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The Top 10 Music Videos of All Time

This post is a lightly-edited transcript of the Hyperjump Podcast: Top 10 Music Videos, which you can watch at this link here. As such, it may read more like a stream of conversation than a formal article. Subscribe to us on YouTube for more similar content!



Hi! I’m Cameron M. Johnson, Creative Director of Hyperjump Productions, based here in Dubai, and I'm here today to talk to you about one of my favorite things in the world: music videos. 


Music videos are at the intersection of two of my favorite art forms: music and, you guessed it, videos, and I love the way that music videos have such a unique effect, where obviously they can connect us to the songs that we love from our favorite artists, but they can also elevate the music into something beyond just what you can hear in your ears. 


They can turn songs into stories, into cinematic experiences, or just to pure vibes and memories, and they can create completely new feelings that the songs alone could not capture on their own. And it's a brilliant way for both filmmakers and musicians, of course, to collaborate and create something new and interesting. 


Of course, music videos follow a sort of marketing function in society. The whole point of music videos is largely to advertise the songs that they are made for, but as a unique art form on their own, even though it is a rather commercial art form, they are super interesting, and often allow artists a lot more creative freedom than they might have, say, in a scripted television show or film. And so you often see a lot of the coolest ideas, really avant-garde interesting stuff, coming out of the best music videos. 


Today, I'm going to talk about 10 of my favorite music videos, why I think these videos are special, why I think you should check them out, what we can learn from them, and I also encourage you guys in the comments below to get typing with some of your favorite recommendations for music videos that you love. This is all about celebrating art and creativity. So let's get positive. Let's get shouting out to some of our favorite music video artists and let's get making music videos of our own!


10. *NSYNC - Bye, Bye, Bye



Let's get into the top ten music videos of all time in Cameron's correct opinion. In 10th place, I'm starting off with a pretty iconic one here. We have the *NSync music video: Bye, Bye, Bye. Which is one of the greatest videos of the late nineties/early 2000s, Y2K period. 


Now of all the videos on this list, this is probably the one that you guys will have most likely seen. It's a super iconic, very, very famous music video. And the whole kind of meme of this video is that you have this really tall woman who is lording over these men that she's controlling with marionette strings. 


What I find really interesting though about this video, why I kinda love it so much, isn't just the epic visual concept, really well done, obviously, really iconic concept takes the kind of point of the song breaking up with a toxic, you know, lover, and turns it into something really fun and visually obvious and recognizable for the audience. 


But I just love how well choreographed these guys are on the strings. It's like every kind of movement that these guys are doing, especially Timberlake, is matching exactly the way that the strings are being pulled, as well as matching the beat of the song, which I find a really enjoyable thing to watch. But I think that it could also be that effect, I've heard before that there's this effect that if you have a visual and then you have music playing, your brain will kind of find a way for those things to link. I'm not sure if that's exactly what's going on here, but I just love watching the guys dance on the strings. I think it's a really, really fun visual and it makes this one of the most entertaining music videos ever created, in my opinion. 


This video was released at the crack of dawn of the 21st century in the year 2000, right in January of that year. And it was directed by Wayne Isham, who if you look on his Wikipedia bio, has directed hundreds of epic music videos over the years. He's really one of the GOATs of this art form. But for me, this might be his most iconic video of them all. I love this one and it starts off the list at number ten. 


9. Sinéad O’Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U



In 9th place, we have another iconic example of a music video with 1990's "Nothing Compares 2 U", sung by Sinéad O'Connor, originally from a song by Prince. Now this music video was directed by John Maybury, a British director, and it's also, like the first one that I mentioned, one of the most iconic music videos of all time. This one for much more minimalist reasons. 


If "Bye Bye Bye" is an example of maximalist cinema, big budget, so much going on, tells an epic story, this is a much smaller, more intimate music video. The vast majority of this video is just a close up on Sinéad O'Connor's face as she goes through different stages of emotions while processing her grief and her anger, her sadness. Of course the song is about grieving a lost relationship. And this music video gets across the power of that feeling so well, and as I said, most of the video is just a close up on Sinéad O'Connor's face, and the most iconic part of it, of course, is eventually at the end of the music video as two tears slowly drip down her face. One of the most powerful images in music video cinema ever captured. 


