The music video features a continuous shot that never changes its angle of vision. The footage was B-role and never meant to be seen until the director decided to use it. Taking place in a residential space that later is revealed to be a filming studio, it has many shots where the crew is "fixing" the scene, as in a making of.
The video of the song was rated the second best video of all time by MTV Italy.
The song's music video was directed by Sophie Muller. It opens with a scene of the band performing the song in a garage. Stefani's ex-boyfriend (played by Terry Hall, the lead singer of The Specials.) walks by the house and sits down on a swing. After the first refrain, Stefani leaves for a grocery store where she buys canned tomatoes, and Kanal begins boiling water. Adrian Young sets the table outside while the other three band members begin cooking a meal in the kitchen. While chopping the tomatoes, Stefani cuts her finger and begins bleeding. After she rinses her finger, there are several time-edited shots, after which Stefani carries the spaghetti outside to the table. After rinsing her finger Stefani says 'now you're looking like I used to' while Tony Kanal is cleaning the tomato sauce off the floor. This is most likely a reference to one of Stefani's teenage job of scrubbing floors at Dairy Queen. After the group serves each other and begins eating, a food fight ensues. After the music ends, the ex-boyfriend is shown to still be sitting on the swing.
A highly-acclaimed music video for the song was directed by Jonathan Glazer.
The band is presented in imitation of the opening scenes from the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, in the Milk Bar. Blur star as the quasi-Droogs, complete with Damon Albarn wearing eyeliner similar to the character Alex DeLarge. They perform in the bar in all-white. Though the band do not engage in their usual vibrant stage demeanor, Damon frequently turns to the camera and gives a sly, crooked smile. Graham Coxon spends the majority of the video sitting against the wall while playing.
The bar patrons consist of different groups; a lone female entertains male business colleagues by exploiting their sexual interest in her; two men, one identified as a 'red man' (dressed entirely in red) who used to be 'blue', conduct a stilted (subtitled) conversation; two other men – one of them wearing a vicar's clerical collar – become increasingly drunk on cocktails, laughing more and more hysterically until the clergyman tells his friend something to which the viewer is not privy, causing his friend to withdraw into stunned silence (a device similar to that used in Radiohead's promotional video for the song "Just" in the same year). There are also two old men who make a few comments marveling at the scene.
These clips are interchanged with scenes of a crowd of ordinary people standing motionless before an oddly shaped speaker. Similarities between them and the patrons in the milk bar, as well as behavior mimicking between the two scenes, indicate that the patrons in the milk bar are the people in the crowd, captivated and transported by the music into the ethereal, seemingly utopian world.
Minimalistic stills can also be seen scattered throughout the video, used to accentuate certain aspects of the video. For example, when the man in the clerical collar and his friend begin their drinking binge, a still showing a fetus in a cocktail glass is shown where the glass seems to represent a womb. When the female begins entertaining her fellow patrons, a still of handcuffs is shown, suggesting that though she seems happy, she is really feeling trapped and dehumanized. A similar still of a magnet drawing a man is shown, directly after the man in the clerical collar whispers something to his friend, which prompts a reaction of quiet dismay. The still in this case seems to have a dual-meaning, representing the band's ability to attract people and doubling as a euphemism for homosexuality, as at the end of the video the man with the clerical collar attempts to kiss his shocked friend.
The music video for "Ironic" was directed by Stéphane Sednaoui. In it, Morissette appears driving a dark blue 1977 Lincoln Mark V, through a winter landscape. She plays multiple roles with multiple personalities as her passengers.
Blaine Allan noted in the book Television: Critical Methods and Applications (2002) how Morissette interacts with the watcher. He commented that unlike Britney Spears' "Lucky" music video, where Spears plays dual role of a girl named "Lucky" and her fan, and both appear together in some scenes helped by visual effects, "Ironic" does not utilize them, using solely editing, giving the sense that all the Morissettes interact with each other.
Journalist Carol Vernallis also found that Morissette's "chitchat" way of singing the song creates an intimate connection viewer. She mentioned the video in her book Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (2004), where she studied how the audience may pay attention to the lyrics of the song in a music video. Vernallis added that "Ironic" music video functions as a limited example of how the meaning of a song's lyrics become "inaccessible" when they are videotaped and televised.
The video was nominated for six MTV Video Music Awards in 1996: "Video of the Year", "Best Direction in a Video", "Viewer's Choice", "Best Female Video", "Best New Artist in a Video" and "Best Editing", winning the last three.
