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Nov 03, 2023

Die 150 größten Hüften

Von Run-DMC bis Doja Cat, von Missy bis Busta und darüber hinaus. FOTOILLUSTRATION VON GRIFFIN LOTZ. FOTOS IN ILLUSTRATIONEN VON MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, 2; STEVE EICHNER/GETTY IMAGES; ROGER

From Run-D.M.C. to Doja Cat, from Missy to Busta, and beyond

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY GRIFFIN LOTZ. PHOTOGRAPHS IN ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, 2; STEVE EICHNER/GETTY IMAGES; ROGER KISBY/GETTY IMAGES; YOUTUBE, 2; ADOBE STOCK, 4

Hip-Hop was Born in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. To celebrate the music’s 50th anniversary, “Rolling Stone” will be publishing a series of features, historical pieces, op-eds, and lists throughout this year.

From the moment Run-D.M.C., clad in all-black leather and fedoras, emerged from the Cadillac in the “Rock Box” clip, the music video was turning hip-hop artists into icons. Then and now, rap videos serve as ambassadors to sound, fashion, art, and emotion, transforming localized subcultures into vital elements of Planet Rock. The world could now visit Grandmaster Flash’s New York, Dr. Dre’s Compton, Juvenile’s New Orleans, Mike Jones’ Houston, and Chief Keef’s Chicago. Kids from every corner of the globe could learn to scratch or do the Humpty Dance.

The rap clips of the early Eighties, like those of Roxanne Shanté, were triumphs of creating a big impression with practically zero budget, mostly shown on Ralph McDaniels’ pioneering New York public television show, Video Music Box. Soon the undeniable force of artists like Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince would knock down the segregated walls of MTV airplay. A pilot for a show called Yo! MTV Raps would do bonkers ratings numbers for the channel in 1988, and soon suburban living rooms across America could be bum-rushed by the righteous anger of Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, and Ice Cube. The pay-to-play jukebox channel the Box would show the videos they wouldn’t touch. BET’s Rap City took the message to other parts of our cable network.

By the Nineties, hip-hop was America’s pop music, and filmmakers like Hype Williams, Paul Hunter, Spike Jonze, Sanji, and Diane Martel began tweaking and rethinking the visual language of the genre, bending it prismatically toward their visions. Directors like the Hughes Brothers, Michel Gondry, Antoine Fuqua, F. Gary Gray, and Brett Ratner caught early breaks from rap videos. Artists like Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Lil Kim, and Puff Daddy were almost inseparable from their larger-than-life video personae.

As the video age gave way to the YouTube era, blockbuster stars like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Drake did their best to keep grand (and expensive) artistic statements alive in a period where budgets were shrinking exponentially. However, the democratic nature of the internet meant that anyone with access to a camera could find a way to ensnare millions and millions of eyeballs, whether that means the shock of Odd Future, the hyper-local intimacy of Chief Keef and Bobby Shmurda, the arthouse fury of Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino, or the deeply charismatic presence of Ice Spice and GloRilla.

Our list of the 150 greatest hip-hop videos was compiled by the editors of Rolling Stone and a panel of music critics. It’s a celebration of hip-hop’s incredible history of making a big impact on small screens.

DIRECTOR: LANCE RIVERA

This girls’-night-out-on-steroids clip had all the requisites for big budget-era rap videos. Tropical location: check. Speedboats, Jet Skis, and snorkeling: check. Cameos galore: check. It looked like the set was an actual party. Not only did Lil’ Kim, Left Eye, Da Brat, Missy Elliott, and Angie Martinez create what is arguably the most formidable all-female posse cut ever, the video is a who’s-who of Black women in Nineties entertainment. Members of R&B groups SWV, Xscape, Changing Faces, and Blaque, rapper Queen Latifah, and actress Maia Campbell all wave singles at male dancers, grab drinks from the bar, and enjoy personal massages in the video’s hideaway tiki cove. The definitive cameo, however, is a barefoot and nonstop dancing Mary J. Blige, who crashed the group-performance shot for the entirety of the clip. The result is the rare rap video to showcase a space without any male homies, producers, label heads, or even celebrity eye candy. The focus is completely on the women and their celebration of each other. “It was so much unity. We had a ball,” Da Brat told Ebony in 2014. “You don’t get that these days.” —N.C.

DIRECTOR: TRAVIS SCOTT AND WHITE TRASH TYLER

Travis Scott’s self-directed “Franchise” appears to take influence across 80 years of film history — Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, Hype Williams’ Belly, Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy, Ari Aster’s Midsommar and, well, Dennis Dugan’s Happy Gilmore. The video’s production and release was no less grand: It was filmed at Michael Jordan’s Illinois estate and premiered on IMAX screens before Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. In the clip, M.I.A. wears a dress constructed of 600 real flowers. “The sun was setting, so we needed to hustle to get the magic ‘golden hour’ shots. We were manically sticking flowers into the suit whilst she had it on, and we had to make our way through hundreds of sheep to adjust the piece between takes,” set designer Emily Davies told Vogue. “Flowers would fall off as she was dancing, and then the sheep started eating the flowers right off her while she was performing.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: GRIN MACHINE

“[M]y aesthetic for videos now are more everything at once, just more chaotic, organized chaos,” A$AP Rocky told Complex. “I think it is a nice way to display my ADHD.” On “Shittin’ Me,” the Harlem rapper’s psychedelic visuals took a turn toward the trenchant. The concept is like an LSD-fried version of Weekend at Bernie’s: a rapper’s death fails to stop the activities of his crew, his label or the fame machine. Though released in an era where rappers end up with a constant stream of posthumous releases and collaborations, Rocky waved off accusations that the video was critical toward the industry. “I think it’s just art. Art is subjective, take what you will from it,” he told Hypebeast. “It’s supposed to strike emotion, and that’s all I wanted to do.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: TERRY HELLER

Gang Starr took four years to release their fifth LP, Moment of Truth, and rapper Guru spent that time growing displeased with the state of hip-hop. “You Know My Steez” roars out of the gate — it’s the LP’s first track and first single — with a hard-knock beat that goads Baldhead Slick to deliver a stern state of the union (“The wackness is spreading like a plague,” he intones). The video, by Terry Heller, merges Guru’s damning vision of late-Nineties hip-hop with George Lucas’ fascist bunker dystopia THX-1138, complete with S&M-chic centurions and bleached-white torturescapes. Guru breaks free, of course — DJ Premier’s beat on the track could knock down any wall. —C.P.

DIRECTOR: BONESVISIO

Maybe all you need for a great video is one set, one car under one streetlight, one verse stretching on for three effortless minutes by one 17-year-old with outsized charisma, and a singular flow. Kodak Black’s premiere video is a case study in minimalism, the camera’s autofocus flinching beneath the head-on gaze of the rapper. Director BonesVision switches to night vision, sometimes doubling the image against itself, but the effect is almost documentarian. There’s some styrofoam or something on the ground behind Kodak, if you can take your eyes off him. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: DALE RESTEGHINI

Few cultural artifacts capture flip-phone-era virality as well as the video for Soulja Boy’s infinitely memeable “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” which follows the adventures of Atlanta record mogul Mr. ColliPark as he tries to find the source of a dance craze that’s captivated the kids both in his office and in blurry clips he watches on his phone. Soulja Boy is, of course, at home in front of his webcam, keeping tabs on his instant messages and the hit count at souljaboytellem.com — and the clip’s story ends happily, with Mr. ColliPark giving the kid a record contract and a celebratory amulet, and Soulja Boy leading a gym full of devotees in the dance he dreamed up. —M.J.

DIRECTOR: RSEVN

“It ain’t really a lot of people that represent females from the hood and ratchet females,” Memphis crunk star GloRilla told BET.com. “We was just in the video having fun, doing what we normally do, and people like the authenticity — the realness to it.” “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” was a TikTok smash that had the energy of a TikTok video, GloRilla and her all-female squad dancing, doing doughnuts in a parking lot, and dancing at a red light. The simple clip launched her from the video-sharing app to the Grammy stage within months. To keep the energy of their collaboration, Hitkidd pushed GloRilla to shoot the video the same day as a recording session. “I got to the studio by 12:00 and we got done at 1:00,” GloRilla told Billboard. “He was like, ‘We’re gonna shoot the video at 4:00 today. Go get all your friends.’” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: RUPERT WAINWRIGHT

“Fun-loving” isn’t a term often used for the serious-as-cancer Public Enemy, but there’s no other way to describe this satire of the way American medical care underserves the Black community. Flavor Flav lies in a funeral casket, enjoying life after death; his mom collapses from a heart attack, only to have an ambulance worker dribble bits of sandwich on her face; and some random guy falls onto a snowy street, convulsing after suffering a broken neck, while his homeboy calls for an ambulance that never arrives. Somehow, the whole thing is hilarious, thanks to Rupert Wainwright’s sitcom visuals — which earned him a 1991 Soul Train Music Awards nomination — as well as Flav’s flamboyant, indescribable “Flavor Dance.” Lookout for cameos from a pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson, Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C., and DJ Hurricane from the Beastie Boys and highly underrated Def Jam parody act The Afros. —M.R.

DIRECTOR: GREGORY DARK

In a clip made to look like one continuous take — it was actually 13 shots craftily edited together — Xzibit raps with unflappable ease as his neighborhood roils with chaos around him: a swerving police car chases a suspect, a pickup truck explodes, someone with sticky fingers crashes through a pawn shop window. “Nobody wanted to shoot that video,” Xzibit told the Breakfast Club. “‘Cause I came up with the concept. And everybody was like, ‘Oh, it can’t be done, it’s too expensive.’” Still Xzibit estimated that they managed to do it for less than $100,000. Beyond explosive action sequences, the clip also features a cameo from human pyrotechnic Flavor Flav. Said Xzibit, “Flavor Flav wasn’t even on the schedule; he [was] just driving by, saw us, and hopped out and got in the video.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: MILES CABLE & AJ FAVICCHIO

Like her Video Vanguard inspirations Beyoncé Knowles, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat is dedicated to adventurous fashion choices, chameleonic looks, and arresting visuals. Perhaps her most audacious video is the cyberpunk-meets-hyperpop clip “Need to Know,” a brutalist retro-future nightlife party conceived by Doja and her creative team. On Planet Her — inspired by Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles and The Fifth Element‘s New York— a blue-skinned alien Doja goes out for a night on the town with her squad (which includes Grimes and actress Ryan Destiny). Though filmed in the digital age, Doja and directors Miles Cable and AJ Favicchio opted for big sets on a soundstage and laborious makeup. “They had, like, a 20-person prosthetics team,” Favicchio told Nylon. “It was a huge undertaking to get that done. I think their call time was obviously hours and hours before ours.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: F. GARY GRAY

“Outkast wanted me to film ‘Bombs Over Baghdad,’ but ‘Ms. Jackson’ really stood out to me,” director F. Gary Gray told GQ. “You never know if it’s going to work — animals bobbing their heads to the music and the guys fixing an old, broken-down house? But people really got it.” Gray matched one of Outkast’s most earnest songs with a color-saturated, bittersweet video where the duo tends to weather damage on a broken home. Soon, “Ms. Jackson” would become the group’s first Number One single. Remembered the group’s André 3000 to BlackFilm.com, “I was doing the close-up scenes, and he was looking at the playback monitor and he said, ‘I think you’re going to have a great career in film if you ever go in that direction.’” André would go on to his first starring role in Gray’s Be Cool, launching a career that would see the rapper working with action directors like John Singleton and Guy Richie as well as arthouse heroes like Claire Denis, Noah Baumbach, and Kelly Reichardt. —C.W.

DIRECTOR: PETER MCCARTHY

Directed by Peter McCarthy, who helmed the 1994 slacker gem Floundering and co-produced indie films like Repo Man, the video for “Love’s Gonna Get’Cha” triumphantly illustrates BDP’s tragic fable. KRS-One plays both the song’s narrator — his JA-colored cap symbolizes knowledge of self — and the protagonist, a Black teen who sees crack dealing as a way out for his impoverished family. Several members of the BDP crew make cameos, including his brother Kenny Parker, the late Ms. Melodie, Heather B, and Harmony. They’re all cast in shadows illuminated by a single spotlight, like characters striding into a stage play. The way McCarthy shows dollar bills and Uzi machine guns circling in the air like dreams and nightmares gives “Love’s Gonna Get’cha” a poetic quality and enhances BDP’s classic story rap. —M.R.

DIRECTOR: ZBIGNIEW RYBCZYŃSKI

This kinetic video by experimental filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński turns Grandmaster Flash and his rebooted mid-Eighties crew (which includes Furious Five alum Kid Creole and Rahiem) into a human game of Perfection, sproinging the group into the air over and over again, matching the beat with rhythmic editing. Complementing another one of the group’s post-“Message” message raps about contemporary chaos and disorder, the band raps as Rybczyński’s bespoke machine launches them alongside boomboxes, speakers, and trash. Two years later, the director would collect the MTV Video Vanguard Award. —C.W.

