The 25 Best Music Videos of the 1970s

From Grace Jones’ erotic castle to Kraftwerk’s singing automatons to Kate Bush’s otherworldly hall of mirrors, these pre-MTV clips helped define what music videos could be.
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Lists & Guides: The 25 Best Music Videos of the 1970s

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Photo by: Illustration by Nicole Ginelli

Even though only a handful of viewers actually saw MTV’s technologically challenged first moments on August 1, 1981, that date has been etched into history as the birth of the music video. But by then, the idea of linking popular music with motion pictures was nothing new.

Patrons of nightclubs in the 1940s could view Soundies of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, and the rise of television in the 1950s made pop music a permanently multimedia form: Between “The Ed Sullivan Show” and programs like “Top of the Pops,” “American Bandstand,” and “Soul Train,” musicians have long developed visual styles to accompany their songs.

Though the phrase “music video” didn’t take hold until the late 1970s, the prototype for the form and its promotional possibilities came with the Beatles’ simple short films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” songs they were loath to recreate live (the video package sent to “Ed Sullivan” in 1966 came with an apologetic intro from the band explaining that the clips were substituting for an in-person appearance). A handful of well-funded and/or forward-thinking musicians started making short promotional films in the early ’70s, and as video technology continued to advance through the decade, many directors fell for its speed, creative possibilities, and easy duplicability—not only expanding the practice, but creating a unique visual aesthetic as well.

As the ’70s went on, distribution networks for music videos (throughout this piece, I use “music video” as shorthand, even though it doesn’t directly apply in many cases) started emerging. Local television stations would often air the clips between programs, and discos started streaming them on loop via closed-circuit TV. Actual music video programs started taking shape as well: Australian television had two such shows, and ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith started a program called “Pop Clips” that briefly aired on Nickelodeon a year before MTV’s launch.

The music video format proliferated and matured during the 1980s and 1990s, but musicians and filmmakers developed its basic shape and first explored its creative limits during the ’70s, a time of tumult and innovation in the record business, from the rise of arena rock and prog through the emergence of disco, electronic dance music, punk, and new wave. Out of the hundreds of videos created during that heady decade, we’ve selected the 25 that best represent the format’s possibilities, eccentricities, and influence, and added a few dozen runners-up to cover all the bases.


The Rolling Stones: “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)____” (1974)

By opening two of their tours to documentary crews—resulting in the iconic Gimme Shelter and the long-unreleased (and thoroughly NSFW) Cocksucker Bluesthe Rolling Stones were visual pioneers of rock’s darkest moments and crass excesses. With 1974’s Top 20 single “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It),” however, the band effectively announced it was done blowing minds and would double-down on the basics—a stance that defines the Stones to this day.

For the video, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who filmed ahead-of-their-time clips for the Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as well as the Beatles’ dissolution documentary Let It Be) had the band mime to the camera, shooting them from below with a wide-angle lens while a gaudy tent inflated around them and soap bubbles gradually infiltrated the set. The song might signify the Stones admitting that innovation was overrated, but Hogg’s simple style would, purposefully or not, reappear to define a significant segment of ’90s MTV: think Hype Williams and the Beastie Boys.

See also: The Rolling Stones: “Angie” (1973) and “Miss You” (1978)


X-Ray Spex: “Identity__” (1978)__

X-Ray Spex were among the most stylish and musically innovative of the first wave of British punk bands thanks to Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, aka Poly Styrene, the rootless Somali-British 21-year-old who was still wearing braces when her band’s debut album, Germfree Adolescents, was released in 1978.

Styrene’s political ambit was broadly aimed and sharply delivered, and “Identity” twists the New York Dolls’ gender-bending proto-punk classic into a forceful treatise on women’s representation. “Identity/Is the crisis/Can’t you see?” she wails in the song’s promotional clip, dressed like a ’50s bobby soxer and performing with her band in an old warehouse littered with retired department store mannequins. It’s been said that “Identity” is the one song on Adolescents that doesn’t explicitly deal with anti-consumerist themes, yet Styrene’s own lyrics in the song—“Do you see yourself/On the TV screen/Do you see yourself in the magazine/When you see yourself/Does it make you scream?”—underscore that the perils of consumerism don’t end at getting lost in the supermarket, but extend to the imagery that surrounds young women. In this light, Styrene’s mere presence in this video clip is a political act, offering a new aspirational model.