And basically the whole video is just that. It's just her face going through these emotions with occasional shots of her walking through a park kind of fading in and out throughout the video. But it really is an example of minimalism done right. This couldn't work for every single music video. Sometimes minimalism isn't the way to go, but for a song like this, which is about raw emotional power, this really was the most striking way to capture that powerful imagery. 


It really reminds me of that really old silent Joan of Arc film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has an iconic sequence which is just showing in close up Joan of Arc's face as she goes through various stages of emotion as well. This very much fits into that kind of range of cinematic language where the human face and our eyes, our mouths, our expressions is the most important thing that the camera can capture. Because end of the day, cinema is the medium of empathy. It's about reaching between people. And there are very few music videos that have done that as effectively as "Nothing Compares 2 U" from the late Sinéad O'Connor. 


8. Grimes - Oblivion



In 8th place we have a music video from one of my personal favourite artists, Grimes, with her masterpiece song "Oblivion". This song and video were released in 2012 and the video was co-directed by Grimes herself and Emily Kai Bock. And the video was filmed I believe at McGill University in Canada, and it basically shows for the majority of the video Grimes standing wearing headphones, dancing, kind of doing her own thing in the middle of a football arena, and then in various different places within the arena. 


So you have shots of Grimes kind of dancing and just being present, doing her own thing while she's in the changing room with the football players as they are lifting and getting ready for the game. You have her kind of dancing in the crowd as people are watching the game, eating hot dogs and so on, combined with the kind of dark synthpop vibes of the song and the dark subject matter of the song, which I will let you look up for yourself. 


It creates this really haunting kind of contrast between Grimes, this kind of free and free spirited woman who is there doing her own thing in this very, very specific masculine environment. It's a really striking contrast between two worlds, and that's what I think is the main takeaway from this video. Sometimes the best thing that you can do to get across your point is to show juxtaposition between one thing and another thing, and how perhaps those things don't have to be so different or so far apart from each other. 


Here we have two very different and contrasting worlds that are coming together with one person choosing bravely to do their own thing to be themselves in an environment that hasn't previously been welcoming to them. And really, isn't that just all of art? It's us making stuff and putting it out there and saying "we want to be part of this!" and I think that's what's beautiful about this. 


Of course, I'm also biased because this is one of my favorite songs of all time. I absolutely love this era of Grimes music. And I think it's a simple, but very, very powerful example of how a low budget music video can create really, really iconic imagery through gorgeous cinematography, of course, lots of great slow motion, but also brilliant storytelling, brilliant contrast of images. One of my favourites for sure. 


7. Hall & Oates - She’s Gone



In 7th place we have perhaps the greatest troll in music video history. It's the 1973 promotional video - this is before they were even calling these music videos - by Hall and Oates, for their song "She's Gone". This video I've always enjoyed just conceptually. 


So the whole story behind this video is basically when Hall and Oates made this song, the classic pop song, "She's Gone", their label kind of wanted them to do a lip syncing appearance on a local TV show - I think it was Atlantic City in New Jersey. They wanted them to go on the show and basically lip sync the song. And they didn't want to do that. They thought that was cringe, so they made an excuse that they weren't feeling well or something and weren't available for that particular shoot, and instead they would provide a recorded version that the show could play instead. 


But what they ended up doing is recording a video of these two guys, Darryl Hall and John Oates, sitting in comfy armchairs, half-assedly, basically, fake lip syncing the song. They don't really try and lip sync it correctly. In one point of the song, Darryl Hall, his verse starts, and he's supposed to start lip syncing, but instead he just starts smoking instead and just ignores the camera. And then you have these just two guys chilling throughout the majority of the song in armchairs, kind of lip syncing the song, while occasionally this girl in a sparkly dress passes by, and then this guy in a devil costume passes by. 