DIRECTOR: COLE BENNETT

“Everything you see in this video was completely authentic. There wasn’t any treatment, any budget, any planning,” director Cole Bennett told Genius. “We just went with the flow, and we were seeing how things went.” A mix of the spontaneous and the chaotic, “Catch Me Outside” captures the off-the-cuff wildness of the SoundCloud rap era, with Florida rapper Ski Mask the Slump God bringing a one-man party to the middle of Times Square. Filmed during Bennett’s first trip to New York City, Ski Mask interacts with tourists and dances with a Statue of Liberty street performer (Bennett says Ski put $20 in his tip jar). “With every shot in this video, you didn’t know what to expect. Someone could look at you crazy, or someone could hop in the video and start dancing with Ski,” said Bennett. “So with every shot we took, it was fun because we didn’t really know what was going to happen.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

“Get at Me Dog” was how DMX began 1998, a year in which he would make good on his long-simmering hype by releasing two Number One albums and starring in Hype Williams’ hallucinatory Belly. The track’s video, by J. Jesses Smith, does its best to capture an uncontainable talent. DMX rapped as physically as he sounds on record, lunging back and forth toward the audience with every line, falling into a boxer’s shuffle only long enough to catch his breath. His off-hand punctuates each syllable, lifting the crowd at legendary NYC nightspot Tunnel along with each pumped fist. “I knew that ‘Get at Me Dog’ was a hit at the Tunnel, and I knew what that meant,” DMX recalled in 2012. “They told me, ‘When this shit comes on at the Tunnel, motherfuckers go crazy.’ But I’d never been — until I performed there, when we shot the video.” —C.P.

DIRECTOR: BRETT RATNER

“Triumph” was a victory lap: Four years after releasing their debut, the Staten Island nonet had held together, releasing a string of instant-classic solo records and keeping egos in check for a double LP. How else, then, to declare triumph but with “Triumph”? Six minutes, no hooks, just verse after perfect verse. Shit-hot (and since-disgraced) director Brett Ratner stages this moment with a video of almost psychedelically bad green-screen effects and endless highlights: GZA becoming a star child, Masta Killa giving sight to the blind, RZA showing up in a bee costume. “Triumph” enshrines the unrepeatable apex of the Wu. —C.P.

DIRECTOR: GEORGE BUFORD

The clip for newbie Bronx rapper Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” directed by George Buford in the home borough of hip-hop, offers a perfect example of how to grab the brass ring of rap success in 2023. The song’s 1:44 length makes it perfect for repeat streaming. And Ice virtually guaranteed the video’s virality by releasing it through Worldstar, the popular platform occasionally known for less savory, more pugilistic content. Ice Spice commands the camera by cheekily adjusting her bandeau boob tube and shaking her fanny in high-cut jean shorts in front of the Paya Deli bodega. Simple, suggestive, effective. —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: PARRIS MAYHEW

“We wanted to bring slam dancing to rap,” Onyx’s Fredro Starr says in Brian Coleman’s Check the Technique. “Believe it or not, Nirvana was a big influence on us. Red Hot Chili Peppers too.” Hey ho, let’s go: “Slam” is one big mosh pit of grimy Queens hip-hop and hardcore punk, with a room full of crowd-surfing, body-slamming, slap-happy hooligans. The director: Parris Mayhew, from the NYC hardcore band Cro-Mags. “Slam” made these baldhead rappers massive on MTV and broke their classic debut, Bacdafucup. The whole project was influenced by some serious psychedelic chemicals. “While we were recording the album, n***as was on LSD the whole time, straight up,” Fredro said. “We was dropping papers, taking meth tabs, during that whole album. That’s just the creative side of making music. We were like Jimi Hendrix.” —R.S.

DIRECTOR: PARIS BARCLAY

In a little gem of fake reality TV, LL Cool J takes his candid camcorder to the streets of New York to film “regular girls” — “I don’t want Ivana,” he says at the clip’s start “I want Tawana.” One of those girls was Leslie “Big Lez” Segar, who would go on to be a storied choreographer and host of Rap City. “[Y]ou don’t expect LL to be someone who’d dance. Not to say he doesn’t have rhythm, but he’s too cool for school! This is ‘Gimme my radio! I’m thugalicious, on the block, Hollis, Queens! I don’t dance. I may bop side to side in my Timberlands,’” Segar told Rock the Bells. “[S]ometimes you have to pull teeth with artists to get them to dance. But he was open, and he was ready and very participatory in regards to whatever the choreography was.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO

A straightforward battle of the sexes scene, this Neneh Cherry music video — directed by French fashion photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino — might not ordinarily qualify as a hip-hop video at all, if not for the evolution of the genre pushed forward by MC’ing vocalists like Drake, Juice WRLD, Travis Scott, etc. As an early hybrid of the rapping chanteuse, Cherry leads a posse of female feminists speak-singing into a broom handle and taking a cheating man (reportedly rocker Lenny Kravitz) to task about his infidelity in front of a crew of misogynistic men. But her closing salvo takes it: She removes her panties and tosses them to the guys as a drop-the-mic gesture that effectively ends the argument, the song, and the video. —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: VINCENT TSANG

A simple brick backdrop, goofy dance moves, and Banks — clad in a Mickey Mouse sweater and braided pigtails — spouting obscenities through a gleaming grin. It was a simple image that created a viral moment that felt equal parts endearing and intimidating. Though the black-and-white clip was filmed in Montreal, quick clips of a bodega and Yung Rapunzel’s charming, no-nonsense lyrics brought undeniable NYC energy to this Vincent Tsang-directed video. Canadian musician Lunice, who appears in “212” alongside electronic producer Jacques Greene, told Billboard, “The shoot was a perfect moment of spontaneous creativity. The kind you can’t rehearse or re-formulate.” —J.J.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

“What she goes through to create these images, people will never know,” said makeup artist Billy B. while making Missy Elliott’s $2 million blockbuster “She’s a Bitch.” “The prosthetics and the airbrush, makeup, and then two hours of gluing on rhinestones. She’s a trouper.” For Elliott’s first video after returning from the success of 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly, Hype Williams, the director of the most colorful videos of the ’90s, took a sharp turn into an Tron noir world of blacks, grays, and silvers — fewer hues, but no less dazzling. Here Missy emerges from the water with a bedazzled look that’s part bondage, part punk, part Matrix, and all visionary. “Back then every1 thought I was a lil off because I rocked a bald head,” Missy Elliott posted to Twitter, “but me & Hype & [Timbaland] was just decades ahead.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: DAVE FREE & KENDRICK LAMAR

“The Heart Part 1,” from 2010, is all grainy digital footage, convenience stores, and van rides. By “The Heart Part 5,” Kendrick Lamar is wielding state-of-the-art technology to transform into figures old (O.J. Simpson) and new (Jussie Smollett), still spitting minutes-straight bars but now speaking with sweeping conviction for a nation of millions. Lamar and longtime collaborator Dave Free created the clip’s series of deep fakes with the help of Deep Voodoo, a studio launched by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Like other “Heart” tracks, “Part 5” hypes an album but sits outside it; where Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is gnarled and conflicted, “Heart” is sanguine, resolved. This tone even carries into the video’s heart-stopping final moments, when Lamar assumes the form of his late friend Nipsey Hussle. ” “I look at everything as a social experiment,” Free told The New York Times. —C.P.

DIRECTOR: LIONEL C. MARTIN

Here is a surrealist peak behind the curtain of the record industry during hip-hop’s initial commercial boom. The snarky but poignant call-out of shady record executives (embodied by a perfectly cast Gilbert Gottfried), racist stereotypes in media, and commodification of rap culture was among the first of its kind. MC Serch and Prime Minister Pete Nice were unlikely guardians of hip-hop purity, but cameos from respected names in rap including Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav, EPMD, Run-D.M.C.’s D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay, and Def Jam head Russell Simmons provided necessary credibility. Through the lens of rap history, the video is now best remembered primarily for two things: a scene where MC Hammer is stomped out in effigy, and the introduction to the world of Zev Love X, then of rap group KMD, who years later became better known as the elusive underground legend MF Doom. —N.C.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

Quite possibly the original bohemian B-boy, Q-Tip set a standard for anti-bling hip-hop with a quartet of A Tribe Called Quest albums from 1990 to 1998. So much so that his first glitzy singles as a solo act—“Vivrant Thing” and “Breathe and Stop”—felt like a jarring commercial grab with Hype Williams-directed clips full of sexy models and beaucoup gluteus maximus jiggling under a fish-eye lens. With decades of hindsight, Q-Tip planting a flag for his relevance in the jiggy era by speaking the lingua franca might have been his smartest move. The bandana holding his Afro in place seems way more Hendrix than 2Pac, as he ambles about in a long leather poncho owning his rep as a hip-hop sex symbol. Eye candy Leila Arcieri (Miss San Francisco 1997) practically launched King magazine and the video vixen era with her appearance here as well.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: MARCUS NISPEL

Filmed over three 16-hour days at the height of the group’s multi-platinum popularity, “Ready or Not” is widely considered the first rap video to cost over a million dollars, and its production forecasted the eye-popping visual excesses of Y2K hip-hop. In the clip, Pras Michel, Lauryn Hill, and Wyclef Jean are rebels on a “quest for justice,” and dodge military helicopters on ski boats and motorbikes. They also hide out from the Illuminati while rapping in a submarine, courtesy of Universal Studios’ backlot. Veteran music video director Marcus Nispel, who eventually graduated to directing genre flicks like the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, films the trio in shadowy lighting reminiscent of an adventure film. When faced with criticism from fans upset with the big-budget theatrics of “Ready or Not,” Michel responded, “I don’t believe in laws or rules.”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: JORA FRANTZIS

The Jora Frantzis-directed visual acknowledges Cardi’s stripper past, and through clips of the rapper breastfeeding, provides glimpses of her maternal present. Pepper in nipple flashes, money guns, and sexy bank tellers, and you have an iconic take on the power of female sexuality in all forms. The video is bolstered by eye-popping fashion choices, like Cardi appearing in a Cleopatra-inspired outfit made entirely of watches — a look Rihanna famously dubbed “the most ghetto shit.” Even though she’s draped in designer looks these days, the Bronx-bred MC has never forgotten her roots, and “Money” doesn’t shy away from highlighting what gives her — and all women — the right to flex. —J.J.

DIRECTOR: ALAN YANG

Let’s pretend for a moment that Friends wasn’t a whitewashed remix of the African-American sitcom Living Single to begin with. For the first five minutes of this clip, directed by Master of None co-creator Alan Yang, an extremely A-list cast (Issa Rae, Tiffany Haddish, Tessa Thompson, Lakeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery, Jerrod Carmichael) shoot the third season Friends episode “The One Where No One’s Ready” beat for beat on the series’ original set. (An opening montage set to Whodini’s “Friends” looks fabulous.) A disillusioned Carmichael eventually wanders off set as Jay-Z’s lyrical critique of hip-hop’s superficiality and creativity begins in the background. Things end poignantly with Carmichael pondering a full moon as the video references the titular inspiration of the Oscar-winning indie drama, Moonlight. Like a lot of the song’s source album, 4:44, “Moonlight” leaves plenty to ponder.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: BRIAN BELETIC

El-P’s solo debut Fantastic Damage is a deeply cinematic affair, its boom-bap blasted to shit by shifty cyberpunk unease and its narrator a snarling wise-ass who keeps falling face-first into trouble. Brian Beletic’s video for “Deep Space 9mm” follows El-P through a grainy post-9/11 NYC in which violence lurks around every corner, quite literally: cabbies, bar patrons, nuns, even boy scouts pull shimmering red revolvers on the emcee. El-P wrote the record before 9/11, but none of it was intended as prescient: “It’s meant to tap into something that I think lurks underneath it all, all the time,” he told NPR.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

“[One of my] pet peeves in life is going into the restroom and a fan following me in there and trying to have a conversation with me,” Ludacris told Esquire. “Art imitates real life.” Equipped with huge Popeye-esque arms in the Spike Jonze-directed video for “Get Back,” Ludacris strangles and punches an aspiring entrepreneur with bad urinal etiquette — the unlucky beating recipient is played by none other than Fatlip from the Pharcyde. Ludacris was rap’s king of comedy in the years between Biz Markie and 2 Chainz and was he was at his larger-than-life best in “Get Back,” doing Hulk smashes on walls and mailboxes. “And those big arms, it was all about ludicrous in every definition of the word, beyond crazy, ridiculous, wild,” he said. Unfortunately, Ludacris did not get to keep the prop arms, but he’s been known to pull out the bulging bicep look in his live shows.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: SCOTT KALVERT

