What are your all-time favorite music videos?

I haven't seen this thread topic recently (to my knowledge) and I thought it would be a lot of fun!

For someone who grew up in the heydey of MTV (the 80's!!!!), and all those great, great music videos, I have a special affection for them and still love all those wonderful 80's videos they show on the "VH1 Classic". I have logged so many hours zombified in front of music television....They used to have a game show on VH1 called "Name That Video"- well, I could name them in, like, two seconds. If you've watched any MTV2 or "Mega Hits" or whatever, you know that music videos have gone to ****, and might as well be declared dead (and new music stinks too !). So since they're dead.... let's post our five all-time favorite videos!

We should post videos that are personal favorites (for whatever bizarre reason)- not your favorite songs, but favorite VIDEO. Not ones that are "supposed" to be the most innovative or whatever according to critics/experts (like "Billie Jean" or "Slegehammer", etc. etc. ....unless they really are your favorite ...), but ones that made you go "Whoa! Holy Crap!" and have stuck with you. The ones that you could watch dozens of times in a row and never get sick of them! The more obscure the better!!!

Mine are:
(in order)
1. The Connells "74-75" -the most heartbreaking, amazing, touching, simple yet effective, beautiful video ever IMO. Too bad most folks have probably never seen it.
2. Lisa Loeb "Stay (I Missed You)"- and she's cute too!
3. Cabaret Voltaire- Sensoria
4. John Fogerty- The Old Man Down The Road (everybody should know this one)
5. Barefoot Servants- Box Of Miracles - the folks who have seen (and remember) it are eyeing me nervously. Must be a fetish- thing.

Thanks!!!
James

 

There are so many....but a video's only as good as the song. Here are a few old and more recent that stick in the memory, for no particular reason:

Beatles: Strawberry Fields Forever
Beatles: All You Need Is Love
Cyndi Lauper: Time After Time, She Bop
Neil Young: Wondering
Bangles: Walk Like An Egyptian (yeh, I should no better, but that vixen Hoffs and those bedroom eyes... )
Jeff Lynne: Every Little Thing
Nick Lowe: All Men Are Liars
Eurythmics: Missionary Man
George Harrison: Got My Mind Set On You (both versions)
U2: With Or Without You
Police: Every Breath You Take
Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms
Jean-Luc Ponty: Individual Choice (how's that for left field? If you've seen KOYAANISQATSI, you'll know what to expect)
Squeeze: Hour Glass
ABBA: Bang- A-Boomerang (so cheap and cheezy it's great!)
Bruce Springsteen: Brilliant Disguise
Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer, Red Rain, Big Time
Peter & Kate Bush: Don't Give Up (both)
Kate Bush: Running Up That Hill (both), The Big Sky
Prince: Let's Go Crazy
Don Henley: The Boys Of Summer
Lou Reed: No Money Down (perverse, as you'd expect)
Iris DeMent: My Life

How's that for a start? So much for 80s music being mostly crap; there was a lot of good stuff out there, and videos, it turned out, didn't kill radio: radio killed itself.

ED

 

Your Wildest Dreams - The Moody Blues

I bought this many years ago on a Japanese CD Video; I find it very touching. Also, I like to song quite a bit.

 

Forgot about that one. I'd also add its companion/sequel, "I Know You're Out There Somewhere," one of the Moodies' very best. The rapport with their audience remains very unique, and nice...

ED

 

Nirvana - In Bloom

 

My all time favorite videos include "Daddy's Hands" by Holly Dunn, any video by the Judds, Hank Williams Jr & his father's "There's a Tear In My Beer," Gary Morris's "100% Chance of Rain," Sweethearts of The Rodeo's "Since I Found You," "Midnight Girl/Sunset Town," and "Satisfy You," Tanya Tucker's "Strong Enough To Bend," "Midnight Girl/Sunset Town" and "Satisfy You," any video by Highway 101, The Forester Sisters's "I Fell In Love Again Last Night," Juice Newton's "Angel of The Morning," "Queen of Hearts," "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard On Me," Foster & Lloyd's "What Do You Want From Me This Time," and the ultimate country video, IMO, is George Jones's "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes." As a child, my music video experience growing up was exclusively country music. In fact, so much of my TV viewing was either TNN & CMT as a child. Boy I miss TNN the way it was, when they changed the format, etc. I felt like I lost a major part of my childhood which I really did.

