Once the song reached number 1, Chrysalis Records produced a video to accompany the song. The video consisted of the band driving a Vauxhall Cresta around empty streets in London.
"Coming Up" is also well known for its video. It is an early example of electronic trickery, with Paul McCartney playing ten roles and Linda McCartney playing two. The "band" (identified as "The Plastic Macs" on the drum kit—a nod to Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band") features Paul and Linda's imitations of various rock musician stereotypes, as well as a few identifiable musicians.
In his audio commentary on the 2007 video collection The McCartney Years, McCartney identified the two characters that were impersonations of specific artists: Hank Marvin (guitarist from The Shadows), Ron Mael of Sparks (keyboards), and a 'Beatlemania-Era' version of himself. While others such as author Fred Bronson have suggested that there are other identifiable impersonations in the video, such as Andy MacKay, Frank Zappa and Neil Young,
McCartney said the other roles were simply comic relief.
The video made its world premiere on Saturday Night Live on 17 May 1980.
The first official video for "Relax", directed by Bernard Rose and set in a S&M themed gay nightclub, featuring the bandmembers accosted by buff leathermen, a glamorous drag queen, and an abundantly contoured admirer dressed up as a Roman emperor, was allegedly banned by MTV and the BBC, prompting the recording of a second video, directed by Godley and Creme in early 1984, featuring the group performing with the help of "laser beams". However, after the second video was made the song was banned completely by the BBC, meaning that neither video was ever broadcast on any BBC music programmes.
In addition, a version including footage from the Brian De Palma film Body Double as well as a live version, directed by David Mallet, also made the rounds at MTV.
The Godley & Creme-directed video depicted a wrestling match between then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko for the benefit of group members and an eagerly belligerent assembly of representatives from the world's nations, the event ultimately degenerating into complete global destruction. This video was played several times at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Due to some violent scenes ("Reagan" biting "Chernenko"'s ear, etc.), the unedited video could not be shown on MTV, and an edited version was substituted.
A longer version of the video (based on the "Hibakusha" mix) included an introductory cut-up monologue by Richard Nixon taken from an ad from his 1960 US Presidential campaign ("No.. firm diplomacy... No.. peace for America and the world"), plus similar contributions from other world leaders, including Lord Beaverbrook, Yasser Arafat and John F. Kennedy. The complete soundtrack to the extended video was eventually released as "Two Tribes (Video Destructo)" on the German version of the Twelve Inches compilation. A third version of the video, included on the band's compilation of videos, retains the introduction, but loses most of the inserted clips in the main wrestling sequence.
The video for "Time After Time" was about a runaway leaving her lover behind. The video opens with Lauper watching the 1936 film The Garden of Allah. Lauper sings (signs) the title of the song to the deaf as she is leaving the train station. The video was played in heavy rotation on MTV. Lauper's mother, brother, and then-boyfriend David Wolff appear in the video, and Lou Albano, who played her father in the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" video, can be seen as a cook. The video was directed by Ed Griles. Portions of the video were filmed at the now closed Tom's Diner in Roxbury Township, New Jersey, the intersection of Central Avenue and Main Street in Wharton, New Jersey, and at the Morristown train station.
There are two versions of the video for "It's My Life." The first, envisioned by director Tim Pope as a statement against the banality of lip-synching, consists almost entirely of footage from wildlife documentaries, interspersed with shots of Talk Talk lead singer Mark Hollis standing in the midst of London Zoo, with his mouth pointedly shut tight and often obscured by hand-drawn animated lines.
The second version, recorded at the behest of EMI, consisted of the entirety of the original video projected on a green screen behind Hollis on guitar and vocals as well as his two bandmates as they lip-synched and mimed the song, deliberately poorly and with comic exaggerated gestures.
For the music video, Madonna sported a complete image makeover. She changed the heavy jewelry and make-up, and adopted the gamine look, which is notably applied to describe the style and appearance that Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn used during the 1950s.
In the video Madonna played a tomboy, dressed in jeans, a black leather jacket, and a slogan T-shirt with the caption "Italians do it better". The video alternated between tomboy shots and those of a sexier Madonna with a more toned and muscular body, cropped platinum blonde hair, and figure-revealing clothing, consisting of a 1960s-style black bustier top and capri pants. It was directed by James Foley, who worked with Madonna in her video for "Live to Tell", produced by David Naylor and Sharon Oreck, and Michael Ballhaus was in charge of the photography.
