5 Music Videos That Changed Everything

Here I break down the day Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video hit MTV and detonated the hair metal era overnight, dropping a grimy gym pep rally into living rooms everywhere. A music video used as a cultural reset button.

It got me thinking about the handful of clips that did not just sell a song but changed the whole game. Here are 5 music videos that rewrote the rules. 

Watch the video: The Day Nirvana's Teen Spirit Video Changed Music and subscribe on the Rock with PJ Pat channel for more rock breakdowns.

1. Michael Jackson, Thriller (1983)

Before Thriller, music videos were mostly cheap promo clips. Michael Jackson blew the doors off with a 14 minute horror movie directed by John Landis, complete with a zombie dance routine, a budget that dwarfed anything before it, and Vincent Price narrating from beyond the grave. It turned MTV from background noise into appointment television. It also broke MTV's unofficial color barrier, forcing a channel that had mostly ignored Black artists to put one in heavy rotation. The Library of Congress later preserved it as culturally significant. Every big budget video that followed is still chasing the standard Thriller set in one swing.

2. Peter Gabriel, Sledgehammer (1986)

Peter Gabriel handed his 1986 hit to the animators who would become Aardman, the Wallace and Gromit studio, and let them go wild. Sledgehammer is stop motion claymation and pixilation, with fruit, chickens, and clay versions of Gabriel's face dancing frame by frame, shot over a punishing stretch with him lying under a glass plate. It became the most played video in MTV history and swept the awards with a haul nobody has topped since. It proved a video could be pure handmade art and still be a monster hit.

3. A-ha, Take On Me (1985)

A-ha had already released Take On Me twice to total silence. Then a director talked them into the pencil sketch look, blending live action with rotoscoped animation where thousands of hand drawn frames make the singer step out of a comic book and pull a woman into his world. It took months of painstaking work. It also turned a twice failed single into a number one around the planet and one of the most beloved videos ever made. Same song, brand new visuals, a completely different fate. That is the raw power of the format.

4. Beastie Boys, Sabotage (1994)

By 1994 the Beastie Boys could have coasted. Instead they handed Sabotage to a young Spike Jonze, who turned it into a dead on parody of a 1970s cop show, complete with fake mustaches, bad wigs, screeching car chases, and invented character credits for the band. It reframed the Beasties as cinematic pranksters and helped launch Jonze into one of the most important directors of his generation. Proof a video could be a comedy sketch and a statement of total confidence at the same time.

5. Guns N' Roses, November Rain (1992)

Guns N' Roses went the opposite direction from grimy and cheap. November Rain in 1992 was a cinematic epic, reportedly one of the most expensive videos ever made at the time, with an orchestra, a church wedding, a rain soaked funeral, and Slash walking out of a desert chapel to rip a solo into the open sky. SO EPIC!!! It was a short film built around a power ballad, and decades later it became one of the first videos from its era to cross a billion views online. Ambition on a scale the format had never seen.

More on What Rocks: The Rise and Fall of Grunge, 5 Master of Puppets Stories, and The Most Underrated Rock Band.

Wear it loud

If you grew up with the volume up and the videos rolling, gear up like a lifer. Two picks for the certified rock heads:

Rock Hand Sign Graphic Tee →
For everyone who learned rock history one music video at a time.

Volume Knob Rock Baseball Cap →
Turn every anthem up to 11, where it belongs.

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Rock on, my friends. 

PJ Pat