 

You and I must be exactly the same age! (I won't ask though).
Great list, brings back memories of those countless hours my sister and I spent in front of MTV during it's golden age.
I loved that Squeeze video, very inventive. And "Missionary Man" is drilled into my head. That animation on Annie's face was ingenious!
Was the Lou Reed "No Money Down" video the one where he rips his face off? Awesome! And Neil Young's "Wondering" with the "Shocking Pinks", right? Had that weird jerky look to it. Fun!

Let me also add Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight", mostly because of it's incredible annoyance factor (supposedly sending some unfortunate viewers into seizures)

I also liked The Police's other videos, like "Syncronicty II" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger".

Peter Gabriel's "Digging In the Dirt" was fittingly disturbing.

Yes's "Leave It", which originally evolved over several weeks with different angles of the band, culminating into the full finished video. Quite clever.

And for pure silly fun, Men at Work's "Down Under" and "It's a Mistake" are hard to beat.

There were many others.
Dan C

 

Actually, Dan, I'm most certainly older than you by a bit . Ooooolllllddddd. But the thing was, all my classmates were getting married, raising kids and along the way became too busy to keep up with the 'new stuff,' just kind of cherished what they grew up with(I suppose that happens to every generation. You don't really lose the music so much as it loses you, other things in life becoming a bigger priority). The difference is, being a little hyper to begin with, I learned to juggle things, and the 80s was just another progression(I listen to a lot less new stuff now, mostly because I'm still catching up with the old stuff--mostly jazz these days). It also helps having several younger siblings who would keep bringing stuff for me to listen to, probably figuring I listened to too much 'vintage' music, as it were, and needed to be exposed to 'hipper' things. Being a collector, I kept up well into the '90s until they stopped pressing 45's on a regular basis. Just happened to me a lot later than it did to my friends, who thought MTV and videos were so much crap. Well, if wrestling and soaps and the like are their idea of good TV, more power to 'em. I had other things to do....
The Wang Chung video was banned in the UK and a few other nations(probably more than a few)for that herky-jerky effect that supposedly could affect epileptics, though of course they hadn't an iota of proof of anything of the sort. Yeah, that's the Lou vid with the face peeling: nice, gross effect, though the single didn't sell beans. "Digging in The Dirt" was so well done that later the "X-Files" TV show used a similar special effect in an episode...I dug Men At Work a little, but when Colin Hay picked up their Best New Artist trophy at the Grammys, he said, "We are the Men....and we'll be back again," I knew they were doomed right there and, sure enough, they were never nominated again, as I remember. Fun bunch, though...

ED

 

Godley & Creme's "Cry" comes to mind. I liked the early Split Enz videos where they looked like they had their hair styled by Mad magazine's Don Martin. There are too many to mention...

 

Yeah..its "semi-cheese" but Hungry Like the Wolf from Duran Duran really sticks in my head for the images and locations they used...

 

Interesting story. By the time I got into my mid-20's, MTV was preaching to a different crowd. I still try and watch now and then, but it's just not my thing anymore. Maybe you had more of an open mind!
The last truly inventive video that I've seen was the Fatboy Slim clip directed by Spike Jonze with Christopher Walken dancing around a hotel lobby. Very cool.

Yeah, poor Men at Work. The dreaded "Best New Artist" Grammy. Kiss-O-Death! Dexy's Midnight Runners won it too.

I have Peter Gabriel's "Digging in the Dirt" on a full length video for "Us" that came out around the same time as the album. It has other clips for "Kiss the Frog" and "Steam", which is the only one that can stand up along "Dirt" on that compilation. Still very cool, Gabriel is a true performance artist. I also lived his video for "Shock the Monkey", though flawed as it is. It has some interesting images.

Remember Asia's "Don't Cry" with the wicked temptress and the Indiana Jones thing? Big budget for them days!
Dan C

 

I remember that Godley & Creme clip. They did "morphing" before the age of computers, pretty inventive. They were the gods of video in the 80's, directing many of The Police's videos as well as that Herbie Hancock video.