And basically the video is a rebellion against this requirement or this pressure from their team to make these stupid performances that these guys did not want to make, and it's turned out to be, even though the video itself was rejected in the day and, in fact, caused the label to get extremely angry with Hall and Oates, as far as I'm aware. It's ended up being one of the most iconic parts of their iconography. And I absolutely love trolly stuff like this. It's a real great statement of how a video can be super simple and in fact go so far against the brief that it's disrespectful, but somehow get across the cool vibes of this band better than any half serious project could have. It's a classic example of the artist's personality winning and coming across spectacularly in the final product. 


6. Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer



In 6th place, we're gonna talk about a video that is almost ubiquitously brought up whenever the topic of greatest music videos is discussed, and this is the iconic "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel. From 1986, this video, directed by Steven R. Johnson, is one of the most iconic music videos ever produced. And if you haven't seen this video, I implore you to go and watch it. 


The basic gimmick behind this video is that it's all in stop motion, and it was partly produced by Aardman. Nick Park himself, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, my GOAT, he personally directed some of these sequences, as did other members of the Aardman team. And basically the video, which is like five or six minutes long, is a smorgasbord of different stop motion sequences that somewhat go along with what Peter Gabriel is singing throughout this song. 


You've got sequences where Peter Gabriel is standing there and a train track is swirling around his head in slow motion one frame at a time, the train track is appearing. You've got another sequence with a dancing rotisserie chicken, that's the sequence that was directed by Nick Park. And you've got an assortment of weird and wonderful imagery throughout the video. 


This video took over a hundred hours just to film, and that included sixteen hours of Peter Gabriel being stuck underneath a sheet of glass as they filmed a very specific sequence with stop motion fish. And what I love about this video is just the raw, expressive, explosive creativity of it. There's so much cool imagery, they obviously put so much creativity and threw any idea that could stick, but that really fits the theme of this song, which is you know, it can be interpreted in many different ways, some more suggestive than others, as most pop songs, especially from the 80s, can be. 


But one interpretation of the song "Sledgehammer" is that it was Peter Gabriel finally embracing his pop era, embracing a style of music that was perhaps less refined and complex and intricate than the more progressive stuff that he was used to, but was more about brute forcing raw emotion and passion and getting to the crux of what really matters, which is what pop music is all about. 


It's about urgency, it's about feeling things now in the biggest way possible. And “Sledgehammer” does that in spades with its music video by having so many different things going on, so many crazy images and ideas on the screen, and it's just an incredible piece of creative work. And you have to admire the amount of effort by so many people, so many craftspeople that was put into the creation of this video. And as a piece of stop motion history, it's absolutely one of a kind. 


5. Baby Keem & Kendrick Lamar - Family Ties



And now. We're into the top five. For this one, we're jumping all the way into the current era with one of my favorite songs in recent memory, "Family Ties" by Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. Two cousins who came together to make a very distinct and powerful track expressing both of their creative freedom and intensity. This song has two very distinct sections, one in which Baby Keem is in charge and one in which Kendrick is in charge of the mic, and the video is very much the same. It's got two very distinct styles. 


But what I think is spectacular about this video is its incredible use of picture in picture to create a unexpected and avant-garde sense of that creative freedom that these guys are enjoying on the song. Throughout the song you'll have split screen, you'll have little videos coming across slowly moving panning throughout the screen, and all of these different images will create this idea of like, wow, I as the listener am not in control of this. I am very much living in Baby Keem and Kendrick's world right now. They are running this show. 


And combined with the kind of almost avant-garde nature of the song, the music video creates this kind of stunning spectacle, just like, whoa, this is so free. These guys are doing it unlike anyone else, and they are doing whatever they want in the best way possible. The picture in picture split screen effect creates this incredible vibe where you always have different interesting things going on in the screen in many different places at once, so there is always something different to look at, and to contrast. 


It's a unique reinterpretation of the whole Kuleshov effect, where you have one shot after another, and they create contrast. Well this time you have many shots at the same time, and I'm sure it's not the first music video to do this, but it's the first one I've seen in the current era that does it in such a stark and interesting way. You have some images that will have fast motion, and aggressive things going on while you have kind of slow, more ambient things going on in the background, or vice versa. And that really creates this unique sense of these two artists who are on top of their game and are controlling the flow with which the rest of the world has to follow to keep on track with them. This is one of the coolest videos that I've seen in recent memory. And yeah, I mean all the videos that Kendrick is involved with have been spectacular, but this is the one that has been most unforgettable for me personally. 


