The Best 80s Music Videos (According to Me)

 

Well, I wouldn't be a proper gray-haired Gen-X music blogger if I didn't post my list of favorite MTV videos. 

Kids who were raised on YouTube can't possibly understand the impact a plethora of music videos had on young minds in the 1980s, particularly young teen-girl minds. Spellbound is a good word. The arrival of MTV kept us riveted to our TVs for the entirety of our high school years. 

We would stay up all night watching MTV on the weekends. The cable channel played in the background while we did our homework and at our parties. We watched it when we couldn't sleep at night. We played our favorites over and over, taped down from VHS machines. As a courtesy, we pretended to like what our friends liked and they pretended to like what we liked. 

It was such a supermarket-surprise in the beginning. And the channel had something for everyone back then, before videos were eventually segregated into overly-curated and boorishly-hosted hour-long "shows" by the 1990s.

In fact, by the time the record companies figured out what they had on their hands, the days of fun were numbered. In the early 80s, with videos by Howard Jones, Annie Lennox, Prince and David Bowie, we thought the world was surely getting better for those of us on the margins. 

But instead, things got bad really fast. The quick-cut collage videos of generic 1990s boy bands became the dull norm. The exciting gender-bending was pushed aside (ironically) by glam metal and rap posturing, both filled with, if some occasional ground breaking, mostly just big-boobed, air-headed misogyny. 

But it was very nice while it lasted.

 

1. "Missing You" by John Waite (1984)

A few years ago this song was used as the title of a thriller by Harlan Corben, ostensibly using the song as a plot-point for the book. I did read the novel (to see this bit of multimedia craft-work) and although it was a respectable thriller, I think the mechanics of the exercise could have been done (and should have been done) better. But my grievance was over how one of the characters in the story described the "Missing You" music video, calling it 'sappy.' 

I wasn't sure I was remembering this right and since I can't find the book in my house right now, I searched for evidence on Google Books.

There it is. Sappy. Synonym for cheesy. 

So full disclosure, I love me some cheesy music video. In fact, there are plenty of sappy/cheesy videos to follow. I asked the Internet to tell me which music video was the cheesiest of videos and it returned "We Built This City" by Starship (1985). I love that video and always make my friends stop and watch it whenever it comes on (which happened very recently, actually). Especially the part where Mickey Thomas sings "Who counts to money underneath the bar?" and then "'Cos we're the simple fools looking for America crawlin' through your schools." It makes no sense in print but that's prime cheese right there. Perfectly enjoyable cheese. Respectable cheese. 

But I take great umbrage with calling the "Missing You" video sappy. It is neither sappy nor cheesy. It is a very well-made and elegant thing. First of all, the video consistently shows up on YouTube playlists of top videos from the 1980s and it also depicts a precise moment in video history when the editing was interesting but not overdone. Lots of great stuff here: the camera pans (right and left, forward and back), the transitions, the lighting, the swinging lamp business, the blocking that follows the music, the casting, the street phone booth reflections, the rock music trope of the singer strutting down the urban street (we will see this again and again with less panache), the play on "missing you" that affects the romance plot, the gracefully filmed performance at the end.

Harlan Corben. Pleh. 

 

2. "Come On, Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners" (1982) 

This video doesn't really get going until the band shows up with its "go all the way" love drama, ("Come on Eileen, overalls really aren't all that hard to take off. Sheesh!"), and the video's undertone of peer pressure and dancing around the streets like charming, unwashed vagabonds. 

This was one of those videos that got us all excited to buy the album only to realize when we got it home that the hit was an anomaly on the record and it would become a dust magnet in our record bins. 

 

3. "Centerfold" by The J. Geils Band (1981)

This video is not on nearly as many best-of lists as it should be. I tend to be a bit wary of videos with rock bands loitering around high school classrooms because they come off a bit creepy. But the band seems more sardonic than lecherous in this one. (The MTV target audience was adolescents, so it is what it is; but I try to avoid the "Hot for Teacher" video if at all possible. Not so much of an issue in 2026.)

I like the night-school lighting here. And those saddle shoes. Ugh. I so wanted to wear saddle shoes in the 1970s but they killed my feet. "Wear them in!" everyone said. It's a bad fashion memory. The Dance of the Saddle Shoes here is very nice, though. 

All the girls come to class in lingerie. Then they're all wearing fuzzy sweaters and skirts. Then they're all in nightgowns. Then oversized sweatshirts. I appreciate the throwback 1970s hair and makeup. 