The opulent, ostentatious flexing of the Cash Money empire defined an era and their expensive taste in “Bling Bling” updated the Oxford English Dictionary. The video exuded peak flamboyance at every turn: a stretch Range Rover, watches on both hands, diamond grills, boats, cars, helicopters, steel briefcases, candelabras and an ice bucket filled with cash. “People from New York, people from L.A. were always asking me, ‘These guys really got that amount of money? Are those houses theirs? Are those cars theirs? Is that all theirs?’ Universal A&R Dino Delvaille told The Fader. “And I was honest with them. I’d say, ‘Yes, that really is theirs.’”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: J. JESSES SMITH

“We went out, we shot four days,” “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” director J. Jesses Smith told This Is 50, “and DMX was actually, visually born at that point.” DMX’s hit “Get At Me Dog” had shown a stylized visions of the gruff MC rocking a crowd, but “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” solidified DMX in the national imagination: shirtless, bandana’d, rapping out in the streets with the incredibly large Ruff Ryders posse. Scads of dirtbikes popping wheelies and four-wheelers leaping up stairs added a tangible sense of danger to the clip, giving a hardcore rapper a different type of outlaw cool — when DMX passed in 2021, tributes poured in saying how he influenced a generation of sport bike enthusiasts. The original video was supposed to have white Harley Davidson riders, but instead the crew ended up shooting the aftermath of “the Wink Parade” where hundreds of bikers show their stuff. “It was a celebration,” Queens rider Craz-1 told GQ. “Police couldn’t do nothing about it. There was too many of us.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: AUBE PERRIE

Inspired by the moral panic stemming from her 2020 hit “WAP,” Houston’s foremost “Hot Girl Coach” and her mob of “super regressive whores” reclaimed this song’s titular phrase by grinding on garbage trucks and clappin’ on counters, delivering a declarative message to coochie-pop critics who refuse to mind their own business. The horror film-influenced clip culminates in Megan Thee Surgeon and her naughty nurses cosmetically replacing a conservative senator’s mouth with a vulva; the audacious move was added by director Aube Perrie in the eleventh hour to symbolize “the very absolute object of all [detractors’] anxiety.” —J.J.

DIRECTOR: LANCE BANGS

“It was all very surreal. I didn’t even know what was goin’ on,” Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt told The Ringer. “I remember we was at the XXL cover shoot and then literally at some point, n*****s was just like, ‘Yo, we don’t want to do this. We just ’bout to shoot this video.’” By 2012, the Odd Future collective had already mastered the disruptive art of attention-grabbing videos. An XXL cover shoot in a Chelsea studio quickly turned to chaos — as things were wont to do around Odd Future in 2012. Someone put their 10-minute posse cut “Oldie” on the speaker and suddenly the afternoon was no longer in the hands of the magazine or photographer Terry Richardson. Seasoned chaos-capturer Lance Bangs of Jackass fame caught the group as they spontaneously made a music video on the fly, everyone dancing, mugging, moshing and serving as each other’s hypemen.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DAPS AND QUAVO

When you hear Migos’ “T-Shirt,” and the trio’s rise from “doing dirt” in a white T-shirt to selling out concerts, the last image you’d conjure is the group stunting in the mountains and cabins of Lake Tahoe, surrounded by impossibly buxom video models. The frisson is what makes Quavo and Oladapo “DAPS” Fagbenie’s clip so memorable. “I wanted to put a picture to it. I wanted to put, like, a movie to it,” Quavo told Billboard in 2017. The trio dress like Inuit hunters, a metaphor for their prior careers as street pharmacists. “It’s basically an alternative trap universe,” DAPS wrote on Twitter. “We tried to build a real igloo but the snow wasn’t dense enough.”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: PAUL HUNTER

This high-budget, high-gloss, high-fashion victory lap for record mogul Puff Daddy essentially kickstarted the Jiggy Era. It was Puff’s debut single as a performer, and he wasn’t going to be demure about it, driving a Rolls Royce through the desert, getting pawed by faceless women and dancing in a room that looks like an illuminated Gravitron. With new recruit Ma$e in tow, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” was the first of the five Puff-produced songs that would hold the top of the charts for 25 weeks of 1997. “We got in the first video and [Puffy] started dancing and everybody was just standing there thinking, what are we doing?” Ma$e told MTV News. “I was like, Man, I can’t let this dude show me out. I know how to dance. That’s how it all started. So then we started dancing in the videos and before I knew it, we were falling out the sky and flying.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: ANTOINE FUQUA

A dramatic song that got an equally dramatic video, Coolio breaks it down, face-to-face with Dangerous Minds star Michelle Pfeiffer. “Michelle was kind of nervous, because I don’t think that, up to that point, she’d ever been around that many black people in her life,” Coolio told Rolling Stone with a laugh. “And, you know, my boys were ‘hood!” Helmed by future Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, the clip for “Gangsta’s Paradise” is saturated in shadows and smoke, a vivid cautionary tale that focuses on the storytelling itself. The evocative, high-rotation clip helped launch “Gangsta’s Paradise” into topping Billboard’s year-end charts for 1995 — the first rap song to ever stake that claim. “I wasn’t completely happy with Antoine Fuqua’s concept at first, because I wanted some low-riders and some shit in it; I was trying to take it ‘hood,” Coolio said. “But he had a better vision, thank God, than I did. I couldn’t completely see his vision, but I trusted him.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: RUPERT WAINWRIGHT

“Directing rap videos at the time was definitely like the lowest of the low in terms of a white video director. Everyone wanted big budgets with Poison and Metallica and all of that stuff,” said Rupert Wainwright in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “Straight Outta L.A.” “About the time that N.W.A. hit, there was this sea change.” Wainwright’s clip for “Express Yourself” reflects that moment when N.W.A captured the imaginations of America’s white bros: Tone-Loc (of “Wild Thing” fame) lip-synchs along to the chorus, and Dre sits in a parade, waving to his fans. But it’s not just a celebratory moment. Perhaps inspired by Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” the video also shows the historical links between slavery, the Christian church, and Black men unjustly incarcerated in prisons. It’s all too much for Dre, who finds himself in an electric chair at the clip’s end, even though he “don’t smoke weed or sess.”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

It looks like a classic music video from Brooklyn’s finest circa the late-Nineties with Biggie rocking an impeccable pinstripe suit, Puffy mugging for the camera, ladies dancing by the pool during the day and the rappers clinking drinks at the V.I.P. table at the club by night. There’s just one thing: Everybody from B.I.G. and the Bad Boy Entertainment stable of artists around to the paparazzi are roughly 10-12 years old. Spike Jonze had pitched Sean “Puffy” Combs on doing this posthumous video for the late hip-hop icon as a riff on Bugsy Malone, the 1976 movie that cast kids as Thirties gangster-flick archetypes. It added an innocence to Biggy’s legacy; Combs said it brought back memories of their days as young men, dreaming of success. “Those kids moved like us, they acted like us — that’s exactly how we rolled up to the club!” he noted on the commentary track for a DVD collection of Jonze’s videos. “You could almost feel Biggie’s spirit [there]…it was surreal and scary. I thought it was genius.” —D.F.

DIRECTOR: MARK ROMANEK

Borrowing the concept from Marina Abramović’s landmark The Artist Is Present performance at the Museum of Modern Art, Jay-Z, “the new Jean-Michel,’ performed “Picasso Baby,” for six hours at New York’s Pace Gallery, allowing attendees to become part of the show. The five-minute video that emerged from the event shows celebrities and art figures amused, awed, ecstatic or confident enough to trip up Jay entirely. Spectators take the stage. Artists like George Condo, Kehinde Wiley, original uptown/downtown bridge-builder Fab 5 Freddy and Abramović herself make appearances. Judd Apatow does a bit. Jim Jarmusch remains cool as ever. “The whole thing ended up being a document of completely unfeigned joy,” director Mark Romanek told Vulture. “There’s smiles and laughter, and people were strangely moved by it, actually. It’s got an extremely humanistic vibe for something that you could describe as from an elitist New York art world.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: CALMATIC

Using Google Earth to survey the fictional neighborhood of Norfy, California, “Fun!” makes potent statements about inequality, the surveillance state, police brutality, poverty tourism and white voyeurism. Zooming in to witness a memorial, a fight and an arrest, it makes a harsh point about outsiders peeking into the Black neighborhoods that artists like Vince rap about. Locals flip off the camera, shield their faces or throw rocks. “I think there’s certain aspects of culture that are always there, whether it be people outside the culture visiting from a perspective or a standpoint of safety and not having to deal with the realness of being part of that culture. I feel like that’s always there,” Calmatic said. “But it changes with technology as far as how they do that. In 2019, whether it be YouTube or social media or Google Earth, you can actually, from the comfort of your bedroom, see what life is like on the other side.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DANNY CORNYETZ AND JESSICA JASON

The 808 electro-pulse of “Planet Rock” famously launched hip-hop and dance music out of its disco phase — and its video provided a colorful glimpse of the future. Though Bam and the Force’s “wildstyle” fashion — walking sticks, beads, headdresses, geometrically sharp sunglasses — implied the Afrofuturistic visions of George Clinton and Sun Ra, the “Planet Rock” video was also bound to Earth, showing off hip-hop’s D.I.Y. roots in gymnasium parties and park gatherings where the Rock Steady Crew showed off their gravity-defying breakdance moves. It seems highly unlikely that MTV played this at all, but the record still managed to sell thousands of copies. “‘Planet Rock’ and the other uptown street records are not just for inner city kids, but have a much wider appeal than many give them credit for,” Tommy Boy Records founder Tom Silverman told Billboard in 1982. “Luckily, this is the kind of music that doesn’t need radio, but through clubs and street play can succeed.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: MATTHEW ROLSTON

This hit song viewed hip-hop romance through the female gaze and its video flipped pop music masculinity on it’s head: Here, strong men are the cheesecake. “I came of age in my still [photography] work in the mid and late Eighties, a period of gender-bending, the beginning of the breakdown of traditional gender roles,” director Matthew Rolston told MTV’s Video Head podcast. The video doesn’t use just any bandana’d hunk to snuggle with Salt: That’s none other than Tupac Shakur. The record label requested his face be obscured due to his ongoing legal troubles. “Me and Tupac had a little chemistry, but I knew not to mess with that. I wouldn’t have been able to handle that guy!” Salt told Rolling Stone. “When we won a Grammy, he sent us, to our hotel room, a cake shaped like a gun. I think it was a Glock. And we didn’t know if he was threatening us or congratulating us. … This has to be his way of congratulating us. And it was. But that was such a Tupac thing to do.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

When the dragon-sized presence of Busta Rhymes’ and the color-saturated visions of Hype Williams joined forces in 1996, it caused an absolute tectonic shift for hip-hop, not only launching a madcap motormouth solo star, but establishing Williams’ next 25 years as the genre’s premier visual auteur. Williams had been directing stylish rap videos for half a decade, but “Woo-Hah!!” was the first to embrace what would be come to be as his signature style: fisheye lenses, banks of lights, unlikely post-production effects and insane color schemes. The style — carried on by Williams along with his protégés and imitators — would help define the larger-than-life look of hip-hop’s jiggy era. “I set out to kind of change things and make rap music videos just as big as rock and alternative music videos,” Williams said in 1998. “If I’ve been able to help do that then I succeeded in what I was trying to do.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: CHRIS MILK

Financed by the rapper himself after he was unhappy with Def Jam’s version, the Evel Knievel-inspired clip for “Touch the Sky” has a Seventies aesthetic that perfectly compliments the song’s Curtis Mayfield sample. Filmed at Grand Canyon West, the million-dollar movie co-stars Pamela Anderson, Nia Long, and Tracee Ellis Ross. (It nearly featured Fall Out Boy as a group of reporters, but the band bowed out due to scheduling conflicts.) Not only was the visual a way for West to flaunt his grandiose ideas, it also served as a tongue-in-cheek way to poke fun at his ginormous ego and recent controversies (which now seem quaint considering what was to come). In one hilarious scene, a TV sportscaster asks “Kanyevil” about his comments toward President Nixon, mirroring West’s pointed real-life words about George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina. —J.J.

