Nirvana

Nirvana are the band here where the director's job was to execute someone else's vision. Kurt Cobain wrote the treatments, drew the storyboards, and at least once recut the finished film himself.

That once was "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Samuel Bayer had never directed a music video before; he and Cobain argued through the shoot, and Cobain refused to lip-sync. When Bayer's cut came back, Cobain flew to Los Angeles and re-edited it himself, pulling out the shots of the teachers. The version that won two MTV Video Music Awards is the singer's cut, not the director's.

Kevin Kerslake came closest to being a house director — four videos here, among them the "In Bloom" send-up of The Ed Sullivan Show, the band playing it straight for a screaming studio audience before wrecking the set in dresses. His run ended in court: he had submitted treatments for "Heart-Shaped Box" and was set to shoot it when the job went elsewhere, and he sued the band for copyright infringement, claiming ideas from the "In Bloom" session had carried over. It was settled out of court.

The job had gone to Anton Corbijn, and it went to him on Cobain's terms. Corbijn shot the singer's storyboards close to as drawn — the poppy road, the mechanical birds and the paper butterflies are his own — then sent the black-and-white footage to Mexico, where a crew hand-tinted the key frame of every edit and Cobain signed off on each one. "It was the one video that ideas-wise, I was the least involved with," Corbijn said later. The same photographer was by then Depeche Mode's creative director in all but name, deciding how a band looked; here he was hired to look through someone else's eyes.

Three of the twelve entries here aren't promos at all, but songs from the MTV Unplugged set taped in New York in November 1993, where the band filled the setlist with covers and album tracks instead of the hits.