4. BTS - Spring Day



In 4th place, we travel to a completely different world, that of K-pop, which I admit to having a huge phase of in the late 2010s, early 2020s. And this is my favorite K-pop music video of all time in a genre that has no end to incredible visual works. It's BTS, of course, the GOATs of K-pop, with "Spring Day". 


This 2017 video directed by Yong Suk Choi takes visual inspiration from both the 2013 film "Snowpiercer" directed by Bong Joon Ho, and also a famous science fiction short story from 1974 from Ursula K. Le Guin called "The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omelas" which is about a dystopian world in which the happiness of the many depends on the misery of one small child. 


The Song "Spring Day" by BTS which is a very meaningful song to the band, and is in my opinion their most powerful song, and one of the greatest pop ballads ever recorded. It has been interpreted as having many different influences to it. There are some real life tragedies that happened in Korea that have been associated with the content of the song, but it can also just be interpreted as a song about finding strength to get through grief and the loss of loved ones or friends through the friendship and camaraderie of the people that we have around us. 


And the video very much presents the members of BTS in different places on their own, in these vast, stark, empty landscapes, such as an empty train, an empty field full of snow, or a massive mountain of clothes, and shows each of the members in a very lonely, scary world, reaching out, wishing for someone to help them get through the desolation that they are feeling. And then throughout the video that's interspersed with with beautiful sequences of the members of the band banding together and having gentle moments of friendship. 


It's a brilliant example of one of my favorite things in art, which is the juxtaposition of the small and the intimate with the epic and the the grandiose. And it has some incredible imagery. It's definitely one of the highest budget and most ambitious videos that's on this list. Some of the images include you know one of the members of the band standing in front of an abandoned ride in an amusement park that's all rusted away and the camera's kind of tilting as he as he's looking sadly into the distance, and you have this kind of creaky epic amusement park ride behind him. 


The iconic imagery, of course, of them all sitting on a massive pile of laundry, which I suppose could be interpreted as all of the changes of clothes that they've worn since they last saw each other, given that the theme of the song is all about I've been waiting for you through this long winter, when can I finally see you again on on that spring day. It's a gorgeous, incredibly colourful music video. The pastel tones throughout this video are incredible and it really creates that sense of of emotion in you when you watch it and you hear and see the themes of loneliness and loss and grief juxtaposed with these gorgeous nostalgic images of the lads in BTS hanging out with each other and having food fights and it's, you know, very simple ideas that are done in the most epic and cinematic ways. 


The album that this song comes from is called "You Never Walk Alone". Shout out to Liverpool FC. It really has some incredibly powerful songs, including, of course, this one that are about finding a way through the kind of loneliness and emptiness that life can sometimes present us with through friendship and through connection with other people. And that really is the thesis of this video. It really is about, you know, you never walk alone, and it's very important to me as a filmmaker myself that we use art as a way to connect with and celebrate the beauty in connecting with each other. And this of all the videos I've seen is one of the greatest examples of that. 


3. Joji - Gimme Love



In 3rd place, we have a video from my favorite artist in the world right now, the incomparable Joji. Now I could have picked many of his different videos to be on this list, but I've chosen my personal favorite of the videos, which is "Gimme Love". This video is actually in two parts and it was directed by two separate directors. Part one was directed by Joji himself, aka George Miller, but part two was directed by a director called Andrew Donahoe. 


As with many of Joji's music videos, this video takes an astronaut theme, a science fiction theme, and it shows basically a guy who's working in a NASA-esque company, maybe it's NASA itself, who is trying to manage some kind of space flight project. And like many Joji videos, it eventually builds towards him having a very lonely sequence where he's an astronaut flying away into space about to go on an incredible mission. This is a theme that has flowed throughout many of Joji's videos. 


But it's an interesting contrast with the the often sad for sure, but definitely melancholy romantic music that Joji often makes, contrasting it with someone being in love and going through the different stages of love and and loss, and juxtaposing that with the imagery of an astronaut going off on this very lonely mission into space. 