DIRECTOR: BEN GRIFFIN

With over one billion YouTube views, “Gucci Gang” gave SoundCloud rap what may be its most iconic image: Miami’s Lil Pump, with a neon shock of pink hair and reflective silver jacket, stalking the hallways of a high school alongside a live tiger. “That was real,” director Ben Griffin told Pigeons & Planes. “[The animal trainers] were like, ‘If he comes a day before the shoot and practices with the animal — and the animal likes him — you can do the shot. But if the animal gets antsy around him, you’ll have to do a composite shot.’ So he went and did the training, and the animal was fine with him… It wasn’t CG or green screen or anything.” The images were instantly indelible enough to help carry a Saturday Night Live parody with Pete Davidson: The show’s director of photography even hit up Griffin to find out what lenses he used.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: MILCHO MANCHEVSKI

The vision of Atlanta’s Arrested Development — part rural South, part righteous Afrocentrism, part alternative-era bohemia — made them one of the most critically adored rap groups of the early-Nineties. Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski helped introduce their look in their debut video, a community gathering shot softly and starkly. Inspired by Depression-era photography and the austere shots of Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Frank, the video cut a warm path across flashier MTV fare. “It took me a long time to convince [the label] that we should shoot the video in black-and-white,” said Manchevski. “But once the video came out, it was extremely successful, it became a Buzz Clip on MTV, it went around the world, and the band exploded.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

Missy blasts off into outer space, where she’s still the weirdest and coolest thing on any planet. After Miss E blew up in the summer of ’97 with “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” she could have toned it down for her next video. But she got even crazier with “Sock It 2 Me,” a Hype sci-fi trip where she dons her superhero astronaut suit, red wig, and silver eye shadow, to battle alien robots on another planet. Her trusty sidekick? Lil Kim. Things look bad for our heroes until Da Brat rides to the rescue on her space motorbike, chanting like she’s on a playground: “I’m the B-R-A-T, her be Missy/We some bad bitches who be fucking it up!” Timbaland flosses in his Albert Einstein fit. It’s a utopian celebration of late-Nineties Southern hip-hop feminism, a moment when the whole world was wired to every move Missy made. Like Da Brat declares, “It’s ’97! This the motherfucking Bitch Era!” Long live the Bitch Era.–R.S.

DIRECTOR: PAUL HUNTER

Really, it’s all about that beat: Maybe the apex of the Neptunes’ early-oughts era, a mad-scientist concoction of tongue clicks, pneumatic drum hits, and white noise that Snoop laces as carefully as possible. Veteran music director Paul Hunter films the video as if he’s documenting history’s victors, capturing striking monochromatic imagery from low angles and cutting only when it complements the beat. “I was influenced by Richard Avedon and the way he captures celebrities,” Hunter recalled. “And we wanted a Sixties, Frank Sinatra feel to it — we wanted to really show that lifestyle, that class.” While Snoop unleashes a pharmaceutical-grade C-walk at the video’s outset, it’s that simple park-it-like-it’s-hot move that has been enshrined in GIF immortality, as simple and inimitable as the track itself.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: KANYE WEST

There are at least three great jokes in Kanye West’s video for Drake’s debut single, which was shot at Bishop Ford Central Catholic High School in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn. The first is pretending that its ebullient hook is a coach talking to his team. (Drake plays the coach, riling his squad before a big game.) The second joke is: What if that team were composed entirely of babes? (Kanye, as director, seems to particularly relish this component.) The last and best joke is: What if they played a really good team? (They get absolutely wiped, 14 to 91.) It’s all ridiculous, as confectionary as the track itself — a reminder of both artists in less dour days. Drake summed up the casual vibe: “I was in New York, Ye was in New York. We just decided, why not go to Brooklyn and shoot a video.”–C.P.

DIRECTOR: ANDREW DOUCETTE

In this crucial document of Chicano rap, Kid Frost and director Andrew Doucette brought the culture of East Los Angeles worldwide. Beyond the fashion and graffiti, “La Raza” showcased L.A.’s vibrant car culture years before Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg crashed their lowriders into pop radio. Here, hydraulics make automobiles do robotic dances, wiggle from side to side or bounce in ecstatic rhythm. “It’s been something that’s been a part of my heritage and my culture for years and years,” Kid Frost told Fab 5 Freddy on an episode of Yo! MTV Raps. Lowriding is just something that the Chicanos started a long time ago and its time now that the world see where they really got it from.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

In a 180-degree turn from the often comedic mood of his videos, Busta largely leans into the sexuality of “What’s It Gonna Be?!” Liquid dreams come to life through watery chrome coverings and liquefied special effects, which ultimately totaled up to an over $2 million budget. Busta (who spends portions of the video as aquatic, non-human figures like sperm and raindrops) wiggles his way through scenes to get closer to Ms. Jackson, who stars as an Afrofuturistic dominatrix. Keeping in line with the video’s titillating theme, Janet admitted to Allure that her iconic purple catsuit and nails were adorned with cock ring appliques. Coupled with her extravagant makeup look, it took her 11 hours to get ready on shoot day.–J.J.

DIRECTOR: NICK QUESTED

Nick Quested is an award-winning filmmaker behind documentaries like Restrepo and Pussy Riot: A Punk’s Prayer and testified last year to a Congressional committee about footage he shot of Proud Boys meetings prior to the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. But he’s also a former music video director who worked with Trick Daddy on several clips, including “I’m a Thug.” The video presents the Miami rapper as a charming and shamelessly incorrigible bad boy who upsets polite society wherever he goes, from the Black upper-class couple outraged that their video vixen-like daughter is dating him, to the corny white diners at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables who feign disgust at his behavior. Clips like this are designed to tantalize and distill the artist’s persona, and “I’m a Thug” demonstrates Quested’s skill at…uh, showing Trick Daddy peeing in the bushes in broad daylight.–M.R.

DIRECTOR: REEL GOATS

DaBaby’s emergence felt like an explosion: he careened into every verse, packing jokes and catchphrases and shit-talk into each bar like he was exhausted that you didn’t know him yet. The video for “Suge” is the same way, starring DaBaby as the titular label honcho and also DaBaby as an unrelated mailman, and he plays both roles with gleeful abandon, chomping cigars and drop-kicking packages and flashing a megawatt “What, me worry?” grin at the camera.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: PHILIP G. ATWELL & DR. DRE

Though many of his videos lean on Bart Simpson-esque skits, Eminem shows a much more serious side in this illustration of the dark side of fandom. Stan’s infatuation with Shady metamorphoses from relatively tame (writing letters in hope of a response) to dangerously obsessive (drinking and driving just like Slim Shady in “My Name Is”). Final Destination actor Devon Sawa’s chilling turn as the titular character stands as one of his proudest career moments. “It was like, ‘Eminem? C’mon Dev, I dunno about doing a music video,’” Sawa told Vice in 2018 recalling his agent’s reluctance about the role. “Nobody was really onboard with doing it on my team, and I was the only one who was like, ‘Oh my god, this guy’s really, really good.’ So I did it anyways.” —J.J.

DIRECTOR: ADAM BERNSTEIN

New York rap videos in the early-to-mid-Nineties reveled in grime and grit, and no one laid the tracks for that aesthetic like EPMD. How underground are Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith? “So Wat Cha Sayin’” takes place literally under the ground. “The video was dangerous,” Sermon told Complex. “We were underground in Manhattan, in not really a sewer, but under like a manhole with the pipes.” Director Adam Bernstein — who had placed them in a Brooklyn ice factory for 1988’s “You Gots to Chill” — captured the group in their subterranean lair, making use of shadowplay and showing off the deft turntable work of DJ Scratch.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: GIL GREEN

Borrowing the first-person drug/sex/violence orgy concept that Jonas Åkerlund concocted for Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” video, director Gil Green showcased the anarchic energy of Atlanta’s explosive crunk movement. Along with Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, the POV video barrels through Atlanta’s famed hotspot Club 112, bumrushes security, spills drinks in V.I.P., hooks up in the restroom and ultimately ends with the same — no spoilers! — reveal of the video’s unlikely troublemaker. “When Lil Jon first stepped on the scene, I got excited for this track,” Green told Miami New Times. “I remember having a meeting with his label and pitching them, and I had to show them that I knew what crunk was. I basically jumped on the desk, throwing papers and acting a fool. Lil Jon was like, ‘Oh, this white boy’s crazy. Let’s do the video.’”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: SASH ANDRANIKIAN

When Slick Rick’s third album, Behind Bars, was released in 1994, hip-hop’s most celebrated storyteller was, in fact, behind bars. Unable to shoot a video, Def Jam turned to quirky Eastern European filmmaker Sash Andranikian, who created a three-minute tour de force that’s both beautiful in its hand-drawn animation and excoriating in its satire. With shades of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Andranikian turned a harsh pencil towards the prison-industrial complex while also showcasing the bleakness inside its facilities.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE LEE

This euphoric celebration of hip-hop itself was filmed in the genre’s 20th year by the hottest film auteur of the early Nineties “Spike Lee was super professional, had multiple setups ready for us, and he even pulled KayGee out of bed to get started because he didn’t want to be late for his Knicks game,” Naughty’s Vin Rock told Vevo. Beyond introducing a timeless chant and arm-wave, “Hip Hop Hooray” showed rap music in full-flower thanks to huge crowds and monster cameos from Run-D.M.C., Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Fab 5 Freddy, Eazy-E and Spike Lee himself, who can be found crowdsurfing in some of the final shots. Though some of it was shot in Naughty By Nature’s Jersey stomping grounds, Lee made sure to bring them to his borough. “Historically, if you weren’t from the five boroughs you weren’t respected as rappers,” Vin Rock said, “but Brooklyn definitely showed us Jersey Boys tons of love.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: BEN MOR

Months after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, local music beacon Juvenile reportedly became the first musician allowed to film in its aftermath. Shot with one camera and a police escort, “Get Ya Hustle On”serves as both tribute and reportage, Juvenile rapping a survivalist anthem amid a city destroyed. Picking locations as they went, the darkly poignant images found amid the wreckage include a VHS tape of Armageddon, a limousine parked on top of a pickup truck and a smashed school bus. Director Ben Mor told author Keith Spera in Groove Interrupted: Loss, Renewal and the Music of New Orleans, “It’s a living graveyard; a lot of people died there. It’s Ground Zero, to the tenth power. I’m hoping to be as delicate as possible.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: RUPERT WAINWRIGHT

In retrospect, there was no way “U Can’t Touch This” wouldn’t be an early-Nineties smash for Oakland’s MC Hammer; its “Super Freak” sample was deployed too effectively, its catchphrases (the title and Hammer’s exhortation to “Stop! Hammer Time!”) too easy to not repeat on end. But its video helped make it a megahit—the combination of Hammer’s moves, which included the platform-game-evoking side-to-side shuffle known as the Hammer Dance, and his style, which was punctuated by billowing pants that made his every step a resounding statement, towered above MTV’s crowded landscape. Director Rupert Wainwright (who had previously done videos for N.W.A. and Too Short) was looking to take a laidback approach to directing “U Can’t Touch This,” but soon learhttps://youtu.be/SwoVLDYjOccned that wouldn’t fly around the hard-driving Hammer. “This tour bus turns up and the dancers came out and this, like, sergeant major’s voice started booming,” he recalled years later of the shoot. “I couldn’t believe it. It was the most organized thing you ever saw in your life.”–M.J.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

Spike Jonze may be frustratingly unforthcoming in terms of feature films — it’s been a decade since he released Her — but his commercial work shows how efficiently he works in any format. “Till It’s Over,” ostensibly an ad for Apple’s then-new HomePod, follows FKA Twigs as a worker drone who trudges home, asks Siri for an algorithmic recommendation, and is jettisoned by the ensuing Anderson .Paak track into a four-dimensional reverie of color, spatial playfulness, even a dance-off with a doppelganger. The apartment itself plays along, teasing apart its walls and furniture via largely practical means: hydraulics, levers, and shimmering, syncopated lights.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: FRANÇOIS ROUSSELET

Likely inspired by the 3-D Toy Story zoetrope currently on display in Los Angeles’ Academy Musuem, the video for “Cash In, Cash Out” turns Pharrell, 21 Savage and Tyler into animation models. Since the pandemic necessitated CGI instead of claymation, they used London’s video effects team ETC who gave everything fingerprints, imperfections, dust particles and jitter. “Underscoring everything was that we wanted the audience to question whether we went out and built this thing for real,” the video’s ETC, told It’s Nice That. The animation team studied the rappers’ moves and mouths from their live shows, adding one more layer of reality to a video that does kickflips in the uncanny valley. “If you stopped on any frame, we wanted there to be so much detail that people would just go back and watch it again,” ETC’s Jon Purton told One37PM. “Go ahead and test it. Pause any part of the video, screengrab it and zoom in to see how immensely detailed every object is.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: BIG TV!