Actor Alex McArthur was signed to play Madonna's boyfriend and the father of her child in the video. Madonna had spotted McArthur in a small role as a naive youth in the 1985 film Desert Hearts, and she thought he was a natural to play her mechanic boyfriend. "I was out in the garage working on my Harley," said McArthur, "I answered the phone and a voice said, 'Hi, this is Madonna. I would like you to be in my next video.'"
The music video starts with shots of the New York skyline, the Staten Island Ferry, and character close-ups.
Madonna plays a teenager, who is seen walking along a lane. Then it shows her thinking about her father, played by Danny Aiello, and how much he loves her. She then sees her boyfriend, played by actor Alex McArthur coming along. The images are juxtaposed with shots of Madonna dancing and singing in a small, darkened studio. Madonna then moves away from her friends, who warn her from her boyfriend. She and her boyfriend spend a romantic evening together on a barge where they reflect upon their lives after watching an elderly couple. Then Madonna finds out that she is pregnant and after much hesitation tells her father. They have a few days of tension between them. Her father eventually accepts the pregnancy, and the final scene is a reconciliatory embrace between father and daughter.
Georges-Claude Guilbert, author of Madonna as Postmodern Myth, compared her look in the video as a "combination of Marilyn Monroe, Jean Seberg and Kim Novak." He added that it was hard for him to believe that "[Madonna] did not know that she was going to cause a huge controversy with the video.... With such a song and video, she was throwing in America's face the image of a country ravaged by the abortion debate, which is far from being resolved."
Lynda Hart, one of the authors of Acting Out: Feminist Performances, felt that the video "alternated between two competing representations of Madonna... Charging coercion, both sides make the video as an invitation to a certain way of life, in the process denying it the stylistic invocation of a rhetoric of self-authorization." At the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, the "Papa Don't Preach" video won the Best Female Video award, and was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Overall Performance.
Express Yourself (1989)
The music video was directed by David Fincher and filmed in April 1989, at Culver Studios in Culver City, California. It was produced by Gregg Fienberg, under Propaganda Films, with editing by Scott Chestnut, principal photography by Mark Plummer, and Vance Lorenzini as the production designer.
"Express Yourself" music video was inspired by the Fritz Lang classic film Metropolis (1927), and featured an epigraph at the end of the video from the film: "Without the Heart, there can be no understanding between the hand and the mind".
The video marked the first appearance of the Shep Pettibone remix of the song. It had a total budget of $5 million, which made it the most expensive music video in history at the time it was made, and currently the third most expensive of all time.
"Express Yourself" had its world-premiere on May 17, 1989, on MTV and was an MTV exclusive for three weeks, being aired every hour on the music channel. The concept of the video was to portray Madonna as a glamorous lady and chained masochist, with muscular men acting as her workers. In the end, she picks one of them—played by model Cameron Alborzian—as her date for the night.
When Fincher explained this concept to Madonna, she was intrigued and decided to portray a masculine persona.[63] She was dating actor Warren Beatty at that time, and asked him to play the part of a slave working at a factory; Beatty politely refused, saying later that "Madonna wanted the video as a show case of her sexual prowess, I never wanted to be a part of it."She then thought about Metropolis and of its scenes displaying factory workers and a city with tall skyscrapers. Fincher liked the concept and it became the main backdrop for the video. In Madonna 'talking': Madonna in her own words, she commented about the development of the video:
This one I had the most amount of input. I oversaw everything—the building of the sets, everyone's costumes, I had meetings with make-up and hair and the cinematographer, everybody. Casting, finding the right cat—just every aspect. Kind of like making a little movie. We basically sat down and just threw out all every idea we could possibly conceive of and of all the things we wanted. All the imagery we wanted—and I had a few set ideas, for instance the cat and the idea of Metropolis. I definitely wanted to have that influence, that look on all the men—the workers, diligently, methodically working away.
Madonna mentioned jokingly in a 1990 BBC Television interview on the program Omnibus, that the main theme of the video and the cat metaphor represented that "***** rules the world".
She added that the idea of the cat licking the milk and then pour it over, was the director's. "It's great but believe me I fought him on that. I didn't want to do it. I thought it's just so over the top and silly and kind of cliched, an art student or a film student's kind of trick. I'm glad that I gave in to him."
Like A Virgin (1984)
The music video, directed by Mary Lambert, who worked with Madonna in her video for "Borderline", was shot in Venice, Italy and partly in New York City in July 1984. Madonna was portrayed as a knowing virgin, a figment of the ****ographic mind, as she walked through marble rooms, wearing a wedding gown. It alternated with scenes of a ****ty-looking Madonna on-board a gondola.She commented, "[Mary] wanted me to be the modern-day, worldly-wise girl that I am. But then we wanted to go back in time and use myself as an actual virgin." The video starts with Madonna boarding on a boat from the Brooklyn Bridge and travels to Venice. As she steps down into the city, she moves like a stripper and undulated sinuously. She wears a black dress and blue pants with a number of Christian symbol embedded jewellery around her neck.