Perhaps that's the point he's trying to get across, that undertaking love and relationships is very much as ambitious and as difficult a journey and a challenge, but as worthwhile a journey as someone blasting off into space. 


What I love about the "Gimme Love" video though, beyond like the kind of astronomy themes and and so on, is this incredible pacing that it has, combining every single beat of the song, which is a very drum and bassy kind of song from Joji as well, has a cut and I - it very much satisfies me when music videos actually cut the shots on the beats. That doesn't always have to be the case, of course, but I'm an enjoyer of videos. It doesn't have to be music videos, any kind of video that has exact rhythm on the beats of the song. If it's a drum and bass video and it goes There should be shotshotshotshotshotshotshot many, many shots, let me tell you. This is something I'm very passionate about. 


But in the "Gimme Love" video there are so many visuals that have been thrown at you with cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut that creates this incredible sense of the intensity of the undertaking that the character in the video played by Joji is going through trying to manage this journey. And of course there is some darker and more kind of violent imagery as the video goes on, and then there are some slow and more kind of melancholy moments as well, but the kind of emotional roller coaster that the video takes you on is impeccable and it's edited together absolutely perfectly. 


Of all the videos on this list, this is the one where the editing was the most exciting for me and fits the vibe of the music so so well, as well as having such an incredible story that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you listen to the song, but just fits when you watch it. And that's one thing that Joji is absolutely impeccable at doing, It's creating this storytelling visual mythology around his music that creates this incredible sense of continuity through all of his works. 


Because storytelling is something that is part of the great continuity of human ideas. And of all the artists today, he is one of the best, along with his team, of course, at creating this grandiose sense of the mythos that we are all connected to and referencing that while also adding his own. unique spin to everything that he does. Phenomenal video, but I would recommend pretty much any video that this man has been involved with because they're all so incredibly creative. 


2. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity



In 2nd place I have gone for a video that, when someone asked me the other day what my favorite music video was, I gave this answer. And it is up there, obviously, it's second place. I did think of one that was perhaps a little bit more personal for me, but this is still one of the GOATs, and it's one of the most iconic and incredible music videos ever made. It is Jamiraquai's "Virtual Insanity". 


So, many people know this music video. It has been the spawn of many incredible memes over the years, and "Virtual Insanity", incredible electronic-y funky song from the late 90s by Jamiroquai. We all know the track. The video for "Virtual Insanity" was released in 1996 and was directed by Jonathan Glazer, who would go on to direct many films such as "Under the Skin" and "The Zone of Interest", which I'm sure will get mentioned on the podcast in another episode in the future. But one of the things that he's best known for is making some of the coolest music videos of the 90s, and this is one of them. 


It has an incredible, of course, funky song by Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity", which we all know and love. And it shows Jay Kay, the lead singer of the band, kind of moving around this strange set with furniture moving towards him. It looks like he's sliding, and it creates this optical illusion where it looks kind of like he's standing still, but the floor is moving. But actually to create this effect, what was actually happening on the set was the walls were moving and they were kind of on wheels and were being pushed around. And actually Jay Kay had to do some strange dance maneuvers to dance his way out of danger in a few places because he might have been crushed by the sofa moving towards him as the walls moved around him and limited the space in which he could move. 


But it's an incredibly fun and vibrant music video, perhaps not as deep as some of the other videos that I've mentioned on this list, but in terms of sheer fun and creativity, this has got to be one of the coolest yet. What I love about the production lore of this video is that apparently the original idea was to get a movable floor for the set, but they decided the production team that it would actually be way cheaper to get walls that could move instead of having a floor that could move. So they did the walls instead, and it created just as cool if not cooler, a visual optical illusion effect. 