The conceit of Lauryn Hill’s first solo video without the Fugees succeeds with a simple premise: a split-screen Washington Heights block party separated by 31 years, with retro Lauryn (circa 1967) in a beehive ’do performing on the left and a dreadlocked, neo-soul Lauryn (circa 1998) rocking on the right. The buses, handheld cameras, portable radios and fashion selections all contrast beautifully across the span of the three decades, as the newly liberated Lauryn bridges the eras of doo-wop and hip-hop. That very aesthetic would soon be picked up and run with by the late Amy Winehouse (who often performed a cover of Hill’s song in concert). But this video—co-directed by Monty Whitebloom and Andy Delaney—made visual connections encouraging the idea that hip-hop has more in common with the Motown age than boomers ever admitted.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: TAMRA DAVIS

This bare bones clip helped turn hip-hop into a pop commodity and launched the career of gravelly storyteller Tone Lōc. Director Tamr Davis did it all with just a Bolex and a budget of under $400: Actress Annabel Schofield, who plays bass guitar in the video, said they were “paid in Margaritas.” The clip, famously, is a tweak on Robert Palmer’s iconic 1987 video “Addicted to Love.” “We were like the cheap club kids that were like ‘Let’s just rip it off. We know really hot girls,” Davis told MTV’s Videohead podcast. The song hit No. 2 and quickly became the biggest selling single since “We Are the World.” “We rolled the first roll, wideshot and Tone Lōc came on and he was just like ‘Bussit.’ He just does the song,” said Davis. “We just looked at each other, we couldn’t believe how much charisma he had. He was all swag. It was amazing.”--C.W.

DIRECTOR: MARK ROMANEK

De La Soul officially bury the Daisy Age with their sardonic dig at the pitfalls of fame on “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey).” Mark Romanek perfectly encapsulates the be-careful-what-you-wish-for angst of Trugoy the Dove, Posdnuos, and DJ Maseo in a stripped-down, black-and-white video where the trio try their best to avoid incoming calls and relentless fans looking to score a record deal. De La still manage to have a little fun (the ghoulish masks symbolizing “every Harry, Dick and Tom, with a demo in his palm” are a nice touch). Since the passing of Trugoy in February 2023, the song has taken on new meaning. As Pos noted, “For now on when we perform ‘Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey),’ we say ‘2-2-2-2-222 we got an angel in heaven who can talk to you.’” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: ZBIGNIEW RYBCZYŃSKI

Helmed by Oscar-winning director and animation pioneer Zbigniew Rybczyński, the Fat Boys’ “Sex Machine” video splits the difference between The Benny Hill Show and the arthouse. Perhaps the most ambitious clip from the days before rap videos had much of a chance of cracking an MTV playlist, the visionary Polish director turns our hip-hop heroes into flickering human animations thanks to his unique editing. It’s a safe bet that the weiner dog is the same one that appeared in Rybczyński’s groundbreaking “Close (to the Edit)” clip for Art of Noise.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: KARENA EVANS

There are many Drakes: confessional Drake, spurned Drake, Magic City Drake, and so on. “God’s Plan” captures an extremely rare magnanimous Drake, handing out a million dollars of studio money around Miami. Director Karena Evans finds moments of traditional music-video grandeur amidst otherwise documentarian lensing of the rapper picking up grocery tabs, donating to after-school programs, and handing crisp stacks to working parents. “For something like ‘God’s Plan,’ it was like, let’s capture real people and tell a story about giving back and that came from Drake’s heart,” Evans told MTV News. What sells the whole thing — aside from that miraculously buoyant beat — is the goofball glee Drake brings to the affair, even coaxing a crowd full of people to shout along with the most ridiculous line in his career. –C.P.

DIRECTOR: AISULTAN SEITOV

A somber study of triumph and tragedy, “A Lot” plays like a Bergman drama in six minutes: A family shares love and laughter when they gather for a wake, but flashbacks reveal the illness, incarceration, trauma and grief they hide under the surface. Director Aisultan Seitov was Inspired by the vintage look of Polish drama Cold War In the final shots, as well as The Godfather. In the final scene, the family patriarch, 21 Savage, sits alone at the banquet. “We had like 15 minutes break and I was thinking what to shoot on this last verse. And I was like, OK let’s make this scene from Godfather II when young Al Pacino is sitting alone in the table with nobody there,” Seitov told Genius. “What’s the last scene of Godfather mean for me personally: The power and the fame leaves you alone. It seems like he sacrificed his family to be on the top, where he is.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: NATHANIEL HORNBLOWER

Inspired by the works of 20th-century painter LeRoy Neiman and directed by Adam Yauch in his Nathaniel Hörnblowér guise, the video for this dense Paul’s Boutique cut captured the New York hip-hop trio in the abstract. At its core “Shadrach” is a performance clip with blurry footage captured, as the video’s art director Audri Phillips told Beastiemania.com in 2010, by “very bad bank security cameras”; that footage was subsequently broken down and turned into paintings by a team of artists, then turned into animation by the studio Klasky Csupo. The result is a clip that, while evoking a stop-motion animation dreamworld, also distills the kitchen-sink ambitions of the Beastie Boys’ second album.–M.J.

DIRECTOR: JONAH HILL

“I love Danny Brown,” actor/director Jonah Hill told 52Insights when asked about his jarring, discomfiting video for a track from Brown’s acclaimed Atrocity Exhibition. “Ain’t It Funny” depicts a sitcom filtered through Brown’s drug-induced psychosis, like a riff on cynical Nineties iconography like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Acclaimed director Gus Van Sant plays the “dad” and Joanna Kerns from Eighties sitcom Growing Pains plays the “mom,” while “daughter” Lauren Avery is made up to look like Kelly Bundy from Married with Children. “I made a trade with Gus: he was going to be in my video, and then I was going to be in his film,” said Hill, who later appeared in Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far. Despite the high-wattage cameos, “Ain’t It Funny” looks deliberately washed out and bleak, a disturbing take on Brown’s real-life struggles with addiction. “Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help,” he wrote on Twitter this year as he celebrated 90 days of being sober. “If I can do it, anyone can.”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: THIBAUT DUVERNEIX AND MATHIEU LÉGER

For Tierra Whack’s debut, Whack World, the Philly rapper created 15 separate minute-long songs, each with its own video. Director Thibaut Duverneix told Insider that the resulting 15-minute work “is made for people who have a very short attention span.” Nevertheless, the silly yet sincere sensibility of Whack’s lyrics is mirrored in this avant-garde multiverse of madness. Whether she attempts to rap with a swollen face about the struggles of making it big (“Bug’s Life”), or spits country-tinged bars for her haters while joyously clipping balloon strings (“Fuck Off”), Whack boldly presents the layers of her adventurous, well-rounded artistic identity. While hip-hop often opts to bolster women rappers who adhere to a specific visual aesthetic, “Whack World” argues that the genre still has room for quirky girls to prevail. —J.J.

DIRECTOR: LIONEL C. MARTIN

True-school rap fans know that Biz Markie has made crucial contributions to the artform through his beatboxing, storytelling, freestyling, fashion and Juice Crew membership. But for everyone else, it’s “Just A Friend”‘s indelible images of the hip-hop Clown Prince in a powdered wig singing his tuneless, lovesick plea. “[H]e mentioned he wanted it to look like Mozart so I brought in the powdered wig,” director Lionel C. Martin told Vulture. “Most hip-hop artists would be like, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that.’ Biz was down for anything.” Martin says Biz showed up to shoot the dorm room scenes hours late and told some tale about getting two flat tires. “His friends were there, and he was kinda smiling. What could I do?” said Martin. “That was Biz, and that was who he was. You could never get angry with Biz. I could be frustrated, but he was impossible to be mad at. He was too damn likable.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: COLIN TILLEY

Swiss Family Robinson meets the strip club, Nicki Minaj’s boldest video updates the funny-freaky vibes of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” for an era where you don’t have to worry about appeasing an MTV censor. Naturally, the steamy, bootylicious video broke the Vevo record for most views in 24 hours. “Some crazy shots didn’t make the cut,” director Colin Tilley told XXL. “It almost would have been too much. It would have been too much for people to handle. Heads would have actually exploded.” Perhaps no one enjoyed “Anaconda” more than Drake, who received a lapdance in the video’s final scenes. “Drake, you know… he’s an actor,” Nicki told MTV News, with an eye roll. “So he did a good job of containing himself. But after the lap dance he was excited like hell. He was like, ‘Yo, do you understand like I’m the man after this video come out?’”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DIRECTOR X

An electrifying update of the street-level G-Funk videos of the ’90s, Kendrick Lamar took to his throne in the city of Compton in “King Kunta,” an artful celebration of his neighborhood’s homes, bikes, cars, jewelry, dances, businesses and people. Despite having a widescreen vision — one inspired by Dr. Dre’s 1999 “Still D.R.E.” — “King Kunta” has a uniquely vertical aspect ratio. “It’s a new age man. Instagram and all that, we’re in a new age of aspect ratios and you’ve gotta embrace that,” Director X told Complex. “It’s exciting to me to see people sharing clips of the video on social media and it’s in that aspect ratio.” The highlight of the clip is Kendrick rocking a crowd at the home of the Compton Swap Meet, the fabled location where locals like Eazy-E delivered their under-the-radar, world-changing gangsta rap releases to Wan Joon Kim’s Cycadelic Records.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: LIONEL C. MARTIN

Big Daddy Kane is the essence of O.G. hip-hop charisma in this pioneering Golden Age video, from director Lionel C. Martin. In “Ain’t No Half Steppin,” the Juice Crew kingpin flexes all his smooth-operator cool with his suit, his dance moves, and his high-top fade. “When I look at it now it’s funny,” Big Daddy says in Brian Coleman’s book Check The Technique, “because that was the suit from my [high school] graduation. It was tight, way too small, but I was still tryin’ to do it.” It’s a series of visual metaphors for a rap battle—a poker game, a boxing match—but Kane conquers all foes.. The supporting cast is mosly female. “My man Lionel Martin blessed me with lot of fine women for that video,” Kane said. “It was cool, the whole boxing ring thing. It was pretty unique.”--R.S.

DIRECTOR: DANIEL HASTINGS

“To get to school every day, I would take a dollar van from Flatbush Ave and Avenue K to the Junction train station at Flatbush & Nostrand Ave,” Talib Kweli wrote in a 2015 Medium piece of his days as a 13-year-old kid making his daily trek through Brooklyn. No doubt the polysyllable lyricist’s nostalgia trip influenced the spirit of Black Star’s around-the-way showcase for their classic 1998 debut single, “Definition.” Kweli and Mos Def ride through their beloved borough in what else? A Brooklyn dollar van. Along the way they pick up passengers, including Dead Prez and Common, call out the maddening violence that took the lives of Tupac and Biggie Smalls, and fight the good fight for hip-hop. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: MAINE FETTI

This bare-bones clip launched Brooklyn drill with little more than Bobby Shmurda and his crew gleefully grooving in the streets of East Flatbush. Shmurda’s charisma made the infectious tune a success, but it was the deliriously blithe “shmoney dance” that became a viral sensation, appearing in countless Vines in 2014 and TikToks in 2021, performed at Beyoncé concerts, NFL touchdown celebrations and recreated on the Instagram accounts of the hugest pop stars. As Shmurda told Complex in 2014, “[W]e knew it was gonna take off because the first day we put it up, it got like 2,000 views. … Other people from Brooklyn, they stuff be up for like five months and they only have like 5,000 views. Some be up for years.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

To be young, gifted and Black living in 1990s Brooklyn meant partying at some point in a brownstone with a mise-en-scène that looked something very much like this 1995 video for the Notorious B.I.G. Director Hype Williams may as well be documenting a celebration coronating Biggie as the new king of New York, given the overwhelming success of his debut Ready to Die. Everyone’s invited, a luminous guest list too extensive to set down in full: the late Heavy D and Aaliyah, Biggie’s one-time wife Faith Evans, Queen Latifah, Spike Lee, Jermaine Dupri, Sean “Puffy” Combs (of course), etc. Evans appeared at Big’s request, replacing one of the models who had been cast in the clip. “Big wanted his real-life woman next to him in that scene,” Evans wrote in her memoir. “And of course, I loved that he was making it clear who the main woman was in his life as well as in the video.”—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

For one of hip-hop’s most intimate portraits of self-loathing, Spike Jonze runs ex-Pharcyde sadsack Fatlip through the ringer. He walks through the streets of Los Angeles as a clown, a homeless drunk in a diaper, a commuting used-car salesman and a cyclist terrorized by children. Fatlip and Jonze spent two days winging it in Hollywood and even took a spontaneous trip to Fatlip’s mom. The video’s most emotionally rich moment comes when Fatlip raps a line about drug use next to his mother and then appears to realize what he said. “I didn’t like it. It was too raw,” remembered Fatlip about seeing the video for the first time. “It wasn’t what I expected. It was on videotape, the beginning of the video I get kicked in the nuts, Spike’s talking in the beginning of the video. I dunno, I think I started liking it after I started getting positive feedback from people that saw it.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS & BUSTA REMO

