The 20 best music videos ever made

On 2 December 1983 MTV broadcast a fourteen-minute film. There's a werewolf, there's a graveyard opening up, and there's a routine that anyone past thirty can still perform badly at a wedding.

Thriller was directed by John Landis, fresh from The Blues Brothers, and it cost $500,000: roughly ten times a normal music video of the period. To find the money, Jackson and Landis pre-sold MTV the making-of documentary — they invented a second product in order to pay for the first.

In 2009 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. It was the first music video to get in, filed alongside Citizen Kane.

But when exactly did the video become more important than the song?

You can date it precisely: 1 August 1981, one minute past midnight. MTV opened with footage of a Space Shuttle launch and then played its first video, Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. In hindsight it's a mission statement, badly worded and absolutely right. (That's a very young Hans Zimmer on keyboards in the video. Yes, that Hans Zimmer.)

What follows is a decade in which the video is where the money and the directors go. In 1986 Peter Gabriel makes Sledgehammer in stop motion with Aardman — the Wallace & Gromit people — and the Quay brothers. The following year it wins nine awards in a single night at the MTV Video Music Awards: still the record, still unbeaten. A year earlier a-ha had made Take on Me with rotoscoping: around 3,000 hand-drawn frames, sixteen weeks of work by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger. They're the two extremes of one idea — that it's worth spending months on three minutes of music.

And in Italy? Here's something that doesn't get told nearly enough: Videomusic launched on 2 April 1984, three years before MTV Europe and thirteen before MTV Italy. Marialina Marcucci founded it and installed it at Il Ciocco, above Barga, in the province of Lucca. Europe's first television channel entirely devoted to music, twenty-four hours a day, broadcasting from a hillside in the Garfagnana. (Put like that it sounds like the opening of a joke, but that is exactly how it went.)

Then the channel closed, and the music video lost its home.

It didn't die: it changed jobs. It no longer has to fill a schedule, it has to get shared. In 2013 Pharrell Williams released Happy as a twenty-four hour video, on a site that still runs today (24hoursofhappy.com). Nobody watches all of it, and that isn't the point: the point is that you talk about it.

And here's the thing you wouldn't expect. In an era when post-production can manufacture anything at all, the videos that last are the ones that were actually done.

In 2011 Gotye and Kimbra stand motionless against a white backdrop while paint covers them. It's all stop motion: Emma Hack paints a few centimetres, steps out of frame, a frame is shot, and it starts again. Twenty-three hours on set across two days, for four minutes of video, directed by Natasha Pincus. In 2018 Childish Gambino shot This Is America with Hiro Murai: no effects, just choreography and things entering frame at the right moment. It won four Grammys and was the first rap song to take Record of the Year and Song of the Year — two categories hip-hop had always been denied (I wrote about that in Il paradosso dei Grammy Awards, in Italian). And OK Go have built an entire career on it: in Needing/Getting they drive a car through a course of tuned instruments, playing them with the vehicle.

Three videos that could have been simulated on a computer, and were made by hand instead. It isn't nostalgia: it's that you can see the difference.

Then, in 2024, the other road opens. Paul Trillo directs The Hardest Part for Washed Out entirely with Sora: the first music video officially commissioned from a generative model. To get the 55 shots in the final cut he generated seven hundred. That number says everything: the machine doesn't execute, it proposes — and somebody still has to choose. (Sora as a standalone product was shut down in April this year. Models change names every six months; the job of choosing doesn't.)

That 1983 film cost ten times the going rate because it had to stand out inside a schedule. Today a video has to stand out inside a feed, and can cost about as much as a monthly subscription. Everything has changed except the problem.

These are the twenty I go back to most. It isn't a ranking: it's a list.

The list

1. Michael Jackson — Thriller
2. a-ha — Take on Me
3. Björk — All is Full of Love
4. The Verve — Bitter Sweet Symphony
5. Gotye feat. Kimbra — Somebody That I Used to Know
6. Peter Gabriel — Sledgehammer
7. Beastie Boys — Sabotage
8. Jamiroquai — Virtual Insanity
9. OK Go — Needing/Getting
10. Childish Gambino — This Is America
11. R.E.M. — Imitation of Life
12. Radiohead — Karma Police
13. Pharrell Williams — Happy
14. Foo Fighters — Learn to Fly
15. Lady Gaga — Bad Romance
16. The Smashing Pumpkins — Tonight, Tonight
17. Queens of the Stone Age — Go with the Flow
18. The Dead Weather — Treat Me Like Your Mother
19. Zero 7 — Home
20. UNKLE — Rabbit in Your Headlights