Is that a hitchhiking dance? Some weird slumber party moves. The classroom has all the cliches of a real American classroom: the globe, the anatomy poster, the American flag, the composition notebooks. 

But the absolute best part, and what makes the video so great, starts when the girls pummel Peter Wolf with textbooks, the drums turn into milk and then the pep rally starts with the streamers, pompoms and somersaults. The closeups and the chaos of the scene make it an unforgettable last few minutes.

But I'm glad Peter Wolf was never my teacher. I doubt those kids learned very much.

4. "Wrapped Around Your Finger" by The Police (1983) 

I liked this one better than "Every Breath You Take" (1983) which seemed pretentious and over-designed. Zoom into the ashtray, it becomes a drum. It honestly put me to sleep every time it came on. 

But for "Wrapped Around Your Finger" they had to set up all those candles! That was impressive. They were positioned in rows and trails like dominoes in various configurations. And for once Sting was not doing that rocking-forward dance he did. He's doing jumping jacks and then a kind of running dance. The whole thing is so simple and atmospheric. And beautiful when Sting knocks down the circle of candles, hitting backwards first. And the band dancing beyond the rows, the light of the candles, the black of the candle holders.  

 

5. "How Will I Know" by Whitney Houston (1985) 

Another one that was deceptively simple. This was the only Whitney Houston video we got where she let herself be a carefree young teen, the one before she quickly got sucked into the entertainment machine and her own identity crisis. 

I was a teen girl when this video came out and it was a very important video to me. I wanted to believe Whitney Houston could be my big-sister-guru in all things boys, and that somehow this video would be the beginning of many lessons, all in primary colors and Houston's sweet love-struck, anticipatory face. All her beautiful possibility, before all the leather skirts and cocaine. This was unfettered youth, back-bending boys, love as a red splash on a maze of plastic walls. 

This is what love will look like. This is what I will feel, surprised by handsome dancers in black and white, big forward lunges, inconceivably happy, big silver bows in curly big hair. The makeup is happy 80s makeup here. (Compare it to the more jaded makeup in "Centerfold.") Flush-faced joy. Self-possession. Friends who are dancing with you in the imaginary bedroom of your head. Whitney will show us through this crazy maze as the optimum teen who has the dress and the hair and the smile.

Unfortunately, none of it was true. 

 

6. "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson (1983)

I was appropriately impressed with the "Thriller" video but it all felt like a log of showbiz hoopla. And everything after the Thriller album was just cheesy past a point which I could bear. All of it. Michael Jackson did amazing dance performances with the Jackson 5, The Jacksons and on his first solo record, Off the Wall (Spike Lee makes a similar case in his documentary on Off the Wall). But "Billie Jean" was the last deserved phenomenon in my opinion. It's practically perfect. Everything else was resting on laurels.

But this is probably the video that convinced everyone the music video was an art form, not to mention the work it did to knock down the walls of segregation on MTV. 

We watched this video over and over again, mesmerized by its mysterious otherworldly quality, like a 1980s Film Noir. But with transformation and magic. The closeups were fascinating and Jackson was so effortlessly debonair in the video (never trying too hard like in later videos) and I don't want to say he seemed "normal" but definitely more representative of the average young guy of the moment.  

The post-disco pavement lighting, the dance (where I think Jackson's true genius was, always thinking outside the box and as fluid as Dick Van Dyke), the creative three-panel editing, the littered, gray road behind him trailing back into the city (as if this were the Noir city of Oz), the gauzy bedroom scene, the mysterious air of scandal throughout the whole thing. Iconic. The video of all videos. 

That tiger stumped us, though. 

 

7. "Take On Me" by A-ha (1985)

Always on the top of best-of lists (along with "Billie Jean"). 

When this came out We. Lost. Our. Minds.

 

8. "Jack and Diane" by John Cougar (1982)

What I like about this video is that for me its the one that defines the undefinable landscape of the Midwest, the area where I grew up. It has that element some people call white trash or in Missouri we called it Hoosier (as a slam to Indiana because I guess there was some sort of rivalry there). But it meant working class, rough and everyone had a cousin or uncle or friend's Dad. It's a character that feels very much at home at a St. Louis backyard BBQ with its oblong metal bucket full of Busch beer. 

The video has that essential Midwest feeling no other video even approaches. His wife's hair and her outfit (the jeans and jacket), buying the "chili dog outside the  Tastee Freez" (we had frozen custard stands instead), the cry for freedom to "do what I please," the landscape he rides his motorcycle through, the car, the bravado, and surely that particular variety of green-grass bleakness in the lyric "life goes on, long after the trill of livin' is gone." 

