While YouTube may have killed the MTV star, we look back at some of our favorite music videos that caught our eye on the channel.
“Closer” by Nine Inch Nails
Back in the late 1900s, when MTV played music videos, there was still an exciting element of music discovery that could be offered by the station — a moment of silence for 120 Minutes, Headbanger’s Ball, and Yo! MTV Raps — especially at night when the less mainstream stuff would pop out of the shadows. One such video was Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” A modern classic that has topped many “Greatest Videos of All Time” lists, it was once considered so risque that it was only shown after 9pm. Teased in short “Buzz Bin” advertisements, just a few seconds of the video was enough to make me stay up to catch it in full. The first time I saw the whole thing, I had the volume down low so my parents couldn’t hear and I sat right at the television screen, hypnotized by the images before my then-teenaged eyes. Drawn in by the visuals, the pulsing beat of the song quickly got under my skin and, soon after, NIN would become my favorite band of all time. Which speaks loads to the power of a great music video: this Mark Romanek-directed masterpiece was so good it created a fan in me and so many others. Decades later, it’s easy to forget that at one time this Oscar-winning family man was considered dangerous, shocking, and boundary-pushing. Indeed, the video remains unnerving, kinda sexy, and completely ahead of its time, the twisted vision of two artists at a creative, collaborative peak. [Beyond “Closer,” Romanek is also responsible for some of the other all-time greats, like Madonna’s “Bedtime Story,” Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” Linkin Park’s “Faint,” the Jackson siblings’ “Scream,” Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” and two additional NIN-related classics (“The Perfect Drug” and Johnny Cash’s soul-crushing take on “Hurt”).] — Neil Z. Yeung
“Take on Me” by a-ha
Art? Romance? Danger? Suspense? The supernatural? A hero with the voice of an angel? Maybe two billion YouTube views can be wrong, but in this case they’re not. — Marcy Donelson
“Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto
Honestly, nearly any of the videos from the first three volumes of the Directors Label DVD series could be my pick — Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry all rewrote the rules of the art form during the ’90s. But I have to go with this palindrome-like brain-teaser as my go-to for best video ever. — Paul Simpson
“The Ghost of You” by My Chemical Romance
Take My Chemical Romance at their most anguished goth-rock peak on 2004’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and dress it in the doomed romance of a 1940’s WWII dance hall and you get “The Ghost of You,” an absolute classic of the early ‘aughts. The Marc Webb-directed video is an inspired homage to WWII-era films like Saving Private Ryan and Memphis Belle. It’s also one that recontextualized the creative scope of the band; framing them in a completely unexpected way that only added to the gutting, pyrrhic tension at the core of the song. Layer on top of that just gads of glamorous period style (not the least of which is singer Gerard Way’s immaculate pompadour), from the superbly-detailed army air corps uniforms and flag-draped dance hall, to the small romantic dramas playing out between the band and their paramours. Webb brings a bold cinematic eye to production, building the drama slowly as the song rises, moving from the nervous energy of asking someone to dance to the bleak violence of storming a French beach. There’s an unforgettable transition moment where sea water spills across the dancefloor that still remains one the best effects of the decade. With “The Ghost of You,” My Chemical Romance crafted a full-length war film in miniature, one where you wonder who is going to make it back home and are left wrecked by the answer. — Matt Collar
“Dare” by Gorillaz
Before the iPods and streaming apps that would revolutionize my young life, there were CDs: and I managed to strike gold with my first one. Having been transfixed by “DARE” on the radio, I ham-fisted my pocket money to the local Woolworths (RIP) and bought Gorillaz’ Demon Days, little knowing of the waves of change it would bring to my life. Though I fell hard for the cultist bounce of “Fire Coming out of the Monkey’s Head” and tender, yellow horizons of “El Manana,” “DARE” was always the favorite. It became a gateway to a visual musical universe that’s rarely, if ever, been matched: Gorillaz videos featured windmill sanctuaries on floating islands, a holiday island made entirely of landfill, a juiced-up Del the Homosapien emerging from the spirit world. But for all their more ambitious endeavors, it’s “DARE” that remains my favorite: a disembodied Sean Ryder is powered up like a steampunk stereo, with the band’s multi-instrumentalist, Noodle, skipping around the living room, fairy lights dangling overhead. For me, it captures the very root of how this whole thing started for me, and indeed for most of us: a wide-eyed kid, in their room, just dancing. — David Crone
“California Tuffy” by the Geraldine Fibbers
Someone needs to show some love for those great but hopelessly obscure videos that were screened two or three times in the middle of the night, or got a token spin on 120 MINUTES before drifting into obscurity, and in this category I would nominate “California Tuffy” by the Geraldine Fibbers, from their second and final album, 1997’s Butch. It’s three and a half minutes of brilliantly orchestrated chaos, complete with fire, broken guitars, a rolling couch, a singing cat puppet, film projections, and the band dancing with a wild and joyous enthusiasm that’s hard not to love. The clip is all the more remarkable for the fact it all happens in one continuous shot, with Carla Bozulich and her bandmates (which include Nels Cline, the thinking person’s guitar hero who went on to join Wilco) leaping in and out of frame with an energy that looks entirely in the moment, though they choreographed this carefully enough that they know where and where to land so they stay on camera. While Bozulich’s bare-wired country songs dominated their debut, 1995’s Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home, Butch featured several tracks that put their punk leanings first and foremost, and “California Tuffy” is not just a great, rollicking song, the video matches it for quality and sheer visual anarchy. Too bad more people didn’t see it. — Mark Deming
“Just” by Radiohead
I remember watching this video late at night on 120 Minutes, and the way it unfolded like a science fiction short story blew me away. Accompanying Radiohead’s bleak and pleading music was a theatrical scene of a man (seemingly undamaged) lying on the pavement as passersby inquire to his well-being. The end is as devastating as you can get in three-and-a-half minutes and I was gobsmacked. Keep in mind, this was nearly a decade before YouTube and since I could never catch it again, I started to doubt the video actually existed. In order to convince myself of my sanity, I ended up buying the VHS tape “7 Television Commercials” which proved I was right in my midnight admiration. — Zac Johnson
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