A bit dark, a little dirty, harsh and unfiltered. It was the "grunge" movement in video form. But mostly, this video set the tone for the next decade. Kurt Cobain's melodic, intense screeching found a home in this video, it meshed perfectly. It punched you in the face, but somehow you liked it. While the feel was decidedly punk, there was something different about Nirvana and this song. Directed by first-timer Samuel Bayer, the concept of a school devolving into a riot was inspired by the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School. Despite a low-budget and a basic concept, this was the video of the early 90s. This video cost less than $50,000 to produce and will live on forever. Which was Michael's entire criticism of the culture of MTV. There's a lot going in this video, but you probably just remember the models. To help that transition, Fincher destroyed the recognizable images from that video, as the jukebox and guitar explode, while Michael's signature leather jacket goes up in flames. Clearly the artist's talent didn't matter anymore, how the video looked did.įincher did great work in this video too, as Michael was trying to move beyond his image from the "Faith" video. So he put a ton of attractive models in a video instead of himself, and it wound up in heavy rotation. Michael's major criticism of MTV was that it had pushed music to be far too looks-centric. The result is one of the most iconic videos ever made, and while the concept of "attractive women in a video" may seem simple, there's a sly humor here too. Instead, he and Fincher hired the world's five hottest supermodels and a few male models to sing the song. Michael didn't want to appear on camera, something unheard of at the time. When 1990 rolled around, Michael was disillusioned with fame, so he hired David Fincher and had a radical idea for a video. It's easy to forget but in the late 80s, Michael Jackson and George Michael were locked in a battle to be the world's top pop star.
The video won four VMAs in 1993, including Video of the Year and helped elevate Pearl Jam above from the rest of the Seattle "grunge" bands to something much more. It truly is a visual masterpiece accompanying a powerful song.
The strobe lighting and quick cuts create a truly haunting effect. Jeremy is the only character who moves, everyone else remains still, bringing us closer to him as the most human character of the bunch.
Complete with biblical references and outside descriptions of the character, this video is arresting. "Jeremy" features a bullied boy who drifts into depression before shooting himself in front of his classmates. In time the label relented, and the resulting video brought on massive controversy. The band's record label, Epic, initially refused to fund the project because it didn't think the song was worth promoting as a single. The third single from Pearl Jam's groundbreaking debut album Ten, "Jeremy" is a sobering look at the life of a disaffected teenager.
(Some of the following videos contain graphic imagery and/or NSFW lyrics. Here's our list of the 50 greatest music videos of all-time. Concepts and directing matter, as did strong, interesting visuals.Īlright, enough explanation. A straight performance video wasn't getting on this list no matter how cool it was. If a great video was matched with a bad song, what was the point? We also trended towards videos that were different or even groundbreaking. Most importantly, the song had to be good. With that in mind, we at The Big Lead wanted to rank the top 50 music videos of all-time.Ī quick note on the criteria we worked off of. Good ones told a story that connected a song's lyrics to the audience through a visual medium. While videos on YouTube are still wildly popular, the art form has suffered over the past decade as MTV and VH1 have moved away from showing them.įrankly, I miss when music videos were important. Music videos used to be the lifeblood of MTV and pop culture.
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