because Demme's hand applied at MTV scale produced one of the decade's warmest videos, and because the bar-singalong template provided a comedic counterweight to the band's more cerebral earlier work.

Brian De Palma — coming off Scarface (1983) — directed Dancing in the Dark over the opening two nights of the Born in the U.S.A. tour at the St. Paul Civic Center in Minnesota: Springsteen performing onstage with the camera tracking him until he pulls a young woman from the audience to dance during the final chorus. The audience plant was a then-unknown Courteney Cox, three years before her Family Ties run as Lauren Miller (premiering September 1987) and ten before Friends. The video became one of MTV's most-rotated clips of summer 1984. Belongs at #80 because De Palma's name on a Springsteen video documents the rare 1980s moment when an A-list American film director crossed into mainstream rock-video work, and because the Cox cameo is one of the decade's most-cited audience-pull-up moments.

Andrew Morahan and George Michael co-directed Father Figure in the Every Breath You Take school of romantic noir: George as a New York taxi driver in pursuit of a model (Tania Coleridge), shot in deep B&W contrast with Daniel-Pearl-style chiaroscuro. The clip is the visual companion to Faith — same year, same Morahan collaboration, opposite registers. Where Faith showed Michael in chrome-and-leather rocker pose, Father Figure showed him in noir-romantic mode. Belongs at #81 because the Morahan-Michael arc spans both registers from the same album and gave Michael back-to-back Hot 100 #1s in winter 1987-88.

Six months after Sledgehammer had taken nine VMAs at the 1987 ceremony, Stephen R. Johnson returned with Big Time — the same album, similar stop-motion technique, but a separate animation team and a different visual conceit: a giant Gabriel head on a tiny suited body, ego inflation literalized through scale. The clip wasn't expected to match Sledgehammer's VMA sweep (it didn't), but its appearance from the same album proved the Sledgehammer method wasn't a one-off. Belongs at #82 because the back-to-back album-cycle releases document the only time in the decade a stop-motion animator returned to the same artist within months — and because the Gabriel-Johnson arc is the most concentrated director-artist pairing of any of the Tier 1 visual innovators.

Prince wrote Manic Monday under the pseudonym Christopher and gave it to The Bangles after Apollonia 6 hadn't recorded it. The single became the band's first US Top 5 hit and was famously held off #1 by Prince's own Kiss — released the same week — meaning Prince's name was on both the #1 and #2 singles in April 1986. Tamra Davis directed the clip in a stripped-down studio register: the four Bangles performing the song with minimal narrative imposition, intercut with brief workplace-frustration vignettes. Davis would later direct features (Half Baked, Billy Madison). Belongs at #83 because the chart-trivia footnote — Prince at #1 and #2 simultaneously — is one of the decade's more amusing structural moments, and because the Bangles' breakthrough video kept the focus on the band rather than the writer.

The 1983 single had no music video — Factory Records' designer Peter Saville created only a die-cut sleeve resembling a 5.25" floppy disk (the design's production cost famously exceeded the record's sale price for years, ensuring Factory lost money on every copy sold). When New Order revisited the track in 1988 as Blue Monday 88, with Quincy Jones supervising the production at his Qwest Records label and John Potoker handling the actual remix, the band finally commissioned a video: Breer's hand-drawn geometric animation intercut with Wegman's Weimaraner-driven vignettes, set against the remix mix. The clip stands in for the original 1983 single in this list because the 1983 song has no canonical music video, and the 1988 remix — same composition, same New Order — was their first authorized film treatment of the recording. Belongs at #84 because the song defines a synth-pop axis without which the rest of the decade's electronic output reads differently — and because the eventual Breer/Wegman film treatment, however belated, is the closest thing to an official New Order video for Blue Monday.

A year before Sledgehammer took stop-motion to its peak, Stephen R. Johnson had already been refining the technique across multiple commissions — and Road to Nowhere is the Talking Heads-meets-Johnson moment that anticipates the Aardman-and-Quay-Brothers pipeline he would later use for Peter Gabriel. The clip combines stop-motion sequences with live-action band footage and David Byrne in motion, the visual register more disjointed and home-movie-ish than the polished Sledgehammer. Belongs at #85 because the Johnson connection prefigures one of the decade's most-awarded videos — Talking Heads gave him the room to experiment a year before Peter Gabriel gave him the budget to perfect the form.

