Most music videos, especially modern ones, are pretty boring.
Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity is pretty impressive when you find out how they filmed it.
DANCING 🕺💃 WALKING 🚶🚷 REARRANGING FURNITURE 🪑🛋️ BABS IS 👵 SHOPPING 🛍️ I LET THE BIRD OUT OF THE CAGE 🦅🐓
Was the first one that came to mind for me.
Aha - Take On Me …such a mesmerizing video. A girl reading a comic is sucked into a world in between the two realities. Really cool artistically and you can’t help but wish you could see more of the story.
Heard the song so many times, never watched the music video
That was great :)
Christopher Walken is so good in Weapon of Choice that he made me like the song https://yewtu.be/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
This was the first one I thought of too.
Did you know that Christopher Walken used to be a professional tap dancer? The parts of the video where he’s doing that are 100% him.
Ok Go, just about any of their videos are worth watching, even if you don’t care about their music
My personal vote is The One Moment.
Dire Straits Money for Nothing was amazing at the time. Turn Down for What is amazing in its own way. Smashing Pumpkins Tonight, Tonight. Michael Jackson had a few good ones.
Fun fact: the Director of the “Turn Down For What” video ended up directing “Everything Everywhere All At Once”.
And the extremely underrated “Swiss Army Man” featuring a fart-propelled Harry Potter raft.
One of the Daniels directed “The Death of Dick Long”, which might be the best mystery movie I’ve ever seen. Go in blind mister and, hands down, you won’t be disappointed if you like mystery movies.
From Yesterday by 30 Seconds to Mars is like a whole short film and they went to China to film it. I remember it being a bit of a deal at the time.
Basically every OK Go music video, This Too Shall Pass is particularly impressive.
Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel is pretty impressive the amount of work that must’ve gone into it.
The face morphing at the end of Black and White by Michael Jackson was cutting edge special effects at the time and it holds up well today (better than the rap verse breakdown in the song itself…)
Haha. Last night my teen was watching the MJ halftime performance. She was SO offended that they cut the rap out of Black and White because “it’s the only part of the song that makes sense!”
I don’t think anyone has appreciated what Coldplay did with their MV for The Scientist. In which Chris Martin really had to learn to sing the song backwards for the MV.
Here’s what Director Jamie Thraves said on his interview with MTV way back on 2003
“I had this idea that I wanted to do a story that’s tragic but starts off happy and ends happy, and the video is about rewinding to that happy ending,”
Thraves needed to find a new way to tell a narrative story that moved forward even as the action moved backward.
“The original idea was a straight narrative without the lead singer in the video,” said Thraves. “But Chris wanted to be in the video and he was really excited to learn how to sing the song backward.”
“He got a tape of the song recorded backward and he listened to it over and over. He’s a very passionate guy, so he got really into it. What we learned later on is about the problems with phonetics, because you have to be very careful with the lip movement so that when you end on a sound your mouth is formed in the right way.”
I think this would be always the most impressive music video in my book, ALWAYS. The dedication Chris Martin put man, I cant even think how he learned all of that.
Labyrinth.
Sure, they call it a movie, but it’s really just an hour and a half long David Bowie video.
That cod piece. What the literal fuck was going on with 80s kids movies?
The totally unnecessary tiddies in neverending story come to mind.
Same goes for Tron Legacy.
Impressive, maybe!? Crazy? Absolutely! The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
That’s not even their most impressive one, imo:
R.E.M. - Imitation of Life. The entire song happens in a few seconds, with all parts at the same time. The video keeps rewinding, each time showing one of the parts.
I’m convinced Ok,Go is a music video band that made music to go with their videos.
Blockhead - The Music Scene is just incredible
Turn Down For What?
Same directors as Everything everywhere all at Once.
Came here to post this one. I saw that movie on the airplane without knowing anything about it, and immediately thought, “This movie was made by the guys who filmed the ‘Turn Down for What’ music video.” I didn’t even know their names, had to confirm my guess after landing.
Because the music video and their directorial style are that distinctive and memorable. It was not surprising at all that they got showered in awards, those guys are creative AF.
A few directed by Ritchie Cunningham, he often collaborates with Aphex Twin and Björk.
Prodigy’s “Smack my bitch up” That video just had excellent camera work and a surprise twist at the end.
Pretty much all videos of Daft Punk’s “Discovery” Album.
Jamiroquai “Virtual Insanity” Simple setup, but great execution.
A few from Peter Gabriel come to mind as well.
Peter Gabriel has a new album out with a bunch of videos produced with AI. I don’t think he meant them to be disturbing but I find them to be very so, in the way that AI when it gets things somewhat wrong is disturbing. I also think possibly his new songs were produced via AI as well - they sound a bit like music by an AI trained up on Peter Gabriel music.
Sledgehammer was fucking awesome, though - and it was done by the guy who went on to do the Wallace and Gromit series.