Split Enz's "One Step Ahead" had decent rotation on MTV for a time. Since US radio wouldn't touch 'em, MTV introduced me to that amazing band.
Dan C

 

XTC- Dear God
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms (shown on MTV at least twice)
Tom Petty - Don't Come Around Here No More
Peter Gabriel - Shock The Monkey
The Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams are Made of This
Pink Floyd - THE WALL (a long form music video essentially)
Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People (I like all his videos)
Pearl Jam - DO THE EVOLUTION (the best video I've seen in the past several years, and, again, played on MTV once or twice, at least. )
Metallica - ONE
U2 - With or Without You (Can someone tell me, does this video have full frontal female nudity, or was I just imagining it when I was in high school?)
Public Enemy - 911 is a Joke
Ice Cube & Dr. Dre - Natural Born Killers
R.E.M. - Orange Crush, The One I Love, Everybody Hurts, Losing My Religion
TOOL - Sober
The Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
White Snake vids with Tawny Kitaen - Okay, not actually great tunes or videos, and she turned out to be insane, but I was in high school when these were in heavy rotation

 

I guess limiting it to 5 was too hard. Sorry.

There were a lot of good videos!

James

 

They spent a lot of the record company's money on that one.
My sister (a rabid DD fan back in the day) bought and sneaked a full length tape of Duran Duran videos. They were one of the first to do such a thing. It had "Wolf", "Lonely in your Nightmare", "Planet Earth" and others. Most notoriously it had the "R" rated version of "Girls on Film" and another song that slips my mind. I can remember the video though, some nude chick dancing in a parking garage, shot artfully in B&W. Naughty stuff! My parents would've killed us if they found it.
Dan C

 

Refresh my memory--what is the name of the "Art Of Noise" song whose accompanying video featured the group in lab coats and goggles? I seem to remember them taking a chainsaw to a piano. I've always liked that video. I always remember liking Howard Jones's "Life In One Day", Rod Stewart with Jeff Beck "People Get Ready", and The Rolling Stones "One Hit To The Body". The anger between Mick and Keith was clearly visible in that video!
Mike

 

My top five are:
Janet Jackson--The Pleasure Principle.

Here is Janet romping through a dimly-lit huge gym/health club filled with exercise equipment. Short page-boy hair, white tank-top, gym shorts, smiling...this was in the days before she tried to look like the Diana Ross incarnation of her brother Michael; she even still had her original nose.
There was something very natural and unmanufactured about this video from the mid-late eighties that I have not seen since.

 

Directed by none other than Godley and Creme and guaranteed to get things moving!

It was a regular on australian late night music TV back whenever.

 

Sorry 'bout that....it's kind of like potato chip or pretzels. Once you eat one you just keep on going, they taste just as good....can't believe I forgot "Cry" which I think I've still got on one of those CD Videos that were in vogue for about six months before the plug was pulled.

ED

 

That was Close (to the Edit) by Art of Noise. I Agree that it was great video.

Anybody remember Jeff Beck's Ambitious. It had Donny Osmond, Tattoo (Herve Villachez) from Fantasy Island and all kinds of others making cameos.
Aaron

 

The Weezer clip was great.

Yes, Billy Joel, who had a few dreadful videos but this was a great one. Don't forget Rodney Dangerfield in full shtick behind stage waiting to go on. They did a great job recreating the Sullivan set, complete with vintage RCA B&W cameras with authentic CBS logos on them (it's all about the details )
I also really liked Billy's "Pressure".

Anyone else remember Phil Collins' cover of "Can't Hurry Love" with three Phil's singing together? Early simple and cheap video techniques used to great effect. But by "No Jacket Required" Phil's became as bloated and overblown as everyone else.

Dan C

 

Has anyone else mentioned The Cars' "You Might Think" yet?!
I can't believe I forgot it. Fantastic video animation and very creative. It was done by a company called "Charlex", if I recall. Anyone else know? The same company did a brilliant Cherry Coke ad and some super annoying National Inquirer spots in the 80's.
Dan C

 

Another gem: Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?," a collage of images very cleverly and smartly done to promote the KISS THE SKY Lp. The Sundays' "Can't Be Sure" and "Here's Where The Story Ends" and Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" are pretty neat, too. For some reason I feel the need to include Enya's "Orinoco Flow," too.

ED