There’s a reason Busta Rhymes has been nominated for an impressive 16 MTV Video Music Awards during his nearly three-decade solo jaunt. The irrepressible Dungeon Dragon was born for the short music-film medium. None are as infectiously bonkers Hype Williams-stamped joy ride “Gimme Some More.” Here, the director’s trademark fish lens captures Busta as an off-the-wall cartoon come to life: a googly-eyed blue monster chasing a ‘50s sitcom house wife, a pistol-toting nod to Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam, an exaggerated muscle suit-wearing body builder. It’s Busta Rhymes taking the unserious very seriously. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: SHOCK G

The presence of LL Cool J, Eazy-E, MC Lyte, Too $hort, D-Nice and Biz Markie in the visuals for DigitalUnderground’s first single put hip-hop on notice that the funk-inflected Oakland outfit consideredthemselves a major new addition to the culture, soon to be as vital as anyone making a cameo here.“Doowutchyalike” introduced Humpty Hump (D.U. rapper Shock G “disguised” as a hip-hop lounge lizard, complete with Groucho Marx-like nose and eyeglasses): the jokey, pleasure-driven id that gave the group a distinct visual hook. As Digital Underground’s mastermind, Shock introduced his group by directing their debut video himself—full of underwater swimming pool shots, bikinis, and a festive California house party vibe that summed up the D.U. aesthetic in five minutes flat.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: DIANE MARTEL

“I fought that ‘All I Need’ shit. I fought it. I didn’t wanna put it out,” Method Man told podcaster Math Hoffa. “‘Cause it was at a point now where, when we were doing these shows, Wu-Tang together, I would come out and there would be girls screaming. Now for me, I’m grimy, same-clothes-three-days-in-a-row n***a. Who wanna go the sex symbol route at this point?” Luckily for Meth, director Diane Martel kept a gritty edge in this much-adored love letter with Mary J. Blige. Showing off some of the acting chops he would display in Belly and The Wire, Meth enters a family drama and dodges the police when not rapping in front of a gorgeous tableau atop a Harlem rooftop. Director of photography Lance Acord would go on to do cinematography for films like Lost in Translation. Martel would eventually direct discourse-disrupting videos for Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus, and Meth became a sex symbol regardless.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: COLE BENNETT

No director has informed the look of SoundCloud-era hip-hop like Chicago’s Cole Bennett, who turned his Lyrical Lemonade blog into a studio that pumped out quirky, colorful, videos for Lil Pump, Famous Dex, Lil Xan, Smokepurrp and many more. His most acclaimed work is perhaps Juice Wrld’s smash hit “Lucid Dreams,” a trippy, deeply emo horror-noir where Juice bares his emotions while poking his head through a hole in the floor. Although Bennett had been filming and uploading music videos since 2013, “Lucid Dreams” was the first time he had a budget —$5,000 — instead of just his usual “run-and-gun, point-and-shoot-style.” Five years later, the video is close to one billion views. “The video is very all-over-the-place in a sense ’cause it came out of nowhere,” said Bennett. “It was just an idea randomly. … I think it’s funny that it’s the biggest video on the channel today.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: MICHEL GONDRY

White Danish rapper Lucas didn’t make too much of a splash in the States, but the director of his lone hit certainly would. The wildly ambitious one-take clip for “Lucas With the Lid Off” was an early success for French director Michel Gondry, who would unleash his mazelike vision on films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. Inspired by 1920s rent parties and Singin’ in the Rain‘, Gondry, Lucas and about 16 film projectors went through 17 takes of a mind-bending performance — the final take was the only usable one. “When [singers] have to do something physical it’s a relief because they don’t have time to worry about who they are or what they are doing and they can be completely natural,” said Gondry, who filmed the video as Lucas ran around him. “I get the best performances when I do this because they are participating and they see they are achieving something that is not easy.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DAVE MEYERS

The first collaboration between hip-hop futurist Missy Elliott and director Dave Meyers—who would go on to direct a slew of Elliott clips, including the similarly mind-bending “Work It” and the feisty “Gossip Folks”—was the result of a movie date turned brainstorming session. “We both flip out over wild visuals and have a similar sense of humor,” Meyers told Fortune in 2019. “We’re different types of people but our harmony was in that, and our collaboration is a result of our differences.” Meyers and Elliott matched the song’s next-generation sonics with a clip that felt beamed in from a post-industrial future, complete with dancers—coached by choreographer Nadine “Hi-Hat” Ruffin—who threw down pugilistic moves while Elliott swung from a crystal-covered chandelier.–M.J.

DIRECTOR: ROMAIN GAVRAS

French director Romain Gavras took M.I.A.’s hectic, up-in-your-grill song and upped the ante, delivering a nine-minute movie about a dystopia where redheads are rounded up and shot. The concept started off as a goof, with the Tamil rapper’s producer Christopher “Rusko” Mercer recalling “how people would beat me up because I was a ginger.” The end result, however, is anything but a joke — it’s graphically violent, remarkably upsetting and a potent allegory about politicizing genocide that inspired a million think pieces and was banned outright by YouTube when it dropped. “I didn’t want to explain myself because if I give my vision it just narrows down the idea to one point of view,” Gavras said. “People are talking by themselves and it’s even better.” —D.F.

DIRECTOR: MICHAEL MARTIN

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony had initially recorded 1995’s “Crossroad” as a mournful tribute to the Cleveland rap troop’s late member Wallace “Wally” Laird Jr. But by 1996, the group had become overwhelmed by a series of deaths of friends and relatives, including their mentor Eazy-E. The quick-tongued spitters tapped Michael Martin to direct the video for a more uplifting remake of “Crossroad,” the eventual Number One single “The Crossroads.” The clip follows a tall, black Grim Reaper as he leads a procession of the dearly departed to heaven — among them stand-ins for Krayzie Bone’s cousin and brother-in-law, Wish Bones’ Uncle Charles, and the glowing ghost of Eazy-E. But the moment where the angel of death leaves with an infant baby still haunts Krayzie. “It was good for the song,” he said on the Halftime Chat R&B Podcast in 2021. “But knowing what I know now … I probably wouldn’t do a scene like that because I know God doesn’t do things like that.” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: TODD HOLLAND

The primary challenge with directing visuals for Slick Rick, one of hip-hop’s greatest storytellers, is thateveryone already has their own music video for his songs running in their head based on his nth-level lyrical narration. Director Todd Holland takes the literal approach to Rick’s moralistic tale, dramatizing a 17-year-old’s bank heist gone wrong with a Chaplinesque, black-and-white Keystone Kops chase through Soho eventually landing our hero in jail. (The song itself remains so beloved that Nas recorded his own take on its police brutality theme, sampling it on 2019’s Kanye West-produced “Cops Shot the Kid.”) “That was the record label’s idea to go that route,” Rick says of his slightly sanitized video: young ladies do the Steve Martin dance and his whole bedtime story puts a dwarf to sleep. “Maybe they didn’t want to go the route of too gritty.”—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: GREGORY DARK

Is there a better encapsulation of peak OutKast than the intro to this video? The duo are discussing video possibilities for a new single. Big Boi wants 30s and Impalas; Andre says the moment calls for “some space futuristic-type thangs”; Big Boi concludes, with no further ado, “Alright then, let’s do both of’em.” Thus: Big Boi rapping in a laser-lit roller disco, Andre rapping at the barbershop dressed for the post-apocalypse. Director Gregory Dark — a porn-industry provocateur who gradually moved to erotic thrillers before taking over millennial MTV — films the affair in lurid hues, letting the player and the poet fly their freak flag in a raucous, street-filling dance party.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: LIONEL C. MARTIN

This clip from the early days of Video Music Box showcases teenage dynamo Roxanne Shanté, whose boasts were some of the boldest of the mid-Eighties. Through some comical vignettes, Shanté recaps her rise to power. In one of the closing chapters of the long-running “Roxanne Wars,” she takes some parting shots at UTFO and the Real Roxanne. “Growing up and being able to see images of myself, especially on Video Music Box, was a blessing ’cause you didn’t see too many kids who looked like me,” Shanté said in the Showtime documentary You’re Watching Video Music Box.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: AG ROJAS

In this deeply physical, painfully bleak video, police brutality is portrayed as a battle that crosses day and night, street and home. A white police officer (Shea Whigham) and a Black man (LaKeith Stanfield) wage a fruitless, endless wrestling match that only leaves them both injured and weakened. “It’s provocative, and we all knew this, so we were tasked with making something that expressed the intensity of senseless violence without eclipsing our humanity,” said director AJ Rojas. “I can tell you it was an emotional shoot day. It is tough to re-create moments that are so fresh and prevalent in our world today. It affected all of us in deep ways.” The clip ends as it begins: the war unfinished, it’s participants exhausted. “There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world,” said the group’s Killer Mike.--C.W.

DIRECTOR: PHILIP G. ATWELL

When you’ve survived being shot nine times to sign a $1 million recording deal with hip-hop behemoths Eminem and Dr. Dre, you are entitled to a bit of myth-making. And so we get the star of “In Da Club,” 50 Cent, literally being rebuilt like Seventies television icon The Six Million Dollar Man. Suddenly he reappears hanging upside down in a gym rapping. But that famous sequence is not the video’s money shot, according to co-director Phillip G. Atwell. “Seeing 50 with Dre and Em having his back is as big a visual statement as it is a musical statement,” he explained to MTV News in 2003, referring to the ending scene in which 50’s mentors appear in lab coats approving of their brilliant creation. “You could see what the commitment was between [them] and what this project was going to be about.” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: DGAINZ

“I Don’t Like” almost single-handedly changed the way rap videos look in the internet age, eschewing almost every music video convention to make something that speaks to the immediacy of social media. Cheap, grainy, shaky, smoky, hyper-local and full of teenage energy, it’s hip-hop with the D.I.Y. attitude and no-budget gloss of hardcore punk, a perfect introduction to Chicago’s homegrown drill phenomenon. Director DGainz gave “I Don’t Like” and early drill scene its cinema verité feel by just showing up, recording and seeing what unfolded. “We were just chilling and [producer Young] Chop put on ‘I Don’t Like’ and everyone started dancing. I just started filming. Everyone was high and drunk — even I was drunk,” director DGainz told BET. “I put it out at like midnight and when I woke up at seven o’clock in the morning it was viral.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: CHRISTIAN BRESLAUER

This Shawshank-flavored video continued the present-day provocateur’s quest to queer up hip-hop. That meant sporting hot pink prison jumpsuits, proudly displaying love in lockup, and using a prison shower — often seen as a place of violence and violation — as the backdrop for energetic, empowering choreography. Director Christian Breslauer told Vevo that “Industry Baby” also symbolizes Montero’s “unwillingness to conform or be caged in because of his beliefs.” Not only does the clip overturn and reclaim stereotypes of Black men in prison, Lil Nas promotes the importance of unabashed self-acceptance, breaking the chains of the genre’s ingrained machismo. —J.J.