See also: The Jam: “In the City” (1977); The Clash: “London Calling” (1979)


Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Tong Poo__” (1979)__

Yellow Magic Orchestra initially formed in 1978 as a conceptual lark, a group of crate-digging Japanese musicians tweaking the Orientalism of “exotica” pioneer Martin Denny’s music, but they quickly established a significant precedent for electro-pop in Japan and beyond. At a time when Japanese imports were threatening American industrial dominance, YMO’s techno-funk flip of Denny’s 1959 single “Firecracker” became an ultra-rare Japanese-U.S. pop crossover hit—so funky they played it on “Soul Train.”

The 8-bit disco of “Tong Poo” had a similarly interesting origin myth—band member Ryuichi Sakamoto based its synth hook on records he found of Cultural Revolution-era Chinese musicians playing American instruments—but its video eschews the political past for a glimpse into the technological future: Three men in tuxes, stoically coaxing grooves from cutting-edge instruments, spliced with lengthy full-screen shots of early video games. The group’s only musical contemporary was Kraftwerk, and while the German quartet were portraying themselves as Soviet constructivist robots, YMO turned themselves into demonstration models in a high-end technological showroom.


Bee Gees: “Lonely Days__” (1970)__

Few bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s were more melancholy than the Bee Gees, from “I Started a Joke” to “I Lay Down and Die,” “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart,” and “Don’t Wanna Live Inside Myself.” Sad! Despite its title, “Lonely Days” is not totally despondent, but it has a blurry emotional core, moving from a weepy, string-laden ballad into a brassy chorus while never revealing exactly where that loneliness came from. The short film produced to promote the song—the first single released after the band reunited with Robin after his temporary split—offers little explanation other than compelling evidence that the Bee Gees are very successful and incredibly rich. Neither Maurice’s butterfly collection nor his gold records can cheer him up, so he goes for a drive in his black Jaguar; Barry’s home also makes him inconsolably depressed, so he walks his big furry dog on a crowded downtown street before taking off in a Rolls Royce. And poor Robin, the saddest of all the Gibbs, who resorts to pathetically stroking a trophy before driving away from his posh country villa in a new Mercedes. In the end, the three men meet in a field, perform a ritualistic hand gesture, and then drive off in separate cars. So, yeah: Who needs girlfriends?

See also: The Bee Gees: “Jive Talkin’” and “Stayin’ Alive” (1977)


Blondie: “Heart of Glass__” (1978)__

Beyoncé may have forever taken ownership of the “visual album” concept thanks to her pathbreaking recent releases, but the original idea for such a promotional novelty dates back to 1979, when Blondie worked with director David Mallet to produce videos for each track of their fourth LP, Eat to the Beat. Despite being far ahead of their time, though, none of Eat’s videos are as iconic as the one Mallett produced for “Heart of Glass,” from the band’s 1978 classic, Parallel Lines.

The clip for the tune that famously broke Blondie to a mainstream audience (and alienated the puritanical wing of its Lower East Side punk base) highlights Debbie Harry, clad in a single-strap, gray Stephen Sprouse dress and clear plastic heels, and her piercing soprano. Yes, there are plenty of shots of the band jumping around in what for them was the novel space of a disco floor, but the most striking imagery is of Harry herself, stoic in the opening close-up and shoulder-shrugging medium shot, resisting any display of emotion while the radiant track unfolds around her—perhaps shading the CBGB purists a bit in the process.

See also: Blondie: “Dreaming” and “Union City Blue” (1979)


Grace Jones: “Do or Die__” (1978)__

For a few months in late 1978, the Italian TV network Rai 2 aired an odd live program called “Stryx,” which featured a variety of short performance pieces with creepy medieval themes. The performances were tightly choreographed and the sets were, for the time, lavishly decorated, a strange visual artifact that hinted at the soon-to-come MTV era. Disco icons like Amanda Lear and Asha Puthli shot their own episodes, as did Brazilian singer Gal Costa, but Grace Jones’ clips supporting her second album Fame are the best.