And I guess Indiana boys must be very similar to Missouri boys because I think of suburban St. Louis every time I see this video and now, by association, whenever I hear the song.

This video was before the arrival of a much more serious John Cougar Mellencamp. The earlier videos show how fun John Cougar was, my favorite being "Aint Even Done with The Night" (1981), a very simple. low budget thing I liked very much with its spoof on the melodramatic balladeer.

 

9. "Like a Prayer" by Madonna (1989) 

The World Premiere. This was appointment television for 80s kids. Young people today don't even know what those words even mean. 

All the controversy surrounding this video felt fresh and important at the time, before Madonna controversy started to feel overripe and performative. I remember watching this premiere with my friends. The racial content and religious imagery and all its inter- and outer-textural drama (Pepsi Corp. freaking out) made us feel like the video was an important statement and that, because of it, we were all destined to evolve as a human race. (Spoiler Alert: we weren’t.) 

Looking back, it was way too ambiguous. But when you're a teen, you classify ambiguity as cool and don't see vague political messages as a weakness yet. 

And then Madonna as a brunette? We were all like Stop the Presses! Madonna got so much flack for her blasphemous look in this video but now all conservative women have adopted this look. Because women, sex and religion: "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end."

"He didn't do it." 

The ultimate video as button pusher.

 

10. "Don't Come Around Here No More" by Tom Petty (1985)

Hasn’t aged a day. 

How nobody before this video thought to mash up Alice In Wonderland and women interacting with members of a rock band. Just genius. Visually stunning and creative.

 

11. "Waiting for a Friend" by the Rolling Stones (1981)

This is on nobody’s list of best videos anywhere, but I found it so simple and fascinating. That set looks so clichéd I thought they were on Sesame Street. It's so literal, too. There's more streetwalking and a bar scene in the video but it's only the waiting at the stoop that I remember. It proves you don't need pyrotechnics or big sets to make a good video. You could just have the band mug it up in front of a camera. 

I thought they looked like old geezers then. Oy. 

 

12. "She’s a Beauty" by The Tubes (1983)

This video never makes the best-of lists either but I found the fun-house theme unforgettable, the tent-like lighting casting shadows, the whole creepiness of Fee Waybill, the flow of it, the moral being literally, dangerously risqué, the use of real performers, the ride turns the little boy into an old man. So creepy. 

I keep watching it because it's a crazy, complex combo of fleshy misogyny and ball-breaking feminism. 

13. "Shadows of the Night" by Pat Benetar (1982)

Pat Benetar has the distinction of having the second video ever played on MTV. "You Better Run" played right after "Video Killed the Radio Star" and Benetar became a refreshing staple of MTV thereafter. Most women seem to love her video "Love is a Battlefield" (1983) the best and it was great and more overtly feminist at the time; but it was also overplayed and eventually read as cheesy. 

Not to say "Shadows of the Night" wasn't cheesy but it didn't take itself very seriously which makes it pretty awesome. And Benetar as a fighter pilot is pretty unforgettable. She gets to pretend to be an American spy fighting against the Germans in World War II along with her husband, Neil Giraldo, and all the band-mates, It's like they're all little kids playing war games. What could be more fun than that?

Plus the pace of the song is so well-matched to the action of the video: the propeller when the instruments come in, (yes that's Judge Reinhold), the airplane liftoff at the word "dreams," all the flight scenes, Benetar's makeup always looking lush and colorful, action, action, action, lots of pointers slapping down on maps, the ubiquitous bomb (although for some reason it takes three people to stuff it into that grate), a sexy German frau. 

 

14. "99 Luftballons"by Nena (1983)

My friends and I loved any video in a non-English language because it made us feel so cosmopolitan. See also: Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" (1986, US).

 

15.  "Love Is a Stranger" by Eurythmics (1983)

Most people will cite "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" (1983) as the top Eurythmics video of the 80s but it took me a minute to warm up to Annie Lennox, which I eventually did (and was luckily to see her play live at Royce Hall in Los Angeles during the Bare era). 

I liked this video better, though, because it showed how conventionally feminine Annie Lennox could be (in the culturally acceptable way) if she wanted to, especially with those cheekbones. But the point was she choose to present in another way (or in this video many ways)...because she could. 

This is the best work by wigs outside of a Cher video.

 

16. "Always Something There To Remind Me" by Naked Eyes (1983)

Lots of camera focus, panning, running, glamour, young men pining over lost love, a well-dressed woman in a disheveled apartment hopping on one high heel (her life is chaos!), all the things.