DIRECTOR: ADAM BERNSTEIN

“I wanted to make sure that when she was on that pedestal, she always looked elevated, and I wanted the two white chicks dissing her to look like they were looking up, not down,” Sir Mix-A-Lot recalled of the inspiration behind the memorable “Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt” opening of the 1992 video for his chart-topping “Baby Got Back.” The Seattle rhyme pioneer had originally suggested to director Adam Bernstein that he appear coming out of the controversial music short’s infamous giant ass. That idea was thankfully spiked. Still, the polarizing “Baby Got Back” received backlash for what many critics saw as the sexist objectification of women. MTV censors sidelined it before agreeing to play an edited version after 9 p.m. Mix’s gyrating, shaking ode to the bodacious derriere has since become a campy pop-culture marker, cited by some Black feminists for its rebuke of systematic European beauty standards. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: LANCE “UN” RIVERA

“The first video, B.I.G. was gonna direct it. He was gonna play different characters,” director Lance “Un” Rivera told VladTV about “Crush on You,” originally a solo spotlight for Kim’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. cohort Lil Cease. “He had this dance he used to do call the Bum Bitch. And he said ‘I’mma be doing the Bum Bitch tryin’ to lock Cease up’ as the cop from Martin.” However, once Lil Kim hopped on the remix, it became her show: a colorful explosion of matching wigs and outfits in inspired by the 1978 musical The Wiz. The bright, audacious look would promptly become one of the most iconic of the 1990s. “[A]t this point no hip-hop or R&B artist had experimented with bold color. The stages on set turned from blue to green to yellow to red and I saw that her clothes were like that too,” hairstylist Eugene Davis told Vice. “I left Long Island City where we were shooting, went back to New York, bought some wigs put them on her and recut them on her.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DR. TEETH

As mainstream ambassadors to Houston’s long-percolating hip-hop scene, Mike Jones, Paul Wall and Slim Thug turned the slow-rolling, trunk-rattling sound of Houston rap into a cultural sensation. Director John “Dr. Teeth” Tucker provided the travelogue: candy-painted cars with neon in the trunk, high-circumference rims with protruding “swangas” or rotating spinners, sparkling chains and diamond-encrusted grills, and Swishahouse co-founder Michael “5000” Watts providing the soundtrack on two turntables. “We shot it in Houston, which was the way that I wanted to go. I wanted to show its culture,” Tucker told AllHipHop. “The girl dancing in front of the tables is like the Pied Piper. You also have candy-colored cars swaying in and out on the street. It’s hood, but also artistic at the same time. It all goes together. The amazing thing is that people got it.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: STEVE KAHN

In the summer of 1984, Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box” became the first hip-hop video to appear on MTV, joining Michael Jackson, Prince, and Tina Turner among the few Black music artists at the time to appear on the largely white video channel. The Steve Khan-filmed promo is as iconic as it gets, opening with Run, D, and Jam Master Jay stepping out of a Cadillac in all their Godfather hat, leather suit, Adidas-rocking glory, as guitarist Eddie Martinez shreds on top of the car’s roof. The group’s label, Prolife Records, even cast a young white kid as an enamored fan to ensure robust airplay. It worked. “If you look at the video, it’s not the park, it’s not the block party,” explained D.M.C. in the 2021 documentary series Hip Hop: Songs That Shook America. “It’s a downtown Manhattan club, it’s punk rock in the video, it’s metal in the video. But the Black hip-hop dudes were the stars!” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

Hip-hop’s biggest crossover project of the 2010s deserved an equally distinctive music video to commemorate its second single. So, Jay-Z and Kanye West enlisted director Spike Jonze, who in this case took a slightly less auteurish approach to their decadent ode to wealth, fame and badass than was his norm. Filming a $350,000 Maybach getting liberated of its doors and roof, hip-hop’s glimmer twins then took their Thunderdome mobile for a thrill ride spinning doughnuts in Downey Studios, a quartet of giggly models in the backseat. And yet the most indelible image isn’t the fireworks or the Maybach—it’s the brotherly love between two rap superstars at the top of their game, a U.S. flag backdrop serving as a visual symbol of the American dream they managed to acquire despite the odds.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: RYAN STAAKE AND YOUNG THUG

When it came time for the Atlanta trap god to make a music video for his Jeffrey mixtape track, his team sent director Ryan Staake some requests: He wanted to shoot in the Hollywood hills. Models would trash a police cruiser. All the adults would be driving comically tiny Power Wheels. And kids would be driving regular cars. Then Young Thug showed up 10 hours late and wouldn’t get out of his SUV, opting instead to just send some self-shot footage two months later. So Staake chronicled how the planned video didn’t happen, complete with B-roll of underage cops with squirt guns and models suggestively eating a sausage. It’s a masterpiece of turning lemons instead spiked lemonade. “It’s just as much making a mockery out of the production world and the industry of music and celebrity,” Staake told Rolling Stone. “I was trying to deliver to make an interesting statement, but also fulfill a contractual obligation.” —D.F.

DIRECTOR: PHILIP ATWELL

Here’s one way to introduce yourself: grab a candy-colored beat by Dr. Dre and rap directly down the barrel of the camera dressed as a chemistry teacher, a late-night host, a straightjacketed patient, Marilyn Manson, Bill Clinton, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a bully, a scumbag, and, most pressingly, as a jumpsuit-clad rapper capable of fitting in more slant rhymes and pop-culture references per bar than scientists previously thought possible. Practically the only other characters in the video are the American wastelanders who Em charms over the video’s runtime — a fitting prediction.–C.P.

DIRECTOR: SANJI SENAKA

This poetic, Grammy-nominated, CGI feast turns New York City into a spinning record, a needle reading the grooves of the streets. It could be interpreted as a potent tribute to the power of hip-hop itself — when scratched, police searches are disrupted and newspapers are blown around. But director Sanji had something more existential in mind. “With ‘Everything Is Everything,’ I thought: ‘The world is a record; life is a song; the record has to get played; you can only play your record if you allow your needle to stay in the groove, and not skip or get scratched. You have to stay on your groove, i.e., your path, to ultimately hear the beauty and finality of what your song’s about,’” he told Trace magazine.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: VIVIEN GOLDMAN AND MIKE SAWYER

Like everything else Eric B. and Rakim did in the Eighties, their first video set a new standard for hip-hop cool and street realness. “I Ain’t No Joke” wasn’t set in a club or on a soundstage—it was right there on the street, in the same park where they hung out. No cornball comedy, no posing: Eric rocks the turntables while Rak holds the microphone like a grudge, next to a graffiti mural, a playground, a Harlem storefront on 125th Street. It made all previous rap videos look like Toys R Us. The director was Vivien Goldman, the London punk professor who’s chronicled reggae, Afrobeat, rock, and rap. There’s a scene-stealing dance cameo from a then-unknown Flavor Flav—his first time on camera. He was just hanging out that day to watch, but Goldman noticed he was “jumpy and perky and lively. And I said, ‘Oi, you over there! Can you do me a favor, will you do a bit of dancing for us?’…And that’s how sort of innocent it all was.”–R.S.

DIRECTOR: MARCO BRAMBILLA

Kanye West had come across visual artist (and director of 1993’s Demolition Man) Marco Brambilla’s work while at New York’s then-hip Standard Hotel, which displayed his Inferno-inspired video collage “Civilzation” alongside elevator rides—guests ascended up to heaven and or tumbled down to hell, depending on their destination. West asked Brambilla to create a similarly life-or-death-themed clip for his King Crimson-themed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy cut. The result, a 90-second tableau focusing on a hyperstylized West, surrounded by muses and wearing a massive chain, was “not a video .. It’s a moving Painting!!!,” as West tweeted, correctly, after its release.–M.J.

DIRECTOR: DAVE MEYERS AND THE LITTLE HOMIES

When Kendrick Lamar dropped the surreal highlight reel for “Humble,” the think-piece industrial complex went into overdrive attempting to dissect the Compton MC’s curious messaging. Did Kung Fu Kenny dress like his holiness the pope only to flip to indiscriminately firing a money gun as some statement on his struggle to find balance? Is there a symbolic meaning behind taking golf swings off the roof of a run-down hooptie? What’s up with Lamar sitting in for Jesus in a wide shot re-creation of Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper”? And why is he wearing a white suit in a large group of men in black suits? As Kendrick put it, “The initial idea was to go off of one my favorite words: contradiction.” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: RICKY SAIZ

Jay-Z’s “Picasso Baby” already qualified as a high-art music video, with his epic staredown of Marina Abramović at NYC’s Pace Gallery. Going several steps further, Jigga and Beyoncé donned pastel suits and shut down the world-famous Louvre museum for this Ricky Saiz-directed clip. Their unprecedented flex led to an over 50 percent uptick in Louvre visitors under the age of 30 when this dropped in 2018, with a guided tour taking Gen Z fans through all the artwork (the Mona Lisa! the Venus de Milo!) featured in the video. Strategically chosen paintings depicting royalty, status and wealth found their modern counterparts in the Carters. Setting a new bar for luxury rap, Bey even delivered a more impressive flow than her laid-back zaddy.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: FAB 5 FREDDY

From an opening frame centered on a photo of the late Boogie Down Productions DJ Scott La Rock and his two children, director Fab 5 Freddy ensures this clip from By All Means Necessary is all about family. A young boy in a LITTLE RED ALERT sweatshirt appears early, most likely the son of famous hip-hop DJ Red Alert (who appears several times). KRS-One’s ex-wife, the late Ms. Melodie, goads him on throughout the black-and-white clip as he cements his transition from the proto gangsta rap of Criminal Minded to this sophomore album video full of Malcolm X, Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey imagery. As an extra cradling a saxophone mimes the hook (borrowed from Stanley Turrentine’s “Sister Sanctified”), KRS rocks a golden-age hip-hop nightclub, making it clear that politically conscious rap could also rock the boulevard.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: ROMAIN GAVRAS

“The idea was to compile Arabic references, fantasized or not, into a pop video,” said “Bad Girls” director Romain Gavras. “Pop videos usually show American kids in their element. Here, you got Arab kids in an insane car rodeo element.” Full of fast and furious drifting, M.I.A’s “Bad Girls” video mixed the beautiful desert landscapes of an epic drama with the dangerous vehicular stuntwork of an action franchise. Gavras and M.I.A. were inspired after watching YouTube videos of Saudis driving their cars on two wheels, jetting off to Morocco to film their own version. “I thought I was gonna die on the shoot when I saw the drifting. It was a four day shoot so everyone was on edge the whole time specifically ME when I had to [sing] to the camera while the cars did doughnuts on the wet road 10 feet away,” said M.I.A. “In my mind I was thinking how I was gonna deliver the video to Vice with no legs.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: MARC KLASFELD

A sweeping shot takes us through 32 years of the joy and pain that Scarface has witnessed on the same Houston block. The fashions change, the haircuts change and even the cinematography changes — director Marc Klasfeld aged the film and added grain for scenes in the ’70s and ’80s. However, the core message of the video — bookended by shots of sneakers on a wire — is the exact opposite. “The whole pair of shoes over a wire is pretty indicative of somebody dying [in the projects],” Klasfeld told MTV. “I wanted to start it with one pair and then end it with many. And it was the same kid in 1968 as it was in 2002, meaning the hood is fucked up. It’s kind of hopeless and the shit never ends. It’s a cycle and it’s hard to get out.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: RIC MENELLO AND ADAM DUBIN

“It was kind of a dumb video, but it was done in a very sophisticated way visually,” “Fight For Your Right” co-director Ric Menello told MTV News. I often say the style of the video is ‘stupidity done in an intelligent way.’” Columbia Records wanted a video ASAP for their bratty new signees and gave producer Rick Rubin a few days to make it happen. He tapped Menello, NYU film school alumni. Menello wanted someone to blame in case the video went sideways, so he wrangled Rubin’s roommate, Adam Dubin, to co-direct. With a $20,000 budget and a two-day window on Thanksgiving weekend, Menello and Dubin turned the young Beasties into pie-throwing, beer-chugging, girl-chasing Marx Brothers for the age of hip-hop and punk rock. “It was designed to be a classic comedy and it works that way,” Dubin told Beastiemania. “It is like the Beastie Boys’ version of the Beatles’ A Hard Days Night.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

“Mo Money Mo Problems” was the first Biggie video made after he was killed. When the song hit Number One, the chart-topper it replaced was about his death: the Puffy/Faith Evans eulogy “I’ll Be Missing You.” The video could’ve been a downer, but it became a joyfully lavish tribute from Puff, Mase, and Hype Williams. They do right by Big by cranking up the Bad Boy floss all the way. Puff and Mase float in mid-air in a 2001-style spaceship wind tunnel and dance under the Unisphere in their shiniest suits, bigger than the city lights down in Times Square. Kelly Price sings the Diana Ross hook. Biggie beams in via archival footage, cut to sync with his climactic verse. In the most touching moment, Puffy and Mase throw their Rolies in the sky and wave them side to side, at Big’s command. And because Puff is Puff, there’s also a comedy golf gag where he’s Tiger Woods and Mase is Bryant Gumble.–R.S.