Sure, the “Stryx” performance doesn’t actually qualify as a music video in the strictest sense of the term, but Jones’ promenading in a frock and bustier through a stagy castle with human hand candle sconces, barnyard fowl, and a nearly naked prince has the power to broaden most rubrics (see also: her clips for “Anema e Core” and “Fame” from the same episode). “Stryx” was quickly canceled after the network received complaints about the show’s racy content; televisual genius often goes unrecognized until long after it is gone.

See also: Amanda Lear: “Gold” (1978); Asha Puthli: “Mister Moonlight” (1978)

Prince: “I Wanna Be Your Lover__” (1979)__

Prince’s famously coy, taciturn interview with Dick Clark after performing “I Wanna Be Your Lover” on “American Bandstand” is one of pop’s most subtle jabs at the promotional necessity of lip-syncing a single on television. Music videos were gradually easing this burden, and Warner Bros. ended up funding two for “Lover.” The one featuring Prince performing the song with his band (mute the audio on this clip) was scrapped for unclear reasons—many suspected it was too salacious—but the incredibly cheap video that circulated showed Prince at the midpoint between his fledgling early years and Dirty Mind’s new wave breakthrough.

Shot with a backlight-provided halo, the 21-year-old androgyne with the 1,000-yard-stare is front-and-center in the clip. His combination of visual signifiers were sui generis in 1979: the feathered hair, hoop earring, and skin-tight unitard were much more the stuff of a dancer at the time, not an axe-wielding frontman dancing with the swagger of James Brown and Mick Jagger. Prince would of course go on to dominate music video culture for the next decade, but “Lover” stands apart as a simple showcase of a virtuoso on the verge.

See also: Sparks: “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” (1974); Bob Marley & the Wailers: “Is This Love?” (1978)


Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive__” (1979)__

Arguably the definitive disco single, “I Will Survive” was written as a defiant kiss-off to an ex-lover (“I should have changed that stupid lock/I should have made you leave your key” is one of the most wonderfully specific breakup laments ever), though its chorus was later embraced by the LGBT community in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Driven by a slick arrangement and Gloria Gaynor’s powerhouse vocal turn to the top of the Hot 100, “Survive” spawned an iconic video as well, shown on television monitors in discos around the world.

Shot at the New York disco Xenon, Gaynor’s only visual accompaniment in the clip is a skater from the group The Village Wizards, a nod to the deep connections between discotheques and roller rinks. What’s most striking about the video, however, is Gaynor’s solitude, photographed in isolation against a stark black backdrop. Late ’70s disco culture is often understood to be a tribal space, a utopian dream of community. As Gaynor’s video represents, though, discos could complement that ideal by also serving as a milieu for self-empowerment, enhanced by the glorious feeling of solitude amid an electric crowd of strangers.

See also: Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band: “Cherchez La Femme” (1976); Sister Sledge: “We Are Family” (1979)


The Alan Parsons Project: “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You__” (1977)__

The Alan Parsons Project was never known for intellectual understatement—the band’s first LP, 1976’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, was an Edgar Allan Poe-themed concept album with Orson Welles providing occasional narration. For the 1977 follow-up, the inspiration was Isaac Asimov’s I Robot trilogy, and, though the interpretation was loose, the idea bore fruit: The disco-tinged “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You” cracked the Top 40.

In the song’s video, produced by the Rock Flicks group that also helmed Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Parsons unsheathes a creepy mummified cyborg while digging through an archive. He then monitors the creature as it scampers through a UNIVAC tape room (a precursor to the modern server farm) and a Brutalist cityscape, propelled mostly by jump-cuts that sync with the song. At one point, the clip, otherwise a quaint parable for artificial intelligence, borders on slapstick when the strange being uproots a flower that the harried Parsons takes pains to re-plant. Spoiler alert: Once Parsons touches its face, the robot immediately melts into a pile of wires, and the closing credits—a dot-matrix printout of “I Robot”—roll.