Dave Robinson — co-founder of Stiff Records and Madness's manager — staged Our House as a comedic walking-tour of a fictional working-class British family's home, the seven Madness members weaving in and out of domestic vignettes. Suggs as the older brother, Chas Smash as the dad-in-the-car, the rest of the band as variously animated household figures. The visual conceit took Madness's ska-pop affability and gave it a single charming family-album frame. The single became the band's biggest commercial moment in both the UK and the US, and the clip — modest in budget — captured the band's signature register at its most accessible. Belongs at #86 because Our House is one of the decade's warmest videos, and because Madness's particular British-comedy register found a US audience through a video the rest of MTV's American programming had no equivalent of.

Peter Israelson's clip stages a young girl watching a mentor figure perform onstage from the wings, intercut with the present-day Whitney performing for her own audience while a maternal figure watches. The exact narrative read varies — some sources frame the older performer as Cissy Houston, Whitney's mother (who appears in the video) — but the clip's emotional structure is mentor-passing-the-torch rather than strict biography. The autobiographical framing gave the song's anthem-of-self lyric ("learning to love yourself / is the greatest love of all") its visual companion. The single broke a chart record: no solo woman had ever produced three consecutive #1s from a single album before. Belongs at #87 because the mentor-passing framing is unusual for an MTV-era ballad video, and because the clip captures the moment Houston's debut had reached its commercial peak before the Whitney album's even larger 1987 follow-up.

Keith MacMillan ("Keef") shot the clip on the streets of Manhattan's East Village: Debbie Harry walking past graffiti artists, a Native American figure, Uncle Sam, a child ballet dancer, and a man in a white tuxedo who appears at intervals across the song. Hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy appears in cameo. Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had not been originally cast, stepped in as a last-minute replacement when Grandmaster Flash didn't show up to the shoot. The single's rap section was the first to be performed by a vocalist on a US #1 hit — six years before Walk This Way and two years before Rockit. Belongs at #88 because the East Village staging documents the early-decade NYC art-music-graffiti scene at its formation, and because Harry's rap section locked in MTV's eventual willingness to play hip-hop-adjacent material.

Steve Barron — also directing Take On Me and Money for Nothing the same year — handled Heaven in a stripped-down register: Adams performing alone on a darkened stage in firelight, intercut with romantic narrative. The clip stands in contrast to Barron's animation-and-CGI work that year — proof he could shoot conventional rock-ballad material with the same compositional discipline. Heaven gave Adams his first US #1, opening the path that Summer of '69 would close out a year later. Belongs at #89 because the Barron arc spans both technical ambition and conventional craft in 1985, and because Heaven is the entry-point of Adams's commercial peak.

Morahan and Watson built the clip as moving-portrait of London — East End streets, Underground stations, Thames embankments — without narrative beats or performance staging. Tennant and Lowe pass through the city without commanding it; the city is the subject. The construction is one of Morahan's most restrained credits, cross-cutting with his louder Wham! and George Michael work. Belongs at #90 because the portrait-of-a-city-as-music-video register was rare in 1985 and the clip pulled it off cleanly.

Three co-directors — including band member David A. Stewart, who took co-directorial credit on multiple Eurythmics clips — shot Annie Lennox in a translucent dress against the Orkney Islands' dark coastline. The framing positioned Lennox as quasi-elemental figure rather than pop star, matching the song's atmospheric melancholy. The three-co-director model is unusual in 80s music video and worth the editorial note. Belongs at #91 because both the imagery and the directorial structure were idiosyncratic for chart-pop.

Orme staged the clip in tight claustrophobic close-up — Collins's face filling the frame, lit from below, the studio decor reduced to almost nothing. The visual conceit gives the song's famous gated-reverb drum break maximum impact at the chorus turn. Belongs at #92 because Orme's framing prefigured the cinematic re-use of the song in Miami Vice and beyond.

Mahurin — better known at the time as a Time Magazine cover photographer — shot the clip in deliberately spare black-and-white: Chapman alone in the frame, no narrative miniatures, no setting beyond darkness and a single light source. The aesthetic was the precise inverse of 1988's MTV norm and helped fix Chapman as singer-songwriter rather than pop act on the channel. Belongs at #93 because the visual restraint was the argument the song already wanted to make.