She sings the song at full volume as she watches a lion walking between the columns of the Piazza San Marco of Venice and along the statute of Saint Mark. A number of game-playing involving carnival masks, men, lions, werelions are portrayed with allusions to eighteenth-century practices and Saint Mark.
Sheila Whiteley, author of Women and popular music: sexuality, identity, and subjectivity, felt that Madonna's image signified a denial of sexual knowledge, but also portrayed her in simulated writhing on a gondola, thus underpinning the simulation of deceit. The intrusion of a male lion, confirmed the underlying bestial discourse of both mythological fairytale and ****ographic sex. Whiteley observed that in the video, Madonna's lover wears the lion's mask and while cavorting with him, Madonna sheds the veneer of innocence and shows her propensity for wild animal passions. Having instilled desire, metaphorically she turns her lover into a Beast. Madonna commented about shooting with the lion:
"The lion didn't do anything he was supposed to do, and I ended up leaning against this pillar with his head in my crotch... I thought he was going to take a bite out of me so I lifted the veil I was wearing and had a stare-down with him and he opened his mouth and let out this huge roar. I got so frightened my heart fell in my shoe. When he finally walked away, the director yelled 'Cut' and I had to take a long breather. But I could really relate to the lion. I feel like in a past life I was a lion or a cat or something."
With the video, scholars noted the expression of Venetian vitality in it. Margaret Plant (2002) commented: "With the lion of Saint Mark and the virginal city to the forefront, old sacrosanct Venice was propelled into a pop world of high-energy gyration, and endless circulation."
She also noted that Saint Mark was a symbol of a time when sexual crime was punished severely in Venice and acts of rape, homosexuality and fornication incurred the loss of a nose, a hand or sometimes life itself. Madonna appeared to challenge such brutality and stretch the boundaries of tolerance in the video. As the lion-man carried Madonna to the Venetian palace, it symbolized an instance of the Saint taking the simulated Virgin, where Madonna became a symbol for La Serenissima, the Republic itself.
The music video, directed by John Landis, was filmed in various locations in New York and Los Angeles. Contrary to reports of $800,000 to $1 million dollar production budgets, Landis stated that the music video was made for $500,000.Jackson said of making the music video, in an interview that aired on December 11, 1999, for MTV's 100 Greatest Videos Ever Made:
My idea was to make this short film with conversation ... I like having a beginning and a middle and an ending, which would follow a story. I'm very much involved in complete making and creating of the piece. It has to be, you know, my soul. Usually, you know, it's an interpretation of the music. [...] It was a delicate thing to work on because I remember my original approach was, 'How do you make zombies and monsters dance without it being comical?' So I said, 'We have to do just the right kind of movement so it doesn't become something that you laugh at.' But it just has to take it to another level. So I got in a room with [choreographer] Michael Peters, and he and I together kind of imagined how these zombies move by making faces in the mirror. I used to come to rehearsal sometimes with monster makeup on, and I loved doing that. So he and I collaborated and we both choreographed the piece and I thought it should start like that kind of thing and go into this jazzy kind of step, you know. Kind of gruesome things like that, not too much ballet or whatever.
The music video of the song also included on the video albums: Video Greatest Hits - HIStory, HIStory on Film, Volume II, Number Ones, on the bonus DVD of Thriller 25 and Michael Jackson's Vision.
Following the release of the music video, a 45 minute documentary was released that provided candid glimpses behind the scenes of the music video's production.
Entitled Making Michael Jackson's Thriller, it, like the music video, was shown heavily on MTV for a time and was the top-selling home-video release of all time at one point, with over nine million copies sold.[39] MTV paid $250,000 for the exclusive rights to show the documentary; Showtime paid $300,000 for pay-cable rights; and Vestron Video reportedly paid $500,000 to market the cassette, in a profit participation agreement.
Billie Jean (1983)
The short film for Jackson's "Billie Jean" is considered the video that brought MTV, a fairly new and unknown music channel, into mainstream attention. It was one of the first videos by a black artist to be aired regularly by the channel, as the network's executives felt black music wasn't "rock" enough. "Billie Jean" was the first video for the Thriller album.
Inspired in part by the film Somebody Up There Likes Me, and directed by Steve Barron, the video shows a photographer who follows Jackson. The paparazzo never catches the singer, and when photographed Jackson fails to materialise on the developed picture. The entertainer dances his way to Billie Jean's hotel room and as he walks along a sidewalk, each tile lights up at his touch.