See also: Pink Floyd: “Money” (1973); Kansas: “Dust in the Wind” (1977); Queen: “We Will Rock You” (1977)


The Boomtown Rats: “I Don’t Like Mondays__” (1979)__

The morbid origin story of the Boomtown Rats’ second UK #1 single is as wretched now as then: While on tour in the United States in January 1979, frontman Bob Geldof read about a San Diego school shooting that killed two and injured nine. When asked for her rationale, shooter Brenda Ann Spencer claimed: “I don’t like Mondays.” Geldof’s song turned the story into a macabre ditty delivered with stone-faced irony—what he called “the perfect senseless song to illustrate” Spencer’s “perfect senseless act.”

David Mallet’s video treatment predicts the future of the form, mixing hyper-stylized, new-wavy performance footage with loosely narrativized set pieces: a schoolhouse packed with zombie-like schoolchildren slickly transitions through a TV set into a mundane living room scene suggesting British soap “Coronation Street.” “Mondays” would earn significant airplay on MTV a couple of years later, and Mallet became one of music video’s most sought-after directors, all of which Geldof predicted, sort of, in a 1981 “Merv Griffin Show” interview, smack-talking skittish FM radio programmers and predicting that the video format would take rock into the future.

See also: The Police: “Message in a Bottle” (1979); Cheap Trick: “Dream Police” (1979)


ABBA: “Take a Chance on Me__” (1977)__

ABBA were the first music video pop stars. In the mid-’70s, when only a few groups were making videos at all, the Swedish quartet made lots of them: a total of 18 between 1974 and 1979 alone, a pace that aligned them closer to the biggest MTV stars of the ’80s and ’90s. It all makes sense, given that ABBA’s career started on TV, with their “Waterloo” victory in the 1974 Eurovision competition.

“Take a Chance on Me” came after “Dancing Queen” propelled them to global superstardom, though don’t expect any crane shots or special effects past the softcore closeups of Agnetha and Frida, or the Brady Bunch-style quad-screen that accompanies the song’s a capella cold open. The joy in ABBA videos, as in their music, involves the unabashed embrace of heart-on-sleeve dorkiness and a masterful deployment of simple ideas. So in the “Chance” video, we get Frida and Benny jamming tunes in a mod Stockholm pad, Frida and Agnetha mom-dancing, and Benny and Bjorn striking seated poses in a stark white sound studio. With a song this good, there’s no need for much else.

See also: ABBA: “Waterloo” (1974), “SOS” (1975), “Dancing Queen” (1976), and “Fernando” (1976)


Joni Mitchell: “Big Yellow Taxi__” (1971)__

Ladies of the Canyon was Joni Mitchell’s creative and commercial watershed, thanks in part to “Big Yellow Taxi,” her only honest-to-goodness pop song. The single’s environmentalist message is simple and timeless, but its animated music video is much more rooted in its era. Produced by legendary animator John Wilson (Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan) for a series that ran on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” in the early ’70s, the “Taxi” short feels born from the colorful antics of late ’60s Hanna-Barbera productions and predicts the manic grooviness of toons to come, like “Schoolhouse Rock” and “Fat Albert.” The clip, like Wilson’s others for the variety show, were less about promoting the songs themselves and more a creative presentation of his own visual auteurism. Narratively, Wilson portrays the song’s lyrics as a story about humanity’s original fall from grace, with Adam and Eve constantly “exposed” thanks to various industrial activities, from mass deforestation to urbanization. Be sure to stick around for the surprise ending.

See also: Coven: “One Tin Soldier” (1972); Cher: “Dark Lady” (1974)


Giorgio Moroder: “From Here to Eternity__” (1977)__

Giorgio Moroder is not a natural-born pop star. This much is plain in the video for “From Here to Eternity,” during which the Italian innovator bounces genially while miming the song. He does get the importance of imagery, though. In 2016, it’s easy to see Moroder as a collection of kitschy ’70s Euro signifiers—the ‘stache, the white satin jogging suit, the shades—but 39 years earlier, it was a getup that was not only a bit hipper, but practical, allowing a reticent studio rat to negotiate a solo career in the spotlight.