Doug Freel directed The Look in a stripped band-performance register — Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson alternating in B&W close-ups, intercut with color-saturated band footage. The clip's energy mirrors the song's drum-pattern hook ("she's got the look"). The single's arrival as a US #1 in April 1989 marked Sweden's biggest pop-export moment of the decade — three years after ABBA had dissolved, Roxette put Swedish-language-band English-language-song production onto the American chart in a way ABBA's earlier US runs had not achieved at the same scale. Belongs at #94 because the Swedish-pop-export angle is rarely covered in 80s music-video lists, and because Roxette's chart breakthrough laid the groundwork for the late-90s wave (Cardigans, ATC, etc.) that followed.

Mulcahy wrote, directed and edited the clip on a reported $50,000 budget, filmed in a single South London day with two days of post-production. The meta-reflexive premise — a video about video replacing radio — was deliberately self-aware, and MTV's choice of the clip as its 12:01 AM August 1, 1981 launch broadcast retroactively cemented the song's argument. Belongs at #95 as a scope exception: although song and video are from October 1979 — strictly outside the January 1980–December 1989 window this guide otherwise observes — the clip's 1981 MTV-launch role makes its omission untenable. No other 1980s music-video account can responsibly skip the first video the channel ever played.

James Herbert — an Athens, Georgia visual artist and friend of the band — directed It's the End of the World as a collage of footage shot in and around Athens: a young boy moving through abandoned interiors, R.E.M. performing in cluttered domestic spaces, archival imagery cut against the song's torrent of references. The visual register is closer to home-movie than MTV polish — deliberately, given R.E.M.'s positioning as an alternative-rock alternative to mainstream MTV-era polish. The song's rapid-fire stream of cultural-collapse signifiers ("Lenny Bruce is not afraid", "Leonard Bernstein") pairs with Herbert's collage editing. Belongs at #96 because R.E.M. is the decade's most-cited alternative-rock band, and because Herbert's Athens-collective visual register documents the alternative scene that Don't You (Forget About Me) and the Breakfast Club generation would soon mainstream.

Temple — who would later direct Absolute Beginners (1986) and several Sex Pistols-related projects — staged the clip in Kennington, South London (corner of Brook Drive and Hayles Street, SE11), with Kevin Rowland and the band in their signature dungaree-and-overall costuming, performing for a small audience that gradually erupts into shared rhythm. The aesthetic was deliberately scuffed, a counter-image to 1982's polished synth-pop. Belongs at #97 because the dungaree-tableau became one of the era's most-quoted single visual gestures.

Released at the very edge of the decade — November 14, 1980, as the second single from Visage — Fade to Grey arrived as a single of pure synthesizer composition. Billy Currie (Ultravox) and Chris Payne wrote the music during their work on the Gary Numan tour; Midge Ure contributed the lyrics; Steve Strange of London's Blitz Club fronted Visage with his New Romantic styling. Kevin Godley and Lol Creme directed the video as one of their earliest visual commissions, three years before they would shoot Every Breath You Take for The Police. The clip's expressionist register — face make-up, theatrical staging, geometric set design — predates and prefigures the synth-pop visual grammar that Sweet Dreams, Don't You Want Me, and the rest of the decade's electronic output would refine. Belongs at #98 because the song defines the decade-opening synth-pop moment, and because the Godley & Creme arc that would dominate the decade's most-precise videos started here.

Garfath staged the clip on a darkened stage with Bush and dancer Michael Hervieu performing a formalized modern-dance duet — choreography by Diane Grey — that literalized the song's lyric of swapping bodies and perspectives with another person. No set design beyond lighting. The clip's eventual 2022 second life via Stranger Things gave it one of the longest commercial afterlives in pop history. Belongs at #99 because the choreographic ambition was rare in 1985 chart-pop, and the cultural afterlife is the cleanest example of a music video outlasting its decade.

Julien Temple — better known by 1984 for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) and his work with the Sex Pistols, soon for Absolute Beginners (1986) — directed Smooth Operator in a register opposite his Pistols-era documentary work: noir-jazz lighting, sumptuous Art Deco interiors, Sade Adu in restrained close-up performing the song with a quiet intensity that opposed the more theatrical pop-video grammar of 1984. The clip plays as visual companion to the song's "smooth operator" lyric — Temple's slow-cinema composition matched to the song's restrained groove. Smooth Operator became Sade's biggest US chart hit and one of the most-rotated late-night MTV ballad clips of 1984-85. Belongs at #100 because it closes the list with a video that argues the 80s could be sumptuous and sparing at once — that the medium had room for jazz-noir restraint alongside the technical ambitions of the Tier 1 entries — and because Sade's particular visual register has stayed un-dated in a way few of the more decade-coded clips on this list can claim.