And of course, later in the video you've got cockroaches, you've got blood, you've got some weird sci fi stuff going on. But what makes this video cool is very much Jay Kay's incredible charisma sliding around the dance floor in his iconic big hat throughout the video and creating this inescapable idea of this strange virtual world that somehow he just fits right into. But I feel like Jay Kay could fit into any situation with the kind of vibes he has going for him. So it's one of those videos that just makes you appreciate that cool people like him exist and make you want to kind of do cool things in your life. It is one of the great meme videos, perhaps not the deepest thing of all time, but I absolutely love "Virtual Insanity". Sometimes we just need a little bit of over the top expensive absurdity in our lives, and that is beautiful. 


1. All Saints - Black Coffee



My favorite music video of all time came out in the year 2000, another Y2K turn of the century, and I suppose one of the reasons for me loving this video so much is nostalgia. So a little bit of lore from me. When I was a kid, my mom used to record every year on VHS tape all of the number 1 singles from that year from the UK charts. And every Christmas on the lead up to Christmas when we were setting up the Christmas tree as a family in the living room, my mom would play these VHS tapes in the background, and we'd kind of have like a marathon watching back all of the music videos of the popular songs from that year. And this is one of the videos that has always stuck in my memory from that era. I would have only been like four years old when this came out, maybe even three, but it's a song that has never left my memory since I was a kid and remains one of my favorite songs to this day. And it's partly because of how stunning and unforgettable the music video was. 


This video is for the song "Black Coffee" by the band All Saints. The video has a very simple concept. It has each of the members of All Saints, a girl group of the time, in separate rooms singing their pieces of the song directly to the camera, while in the background behind them we have the scenes of various couples going through fights and different parts of relationships. And while these fights are happening, the bullet time effect, which was very popular at the time, I think this was only one year after "The Matrix" was released, showed the scenes slow down and kind of the camera turn around these people in slow motion to create this very, very cool effect of moments being captured in time. And it's very simple. 


It's not as elaborate as some of the other videos on this list, but the effect that it creates, that sense of nostalgia, that sense that we take these emotional moments from our past, from our relationships, from our lives, and we burn them into our memory, it's so powerfully captured by this very simple concept. And actually one of the reasons why this was done for this video is that the band were fighting at the time and they didn't want to be in the same room together when filming the video. So they had to film all of these separate scenes and put them together. But actually, in creating these separate scenes with different actors, different couples, different relationships going on all at the same time, it creates this kind of haunting effect of the universality of these things that kind of we all go through in the courses of our lives and our relationships. 


And it has a very unique, very urban skyscrapery vibe, similar to films of the time like "Collateral" and "Eyes Wide Shut." There's something really visually stunning to me about things happening at night in skyscraper buildings, and this video captures that really, really nicely. I find in the simplicity of the kind of gimmick that is being used in this video a really haunting contrast with the song, which is, you know, ironically in contrast with the kind of break up imagery and fight imagery of the of the video is really, even though it's a slow and kind of somewhat dark sounding song, it is a song about uh enjoying the little moments and not wanting certain moments in a relationship to end. 


And I think this video captures that incredibly well with these kind of slow motion snapshots of relationships that are on the brink, as you might say. And it's something that I've just never been able to forget, and it's my favorite music video for that reason. Some things are you know you might appreciate them and you know, be able to dissect every single little detail and be able to find something new every time you watch them. Some things just do the simple things right and they become unforgettable because they are so confident and unique. And this is one of those. 


The director of this video, Johan Renck, would go on to be a very successful director. He directed the mini series “Chernobyl”, which did very well. And uh heck yeah, he's done really well for his career. And deservedly so given that he made my favorite music video of all time. 


In general, All Saints I think are one of the most underrated bands of the late 90s, early 2000s. You might know their song "Pure Shores" from "The Beach", which also has an incredible music video and appeared in GTA5 on the soundtrack for that. But of all their videos, this one, "Black Coffee" is just super special and it holds a place in my heart as a video that I will absolutely never forget. 


And really that's the most powerful thing that a music video or any piece of art can do to you. If it becomes unforgettable it becomes a part of you forever, then it has done its job because if art is anything, it is an attempt at permanence. 


And with that we can bring this episode to a conclusion. I hope you guys are out there enjoying art, listening to music, watching movies, and most importantly connecting with each other! This has been Cameron M Johnson. from Hyperjump Productions.




 
 
 

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