Moroder’s significant musical legacy is as the direct sonic bridge between ’70s European electronic music and African-American dance music—disco and house, specifically—and the “Eternity” clip positions him where he’s most comfortable: surrounded by racks of glittering, oscillating analog gear. At one point, there’s a closeup on a “voltage control oscillator” readout—the electronic equivalent of a rock video showing a guitarist plugging into an amp. In the long march to authenticate synthesizers and rack-mounted electronics in pop music performance, videos like “Eternity” were perfect propaganda.

See also: Donna Summer: “Last Dance” (1978)


Sylvester: “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real__)” (1979)__

After touring as a drag performer and recording two R&B albums as Sylvester and the Hot Band, Sylvester James switched to disco. Not because he loved the music (he didn’t), but because he knew his theatrical approach would thrive in that format. It did.

His hit 1979 single “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” is a significant part of American popular culture not only for its Top 40 crossover success or its formative influence on Hi-NRG disco (and later, Bernard Sumner claimed, “Blue Monday”), but its embrace of black homosexuality as an authentic identity on par with R&B or rock performers’ heterosexuality. In the video, Sylvester moves through a disco with verve and purpose, donning a different guise for each section of the song. He enters by descending a garish staircase in all black leather, adds a touch of executive realness in a white suit, and for the big reveal on the second chorus, unveils a sparkling drag ensemble—one of several on display in the video. Costuming aside, the clip’s most compelling aspect is Sylvester’s gaze. He might not be completely at ease in the music video format, but he compensates by staring straight through the camera, as if daring the viewer to question his legitimacy.

See also: The Village People: “YMCA” (1978); Chic: “Le Freak” (1978)


David Bowie: “Life on Mars?____” (1973)

Given different circumstances, it’s easy to imagine a parallel universe where David Bowie invented the visual language of music videos in the ’70s. He was much more a stage performer, though, and the clips he made were all very simple up until David Mallet’s 1980 classic for “Ashes to Ashes.” Some may argue that the sci-fi drama of “‘Heroes’” or the Berlin drag-club debauchery of “Boys Keep Swinging” are Bowie’s best of the decade, but give me the gaudy simplicity of “Life on Mars?”

In the wake of Ziggy Stardust, RCA rushed to issue earlier material, including “Mars,” originally an album track from 1971’s Hunky Dory, and it shot up the British charts. The clip was shot backstage at the Earl’s Court rock venue in London by famed photographer Mick Rock on the afternoon of the Ziggy concert that devolved into a riot. Because “Mars” predated Ziggy, there’s a bit of historical slipperiness in the costuming: Bowie’s performing a song from the end of his folk period in full glam-rock regalia. And he looked phenomenal, by the way: the ice-blue suit designed by Bowie’s designer/protégé/lover Freddie Burretti balanced by the shocking eye shadow—shown in lingering close-ups that emphasize his alien gaze—and contrasted with his shocking red hair, all washed out by a stark white background. It’s simple but incredibly effective, an important element in Bowie’s extensive, ever-shifting catalog of self-iconography.

See also: David Bowie: “Heroes” (1975), “Be My Wife” (1977), and “Boys Keep Swinging” (1979)

The Residents: “Third Reich & Roll” (1976)

If there is a Mount Rushmore of music video progenitors, San Francisco avant-garde collective the Residents are on it. Before they’d even released their first album in 1974, they undertook one of the weirdest experiments in music history, which doubled as one of the form’s first feature-length works: Vileness Fats. The project, shot from 1972 to 1976 on the relatively new medium of ½" magnetic tape and intended to be more than 10 hours long, was ultimately scrapped, though a shorter version exists. One of the sets constructed for Vileness was repurposed for a film accompanying the group’s second album, Third Reich ‘n’ Roll, a conceptual work reimagining rock history via Joseph Goebbels; the album cover featured Dick Clark in full Nazi regalia and Side A opened with Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” sung in German. The MoMA-approved video mixes stop-motion animation, German Expressionist aesthetics, and a “band” interpreting “Land of 1,000 Dances” in what appears to be Klan garb made of newspaper. Later, two pork chops introduce a “Wipeout” dance sequence that ends with the Fuhrer himself appearing on a balcony. MTV wouldn’t launch for another five years, but the medium of music video had already reached an early, weird peak.