It was nominated in 1997 for the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video. Also, it was listed number eighteen at VH1's 100 Greatest Videos.
The music video, directed by Mike Mills, shows the members of Air in New York City. They see a toy monkey on the street and immediately enter a fantasy in which the monkey is a giant and flies off to the Moon. Meanwhile, the members of Air are still in fact in New York and other people see them playing with the toy monkey around the United Nations headquarters and in Central Park. The fantasy scenes are shown in colorful animation and the scenes in real life are shot in live action and black and white.
The music video opens with a group of schoolchildren on board a coach. The camera focuses on a young girl who opens a medical book of pictures of the human skeleton. A blonde boy spits on the page, then smiles at her as he walks away. The children go to the Natural History Museum, where the same boy tries to scare the girl with a skull in his hood. She chases the boy in the museum, but falls near the bottom of a flight of stairs and breaks her hand. At the hospital, she gets an X-ray of her hand. It then shows her brushing her teeth whilst picturing herself as only bones. The background behind her morphs into a toilet area at the Ministry of Sound nightclub, South London. When she reverts back into a person, she is older. She passes a couple having sexual intercourse in a stall, but she only sees them as skeletons (only if you view the music video on television pre-watershed). She exits the bathroom and heads to the nightclub's bar, where a man flirts with her. You can barely hear his lines under the music. She then pictures him as a skeleton and feels his jawbone before leaving. She then goes to the dance floor, and sees more people as skeletons, almost as if she has X-ray vision. She exits the nightclub and climbs into a taxi, where she sees the driver as a skeleton. The Chemical Brothers make a cameo in the video at the end, coming out of the taxi with DJ equipment.
The music video was directed by Kevin Kerslake, who later directed the videos for "Lithium", "In Bloom", and "Sliver". After the unsatisfactory experience filming the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video with Samuel Bayer, Cobain selected Kerslake due to his impressionistic style. Cobain was unable to formulate any ideas beyond homaging the Nevermind album cover and including "a lot of purples and reds", so he let Kerslake conceptualize the clip. The band shot outdoor footage in a park in Hollywood Hills a few days prior to the main video shoot. Kerslake projected this footage in the background of many shots in the main part of the video.
The video features the band in a dark room, where the appearance of falling water in front of the band distorts and blurs the band members' faces (an idea suggested by Cobain).
Throughout the video, clips such as cells multiplying at an incredible rate, to a living organism in its embryotic stages are shown. The video clip also features Kurt Cobain swinging away on a chandelier throughout the room, and water begins to flow into the room. In addition, the video shows parts involving a dog wearing a cone collar. Images of a baby swimming underwater (a reference to the cover of Nevermind) and a gun floating appear. Towards the end, a clip of the band appears, with Cobain in the front, lying on the ground and kissing the camera.
The music video for "Drop" was directed by Spike Jonze and filmed in Los Angeles.
The video features footage of the group performing the song backwards, replayed backwards, which when combined with the chopped, spacey beat of the song gives the video a slight surrealistic quality. Ad Rock and Mike D of the Beastie Boys makes a brief cameo.
The video was directed by Mark Gerard who also directed her video "Just Another Day...". In the video, Latifah rides a motorcycle, which is a dedication to her brother Lance, who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1992. The key she catches in the beginning and wears throughout the video is the ignition key to his bike.
It features a cameo by rap group Naughty by Nature.
Tupac Shakur and Treach from Naughty By Nature make cameo appearances.
The single's music video, directed by Matthew Rolston, won three MTV Video Music Awards: Best Dance Video, Best R&B Video, and Best Choreography in 1994
The song talks about safe sex, the positive and negative sides of sex and the censorship that sex had around that time in American mainstream media. The song was later included in the trio's Greatest Hits (2000) album. It samples "I'll Take You There" by the Staple Singers. An alternate version of the song entitled "Let's Talk About AIDS" was released to radio on a promotional single and included as a b-side on various singles for the song. The lyrics were changed to more directly address the spread of AIDS and HIV.
The music video for "Let's Talk About Sex" starts in a black-and-white scene with a girl turning on a radio and listening to the song. Then she starts kissing her boyfriend and scenes of Salt-N-Pepa and other couples kissing and hugging are shown. Next the video colorizes when Salt-N-Pepa are shown dancing. Another version of the video has a scene in which a skeleton is shown after the word 'AIDS' with a stamp written 'censored' in his mouth.