After he performs a quick spin, Jackson jumps and lands, freeze framed, on his toes. Upon arrival at the hotel, Jackson climbs the staircase to Billie Jean's room. Each step lights up as he touches it and a burnt out "Hotel" sign illuminates as he passes. The paparazzo then arrives at the scene and watches as Jackson disappears under the covers of Billie Jean's bed. Trailed by the police, the paparazzo is then arrested for spying on Billie Jean.
Jackson sported a new look for the video; Jheri curled hair. Jackson's clothes, a black leather suit with a pink shirt and red bow tie, were copied by children around the US. Imitation became so severe that, despite pupil protests, Bound Brook High School in New Jersey banned students from wearing a single white glove like Jackson had on during the performance of "Billie Jean" at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever.
Walter Yetnikoff, the president of Jackson's record label, CBS, approached MTV to play the "Billie Jean" video. He became enraged when MTV refused to play the video, and threatened to pull all of the videos from CBS/Epic signed artists and go public with MTV's stance on black musicians. "I said to MTV, 'I'm pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I'm going to go public and ****ing tell them about the fact you don't want to play music by a black guy.'" Les Garland, who was the head of acquisitions for MTV at the time, disputes the claim that the network played the video under pressure from CBS. "There was never any hesitation. No fret," he said. "I called Bob (Robert W. Pittman, MTV co-founder) to tell him, 'I just saw the greatest video I've ever seen in my life. It is off the dial it's so good.' We added it that day. How (the myth) turned into a story literally blew our minds." At any rate, MTV played the "Billie Jean" video in heavy rotation. After the video was aired, Thriller went on to sell an additional 10 million copies.
Bad (1987)
The full music video for "Bad" is an 18-minute short film written by novelist and screenwriter Richard Price. The video was directed by Martin Scorsese during a period of 6 weeks in the fall of 1986.
The video has many references to the 1961 film West Side Story, especially the "Cool" sequence.
Not only does it show a street gang dancing in an urban setting, but there are also some parts of the choreography that were influenced by it. The choreographer Jeffrey Daniel confirmed the influence, although they intended to do a more contemporary version of it.
In the video, Jackson plays a high school student named Daryl. Daryl arrives to find his house empty (his mother is played by Roberta Flack, albeit in voiceover), but is greeted by his old friends, led by Mini Max (an emerging Wesley Snipes) and spends an evening with them. At first relations are friendly, if slightly awkward, but the situation deteriorates once the rest of the gang realize how much Daryl has changed, and in particular how uncomfortable he has become with their tendencies towards petty crime. In an attempt to show his friends he is still "bad", Daryl takes the gang to a subway station (The Hoyt Schermerhorn Station in Brooklyn)[23] where he attempts to mug an elderly man but changes his mind at the last minute. Mini Max berates Daryl and tells him that he's no longer bad. After more abuse from Mini Max, the video jumps from black and white to color and Daryl, now dressed head to foot in black leather and joined by a crowd of dancing punks, sings "Bad" and dances his moves. His insistences that Max is headed for a fall are nearly Daryl's undoing, but eventually his friend accepts that, and, after a final handshake, heads off leaving Daryl. The scene shifts back to black and white as Daryl, alone and back in his tracksuit, watches them leave.
The music video was included on the video albums: Video Greatest Hits - HIStory (long version on DVD and short version in VHS), Number Ones (short version) and Michael Jackson's Vision (long version).
The music video received one nomination at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards Ceremony.
The music video, directed by legendary British photographer Terence Donovan was one of the most iconic of the era. The video features Palmer performing with an abstract "band," being a group of models whose pale skin, heavy makeup, dark hair and seductive, rather robot-like expression follow the style of women in Patrick Nagel paintings.
The models in the video are (from left to right) Julie Pankhurst (keyboards), Patty Kelly (guitar lhs), Mak Gilchrist (guitar rhs) and Julia Bolino (guitar far rhs) with Kathy Davies at the back on drums.
The music video for "Born in the U.S.A." was directed by noted filmmaker John Sayles. It consisted of video concert footage of Springsteen and the E Street Band performing the song, poorly synchronized with audio from the studio recording. Released in mid-December 1984, there supposedly had not been enough time to mix the audio from the concert.
This footage was intermixed with compelling mid-1980s scenes of working-class America, emphasizing images that had some connection with the song, including Vietnam veterans, Amerasian children, assembly lines, oil refineries, cemeteries, and the like, finishing with a recreation of the album's cover, with grizzled Springsteen posing in front of an American flag.