See also: Captain Beefheart: “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” TV ad (1970); Suicide: “Frankie Teardrop” (1977)


Hall & Oates: “She’s Gone__” (1973)__

This is the first-ever music video that openly mocked the form. The stranger thing: Hall & Oates did it long before videos were even really a thing. John Oates has said that the band was asked to lip-sync “She’s Gone” for an “American Bandstand”*-*style show shot in New Jersey, and because “they didn’t want to pretend to sing” a breakup song on a teen dance show, they holed up with their own furniture and a bunch of weed in a Philly studio and emerged with this bong-rip promo clip. It never aired. (Oates claimed he leaked to YouTube at some point.)

It sure looks like something that stoned 20-somethings would make in the ’70s: a corpselike, Bowie-haired, wooden-wedge-wearing Daryl Hall mimes his singing parts on a talkshow-looking stage set with Oates, wearing a sleeveless tux. Occasionally, there are walkthrough cameos from Hall’s girlfriend Sara Allen (of “Sara Smile”), and a man in a devil suit (their road manager). The climactic action features Oates putting on his tux jacket and playing a solo through fake penguin flippers. Hall & Oates’ legacy is assured, but this clip adds a footnote: Any future video that makes fun of the very concept of pre-recorded promotion—like the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” the Roots’ “What They Do,” and Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube”—are, to varying degrees, made of this clip’s stardust.

See also: Elton John: “Your Song” (1970); Gerry Rafferty: “Baker Street” (1977)


George Harrison: “This Song__” (1976)__

On September 8, 1976, George Harrison was found guilty of “subconsciously plagiarizing” the melody from the Chiffons’ 1962 hit “He’s So Fine” for his own 1970 single “My Sweet Lord,” costing him half a million dollars. Harrison—not above responding to legal headaches in song—expressed his feelings in the cheekiest way possible.

“This Song,” the brassy first single from Harrison’s 1976 LP Thirty-Three and 1/3, is self-reflexive and satirical, sending up the idea of a pop tune as legal object. The video turns a packed courtroom into a faux concert, featuring a judge/drummer, a bass-soloing bailiff, a stenographer/pianist, and Ronnie Wood in drag as a backup singing juror. Harrison lost the lawsuit, but at least he had the last word: “This Song” debuted during the November 1976 episode of “Saturday Night Live” on which he was the musical guest.

See also: John Lennon: “Imagine” (1971); Wings: “Silly Love Songs” (1976)


XTC: “Making Plans for Nigel__” (1979)__

Australia was far ahead of the U.S. and UK in the development of TV programming built around music videos. By the mid-’70s, there were two video shows airing down under: the ABC’s “Countdown” and Channel Seven’s “Sounds Unlimited,” featuring clips made for local bands, including AC/DC. When “Unlimited” was running low on content, a young producer named Russell Mulcahy was asked to shoot some footage. Mulcahy went on to become the medium’s first bona fide auteur, shooting the first video MTV ever aired, along with Duran Duran’s “Rio” and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes,” Spandau Ballet’s “True,” and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

In this playful 1979 clip promoting the first single from XTC’s breakthrough album Drums and Wires, it’s easy to see Mulcahy tracing the contours of pop video’s visual style for the first half of the ’80s: non-stop camera movement, canted angles, zooms, gaudy overacting. Narratively, Mulcahy twists a song about a young man’s inexorable march toward a boring adulthood into a mental patient being relegated to a rubber room for a *Clockwork Orange-*meets-Cuckoo’s Nest style re-education. Nigel’s Nurse Ratched is a psychotic clown, played by a constantly mugging-to-camera Andy Partridge while a video screen playing XTC hangs on the wall. It’s clever, super-meta, and incredibly hyperactive—the driving forces not only of MTV’s first decade, but the wide swath of ’80s pop culture that Mulcahy’s work helped inspire.

See also: AC/DC: “Jailbreak” (1976); The Buggles: “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979)


Michael Jackson: “Rock With You__” (1979)__

Achieving autonomy from his famed family was a several-year process for Michael Jackson that included shooting The Wiz in 1977, a time when he met Quincy Jones and started frequenting the exclusive Manhattan nightclub Studio 54. The sounds he heard there inspired his solo breakthrough, Off the Wall, and Jackson has cited the thrill of escapism in the decadent club’s celebrity-laden crowd, comparing it to science-fiction films where “you pay $2 and you’re on another planet. You’re not in reality anymore.”