 

17.  "Purple Rain" by Prince (1984)

Again, everyone seems to pick "When Dove’s Cry" (1984) but that video just seems silly to me now. This one (also from the movie Purple Rain) spared us the clips from the movie interspersed with a performance, which never felt satisfying no matter what framing device they tried. This was Prince with the ruffles and teased-up hair. Robert Christgau called this era "an artist in full formal flower" which seems to capture it.

This was the Prince of our Innocence.

 

18. "Rock Me Tonight" by Billy Squier (1984)

So here is some cheese I particularly love. And picking this one I'm going out on a limb. So many, I know, would choose this video as the ultimate worst, the video that might possibly have ended a career. 

I asked the Internet why people hated the "Rock Me Tonight" video back then and got this information returned:

"People hated the 1984 "Rock Me Tonite" video because its effeminate, pastel-themed, and choreographed aesthetic destroyed Billy Squier's gritty, "rocker" image established by hits like "The Stroke"...the video saw Squier prancing and writhing in a bed, which deeply alienated his core male, arena-rock fan base." 

To Billy Squier's arena-rock-fan base I say f**k off. Your homophobic, joyless response says more about you than it does about this video, which has fabulous, explosive moments of delight and fearless selfhood. "Roll me to the light" indeed. The video actually captures the great energy of song. End stop.

In fact, Billy Squier's fearlessness in this video is one of the sexiest things I've ever seen, 100-percent more sexy than orgasmic-guitar clown faces and bravado crotch shots (which this video has, btw).  

This video destroying or even interrupting a career is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. (And I'm not even a Billy Squier fan.) 

And as a human being, if you haven't done this kind of dancing in your own private bedroom, see a shrink.

 

19. "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me" by Aretha Franklin and George Michael (1987)

Well, I like a lot about this video: the classic George Michael era, the way they incorporate pixelated television into it and onto Michael's iconic sunglasses, Aretha Franklin being perfectly Aretha Franklin, the homage to prior videos, the homage to prior duet icons Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Sonny & Cher (I believe this is Cher's first appearance in an MTV video) and Ike and Tina Turner. 

I like how we are fooled into thinking this is just a lame example of two performances in two different locations stitched together. But no, it isn't.  

I'm a senior in High School at this moment and this video is making me feel good about launching myself into the world.

 

20.  Split Enz Videos 

Now this appreciation is more in hindsight. A few years ago I went to the trouble of watching the first 100 videos that ever aired on MTV; and when I watched these Split Enz videos which I had never seen before. I thought they still held up as creative, low budget music videos. There are a lot of kooky, nonsensical videos to choose from during MTV's early years, but Split Enz videos still seem like some of the brightest in the pack.

"One step Ahead" (1980) and "History Never Repeats Itself" (1981) 

 

Honorable Mentions

1. "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles (1979)

This video is probably the patron-saint video of MTV, being the first video ever played on the channel in 1979. It was interesting and arty and really, kind of one and done. And although I loved when the video came on, I mostly just wanted to hear the song.

 

2. "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones (1985)

This is for Lisa. Lisa, Paul and I banked hours and hours and hours watching MTV together in the 1980s. Lisa loved bands like The Cure, Sinéad O'Connor and Violent Femmes but she also thought Howard Jones seemed "nice." And he does seem nice.  

"Wah!"

 

3. "Revolution" by The Thompson Twins (1985)

And this is for Paul. He really poured over the fashions in this video. He even fashioned his hair after this band. His hair was blonde and high up in the air, defying gravity. There was a punk band in our high-school class who even wrote a song about Paul's hair called "Paul O'Neill's Hair" (not his real name). I still have the cassette. 

This cover of the Beatles was the happy, dance floor version of the revolution (I'm sure John Lennon was fine with it). 

And hearing this, I am back in my Molly Ringwald-bedroom and its around one in the morning and I'm sharing Paul's excitement because we had waited all night and this video finally came up.

 

4. "If I Could Turn Back Time" by Cher (1989)

I'm including this because we have turned back time and because this is the video most people think of when they think of Cher in the 1980s, the one that was banned, the one with the navy ship full of all those sailors. 

It took some balls for Cher to go out there wearing basically a thong and some duct tape over her privates and dance in front of all those sailors. The Military Times estimated there were about 150 to 200 sailors in this video, whooping it up as extras. 

So taking the conservative number of 150 times 2...that's 300... 

I think we can literally say that this video took more balls to make than any other music video ever made. 

;-)