The video for “Rock With You,” shot by veteran TV producer Bruce Gowers on a skimpy $3000 budget, transforms Jackson into a lonely alien alighting on earth. The wide collars, polyester jumpsuits, afro hairstyle, and four brothers surrounding him gave way to a new image: Jackson dancing with seeming abandon in a gleaming, silver-sequined suit, with a halo provided by a laser backlight. These moves were among the first glimpses of the astonishing kinesthetic performance art Michael would develop through his subsequent visual work. Eight years before he made a video begging the press to “Leave Me Alone,” here he is, dancing all by himself, like no one’s watching.

See also: Michael Jackson: “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” (1979)


Kraftwerk: “The Robots__” (1978)__

Three years after a three-minute edit of “Autobahn” hit the U.S. Top 30, 1978’s The Man-Machine was Kraftwerk’s first deliberate attempt to present themselves as something like a “band,” with a fully designed image and actual pop-structured songs. This is Kraftwerk, of course, and so “The Robots” has hooks, but it also plays with the very notion of public performance: In the video, humans play automatons performing human labor. On a deeper level, the idea for the “Robots” aesthetic merges a cyborg ideology—“We are playing the machines, the machines play us,” Ralf Hütter claimed as the group’s M.O.— with a hyper-modernist aesthetic.

The iconic style on display in the video mirrors Karl Klefisch’s legendary cover design, with the band’s red shirts and black ties embracing the starkness of 1920s Soviet constructivism, which celebrated the worker amid rapid industrialization. Though Kraftwerk would move firmly into the information age with its next release, the “man-machine” trope born from the quartet’s fascination with a freshly industrialized eastern Europe would remain the group’s defining image well into the 21st century, inspiring a few other synth-pop innovators along the way.

See also: Kraftwerk: “Autobahn” (1975)


Elvis Costello: “Accidents Will Happen__” (1979)__

Elvis Costello & the Attractions recorded a few good-to-great videos for This Year’s Model and Armed Forces, but “Accidents Will Happen” stands apart. A ridiculously cutting-edge clip from video pioneers Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton of the UK’s Cucumber Studios, its pop-art aesthetic recalls Barney Bubbles’ designs for Stiff Records, and its deployment of shape and color suggests a love of the Italian postmodernism that was flourishing in fashion and design in the late ’70s. It’s a shame that MTV wasn’t around to canonize it, but “Accidents Will Happen” clearly belongs in the category of animated game-changers with Steve Barron’s rotoscoped “Take on Me” clip, the computer-animated “Money for Nothing,” Stephen R. Johnson’s manic “Sledgehammer” video, Michel Gondry’s Lego-tastic “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and the Gorillaz and Jamie Hewlett’s “Feel Good, Inc.” For the first time, a music video not only made an artistic statement that both complemented and stood apart from its song, but invented its own visual argot along the way.

See Also: Elvis Costello: “Radio Radio” (1978) and “Oliver’s Army” (1979)


Kate Bush: “Wuthering Heights__” (1979)__

Fittingly for a song with two striking videos—one each for the British and American markets—Kate Bush wrote “Wuthering Heights” not from Emily Bronte’s novel, but after catching the end of a BBC adaptation on TV. The first single from Bush’s debut album got a chart boost from a performance on the UK chart show “Top of the Pops” (that Bush later described as “watching myself die”), which sent it to #1.

The British video directed by Keith MacMillan, however, does an infinitely better job of representing what made Bush and her breakthrough song so great. Having studied with English actor and mime Lindsay Kemp (who worked with David Bowie as well), her training is reflected in the video’s stunningly expressive choreography, a combination of ballet, mime, and theater. MacMillan dials back the urge to layer on visual effects too heavily, and when he does, it’s only to multiply Bush (always a good idea), or emphasize her movements. Otherwise, she’s just performing for a video camera on a soundstage drenched in dry ice, but Bush plays to the rafters: Her fluid movements and facial expressions are as exaggerated as her vocal performance. Bush would go on to make several more great videos, but “Wuthering Heights” remains unique for its pre-MTV simplicity and grand unveiling of a peerless musical talent.

See also: Brian Eno: “China My China” (1974); Bryan Ferry: “You Go To My Head” (1975)


Devo: “The Truth About De-Evolution__” (1976)__

The same year Ohio National Guard members gunned down four protesters on the Kent State campus, musician Mark Mothersbaugh met art student Gerry Casale and formed a band—more of an art movement set to jittery, minimalist guitar rock, really—and wrote a song called “Jocko Homo.” The track’s title was derived from an old pamphlet Mothersbaugh discovered, distributed by a 1920s Ohio preacher who argued for appending a “d” to the front of the word “evolution.” A few years later, “Jocko” was the centerpiece of a short film called In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution.

Shot by fellow Kent State student Chuck Statler, Truth opens with the masked Devo members leaving their “factory” job (shot at Akron’s Goodyear museum) to mutilate Johnny Rivers’ 1966 hit “Secret Agent Man” in what looks like a hostage film. This is intercut with—among other things—two men in monkey masks spanking a woman in a short robe with ping-pong paddles bearing the faces of Chairman Mao and Nixon. Then Booji Boy, Mothersbaugh’s simpering child character and the band’s mascot, frantically runs to bring the “news” of de-evolution to his father, General Boy (played by Mothersbaugh’s father), who delivers an address to the medical profession, complete with spastic dancing that predicted David Byrne’s moves from Stop Making Sense. As for poor Booji Boy, the Paul Revere of de-evolution, he wouldn’t make it out alive. In all, Truth was part manifesto, part origin myth, and one of the most compelling introductions a band has ever created. Statler’s film won the top prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival, earning Devo the admiration of Brian Eno, who’d produce their debut LP the following year.

See also: Suicide Commandos: “Burn it Down” (Chuck Statler, 1977); Devo: “Satisfaction” (Chuck Statler, 1978); Nick Lowe: “Cruel to be Kind” (Chuck Statler, 1979)


Queen: “Bohemian Rhapsody__” (1975)__

This is it—the tipping point of the pre-MTV era of music videos as a promotional tool and extension of a visual aesthetic. The story behind it has turned into music business lore: Queen had to battle with EMI to even get “Rhapsody” released in the first place, with the label worried about the commercial potential of a six-minute suite with no chorus. When it showed immediate signs of popularity, though, the band and label quickly realized they had to figure out a way to perform it on “Top of the Pops”—a promotional necessity that Queen despised. So they hired producer Bruce Gowers and spent an evening creating a piece that could air. There were music videos made before “Rhapsody,” but having one substitute for the live promotion of a single reported to be the most expensive ever produced was the definition of “risky.”

It paid off. The song ruled the UK charts for months. And, for the first time, the video defined the public memory of the song. The opening seconds of Gowers’ “Rhapsody” clip alone—a slow fade in to the band singing a capella, arranged in the diamond shape of Mick Rock’s Queen II cover photograph (itself inspired by Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express) provided an infinitely more iconic image than any stagey TV performance would. For a viewing audience unfamiliar with pre-filmed pop dramatizations, the effect of an album cover coming to life and singing must have been thrilling, capped by the “Galileo” section call-and-response and Gowers punctuating dramatic changes with video feedback and a kaleidoscope effect created by holding a prism in front of the lens. The performance footage—dominated by Mercury chewing scenery in a white satin jumpsuit—only looks run-of-the-mill because it’s the earliest iteration of a visual style that would dominate the first decade of MTV.

When “Rhapsody” resurfaced in the opening scene of Wayne’s World in early 1992, the video gained an unexpected second life. To meet its resurgent popularity, Queen re-released the single with a new video that re-cut Gowers’ original with clips from the film. MTV was just over 10 years old at that point, but the network’s impact on pop’s iconography was deeply entrenched. And here was the “Rhapsody” video once again, being seen for the first time by a generation of new fans, contextualized as the network’s own genesis.

See also: Queen: “You’re My Best Friend” (Bruce Gowers, 1976) and “Somebody to Love” (Bruce Gowers, 1976)