DIRECTOR: RALPH MCDANIELS

Directed by Video Music Box founder Ralph McDaniels, “C.R.E.A.M.” cascades between visual re-enactments of Raekwon and Inspectah Deck’s autobiographical lyrics about life in “Shaolin Land,” as Rae calls Staten Island, and wintry, iced-out nights in New York. For trainspotters enthralled with Nineties boom-bap, both techniques result in iconic images of a bygone era: young clockers running and laughing through tight apartment stairwells and fire escapes, snow-covered parking lots full of Wu-Tang-affiliated men idling in bubble goose jackets, and despondent Black boys staring sadly out of bus windows while “going upstate,” as Inspectah Deck raps. “[RZA said] I just want to do it in the streets,” McDaniels remembered in a 2016 interview with the radio show Sway’s Universe. “It was minus-20 degrees when we shot that in Staten Island.”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

Opening with a referential throw to classic Seventies NYC movie The Warriors (Sean “Puffy” Combs clinking together Coke bottles), hip-hop’s communal spirit suffused this black-and-white clip by ubiquitous director Hype Williams. Beyond the remix’s five starring MCs, cameos abounded from DJ Funkmaster Flex, Irv Gotti, Mic Geronimo, Das EFX, Doodlebug (of Digable Planets), singer Keisha Spivey (Craig Mack’s labelmate from Bad Boy Entertainment R&B trio Total) and Puffy himself—cradling a child who’s surely pushing 30 these days. (Perhaps the most noteworthy cameo? Transgender video vixen Shamika, dancing animatedly beside a smirking LL Cool J.) The monochromatic scheme of the video—all-black-everything clothes playing against an all-white soundstage—presages a hood-famous scene from Williams’s one and only feature film, Belly. Absent any frills, CGI or even a fish-eye lens, Craig Mack and company win big with minimalism.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: CHARLES STONE III

“B.I.G., he really was offended by ‘What They Do’,” Black Thought recently revealed on People’s Party with Talib Kweli. “He was rocking with the song, and then he saw the video and was devastated, because he was a huge Roots fan.” Directed by Charles Stone III, the Roots clip satirically sent up several rap clichés—champagne sipping, video vixens, rented mansions and luxury vehicles—some of which may have hit too close to home depending on one’s public image. In the mid-1990s debate concerning mainstream vs. grassroots hip-hop, the Roots unquestionably sided with art over commercialism, and this third video from Illadelph Halflife made the most convincing visual argument.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: JAY-Z & MARK ROMANEK

For Jay-Z’s most mercilessly political moment the rapper re-teamed with Mark Romanek, the director of 2004’s “99 Problems” and 2013’s “Picasso Baby” for a caustic re-tweaking of the racist images found in cartoons of the 1930s and Forties, juxtaposing them next to more solemn material. By video’s end, the lead character, “Jaybo,” naturally a play on “Sambo,” raps while being lynched. “One thing that made me respect Jay-Z a lot as an artist is there was a moment where we had an early version of the storyboard for the music video that we gave to him. We were waiting anxiously on a response and the response he gave us was ‘it wasn’t hard hitting enough,’” lead designer Rustam Hasanov told KultureHub. “He wanted more of a gut punch with the imagery. That made me feel like, ‘Whoa, he really wants to say something intense. He doesn’t want to side step anything,’”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: RUPERT WAINWRIGHT

There are moments in the harrowing clip for N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” that resemble a stark documentary more than a music video. The camera zooms in on members “from the gang called N-ggaz With Attitude” and then cuts to a nondescript block on fire. There’s conspicuous signage that reads Welcome to COMPTON as a white mustached cop ominously looks on with flashes of a baton and gun. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, and DJ Yella are thrown in the back of a paddy wagon with a brazen Eazy-E riding alongside mocking authorities. Indeed, MTV banned “Straight Outta Compton,” fearing that the World’s Most Dangerous Group’s violent lyrics and provocative imagery would terrify Reagan’s America. Mission accomplished. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: JIM SWAFFIELD

Director Jim Swaffield’s clip for “Scenario” sneaks in far more cameos than A Tribe Called Quest’s feature-filled classic song. Blink and you’ll miss Spike Lee, Redman, Kid Capri, Fab 5 Freddy and De La Soul flashing by, in a posse video that overflows with mosh pit-level rambunctious energy rivaling the track itself. Art directed to resemble the interactive desktop of a Commodore 64 or Macintosh Classic, the 16-bit computer aesthetic (hi-tech circa 1992) looks as retro as Phife’s Bo Jackson reference. A teenage Busta Rhymes also establishes his signature hyper dynamism here, soon to become a staple of his future solo videos with director Hype Williams. A Tribe Called Quest’s output always balanced bohemianism with B-boyishness, and the “Scenario” visuals brought out the latter in spades.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: PARIS BARCLAY

Coming off the lukewarm reception of 1989’s Walking With a Panther, LL Cool J was at a career crossroads. He answered his critics with “Mama Said Knock You Out,” a pugnacious classic that still stands as hip-hop’s most storied comeback. Paris Barclay stylishly captured LL’s never-say-die defiance in a raw black-and-white video in which the sweat-drenched hip-hop giant spars in preparation for the fight of his life — “that Raging Bull motif,” as LL later called it. When the self-proclaimed G.O.A.T. stands in the middle of a shadowy boxing ring and roars his lyrical supremacy over a retro-styled microphone, you can’t help but root for the man. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: FAB 5 FREDDY

The video for the N.J. multihyphenate’s hit single is straight Black — no cream, no sugar. Released during the apartheid era, “Ladies First” embodies diasporic Black power and the importance of Black women banding together to keep up the good fight. Repeated shots of figures like Harriet Tubman and Angela Davis remind us the battle for equality will continue across generations. Clad in military garb with African print, Latifah replaces chess pieces with raised Black fists. It’s these scenes and the weight they bear that announced Latifah as an authoritative voice in hip-hop. “[‘Ladies First’ is] a part of the deep roots of this culture that’s pervasive 25, 30, 40 years later,” director Fab 5 Freddy said in the documentary Hip Hop: Songs That Shook America. “[Latifah and Monie Love] just laid it out there, and it resonated way beyond most people’s perception.” —J.J.

DIRECTOR: CHRIS MILK

Let Jay-Z rap about “Girls, Girls, Girls,” this early Kanye West dispatch was a teary-eyed four-minute look at separation, positioning the emerging rapper as hip-hop’s sensitive, insecure, vulnerable pulse. Using a first person perspective, Kanye chases after his girlfriend (played by Clueless co-star Stacey Dash) through the airport: The viewer gets fleeting looks at our protagonist through reflections in a limousine window, a bathroom mirror and Dash’s sunglasses — not only an emotional feat, but a technical one. “There is a layer filmed for his POV, a layer for the image being reflected and a layer of his hands in front of a green screen to match his hands in the reflection,” Milk told author Matt Hanson in Reinventing Music Video. “And, truthfully, I still don’t think it’s absolutely perfect. Because of time constraints I only got to shoot two takes of each layer.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

This multi-million dollar tribute to the post-apocalyptic visions of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome represents the Death Row Records takeover at the peak of its might, muscle and money. “Dre just was like in a place where he wanted to make movies. This is my movie,” director Hype Williams told Red Bull Music Academy. “This is just him saying, ‘I got a ton of money and I want to go crazy.’” Working off the Mad Max treatment by Tupac’s old friend Jada Pinkett and Dr. Dre, the video features high-speed desert battles, Zapp’s Roger Troutman vocodering from a helicopter and a young Chris Tucker fresh off his star-making turn in Friday. “It was fun and dangerous at the same time. Tupac just got out of jail and Suge Knight was walking around with a Rottweiler,” Tucker recalled. “I didn’t know if I was gonna get bit or what.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: WOLF HALEY

Given the stagnant status quo of the hip-hop mainstream in the early 2010s, “Yonkers” was both audacious and necessary enough to force a tonal shift. The Tyler-directed clip (created with assists from director Anthony Mandler and cinematographer Luis “Panch” Perez) provided a look into the Odd Future leader’s boundless imagination, which has only evolved since. Perez suggested the use of a perspective control lens to create a distorted, fuzzy effect, forcing viewers to question reality. (“It was all clever old-school filmmaking, and the tilt shift is a really nice way of making people feel unsettled,” he told Respect Mag.) If the blurred look of the black-and-white visual wasn’t enough to give people the heebie-jeebies, antics like Tyler eating a roach, rapping with demonically blacked-out eyes, and his fictionalized death by hanging surely did the trick. —J.J.

DIRECTOR: JOE BUTT

Jay-Z, UGK, and friends enter the new millennium on a massive yacht surrounded by bikini-clad models and enough Champagne to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. Just how over the top was the infamous 2000 clip for “Big Pimpin’”? Hov’s $1 million-plus video — a first for a straight-no-chaser hip-hop production — was shot during Trinidad’s iconic Carnival by director Hype Williams, featured the two most celebrated video vixens of that era, Melyssa Ford and Gloria Velez, and obnoxious Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash splashing bubbly over women (behavior he has since said he regretted). Yet the video’s most iconic moment remains a shirtless Pimp C rapping in a black fur coat on the beach in Miami. When asked by his UGK partner Bun B why he would wear such attire in 90-degree heat, the late scene-stealing star replied, “TV ain’t got no temperature.” —K.M.

DIRECTOR: JOE BUTT

A quarter century before Run-DMC was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the kings from Queens lampooned the idea of such an honor, stalking their way through a fictional Museum of Rock. “Not only did they imagine something that didn’t exist, they imagined themselves as part of it,” Def Jam publicist Bill Adler told Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum for I Want My MTV. Director Joe Butt trails golden age hip-hop’s first superstars through the gallery as they stomp out Michael Jackson’s sequined glove, smash some Elton John sunglasses, smirk at old black-and-white performances of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, and rock the house with guitarist Eddie Martinez. Comedian Calvert DeForest (aka Late Night with David Letterman regular Larry “Bud” Melman) has a hearty guffaw at Run, D.M.C. and DJ Jam Master Jay bum-rushing the video’s fictive hallowed halls, but history clearly gave them the last laugh. —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: DAVE MEYERS

By the time Missy Elliott hooked up with Dave Meyers for their fifth video, the future Rock & Roll Hall of Famer had already redefined the medium. After a run of clips that rivaled peak Michael Jackson, she might’ve been forgiven for mailing one in. Instead, she turned it up to 11 with an unforgettable barrage of visual vignettes that never gave viewers the chance to catch a breath. There’s Ms. Misdemeanor rocking the turntables while inexplicably being swarmed by real bumblebees, a Prince impersonator in heat, Elliott backed by a crew of dancers getting down in a dystopian children’s playground, and a defiant slave literally slapping the white off his master’s face. In other words, it’s Missy being Missy. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: RICHARD HUNT

Full of nighttime darkness and multiple dissolves, this Richard Hunt-directed clip takes viewers through literal interpretations of each of the Geto Boys losing himself to paranoid flights of fancy. As an (albeit exaggerated) early exploration of mental health in hip-hop, visuals illustrating vignettes from Scarface, Bushwick Bill and Willie D straight up was the way to go, given each MC’s lyrical mastery. With art imitating life, the late Bushwick Bill ends the video on a hospital gurney after a mental episode punching the concrete of the Houston streets. As Geto Boys’ fans were already well aware, Bill rode a similar wheeled stretcher on the album cover to 1991’s We Can’t Be Stopped—evidence of a real-life suicidal episode involving a self-inflicted gunshot to his right eye.—M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: COLIN TILLEY

The music video for one of 2020’s most undeniable hits breathes subversive life into the iconic sample that pulses through the song — the titular refrain from DJ Frank Ski’s 1992 Baltimore club banger “Whores in This House.” The highly digitized and meticulously elaborate funhouse that the “WAP” video is set in is filled with scantily clad and enthusiastically erotic women; when they’re not channeling wild animals, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion lead troupes of sultry dancers and stumble upon the young sex symbols Kylie Jenner, Normani, Rosalia, Sukihana and Rubi Rose behind foreboding doors. But with its colors and kookiness, the video summons an element of play that seems in contrast to the song’s sense of domination. As director Colin Tilley worked to bring a vision Cardi articulated to life, he realized the power of making a clip that would have, “a little bit more innocence than the song.” The result feels far less like a bid to strike back at any conservative backlash against Wet Ass Pussy in all its glory and more like an ode to the levity, joy, and imagination of sexuality that was always the song’s beating heart. —M.C.

DIRECTOR: JON SMALL

In one of MTV’s earliest heavy-rotation hip-hop vids, heavy symbolism turned into self-fulfilling prophecy. In the first half, a literal wall between rock and rap is broken when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler breaks through to Run-D.M.C.’s practice space. For the second, Run-D.M.C. crashes Aerosmith’s show in their laceless Adidas, teaching rock ‘n’ roll a few moves. The video would be a watershed moment in getting black artists on white-dominated MTV. The crew had to overcome no shortage of racism to even film it. “I advertised on the radio that Aerosmith would be playing so we could get a crowd, and the black radio station they made the announcement too,” director Jon Small told the Golden Age of Music Video. But when we got there at 10 o’clock, there must have been 5,000 black people there. There were no white people. That’s when I said ‘Shit, I can’t do this with no white people — it’s supposed to be an Aerosmith concert!’ Now I’m outside walking around with my assistant director and we could see all these rockers sitting in different cars. There were hundreds of them — they were just too scared to get out of their cars.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: DIRECTOR X

Working in the same medium as the luminous, radiant “light and space” installations of American modern artist James Turrell, Julien “Director X” Lutz and Drake turned a deeply minimalist art movement into a national conversation. With some financial assistance from Apple, Lutz got access to the type of big sets and big budgets that were more commonplace in the music videos made 15 years prior. However, it was the singular dancing of Drake that turned “Hotline Bling” into countless gifs and reaction memes. “That’s really him. That’s who he is. It’s not so much me bringing it out. I guess he can just express it with me in a different way,” Lutz told Rolling Stone. The viral impact hit a unique peak when Donald Trump did his own version of “Hotline Bling” on Saturday Night Live a year before he was elected president. –C.W.

DIRECTOR: CHARLES STONE III

Back in 1989, no one in hip-hop had put themselves on blast with the type of self-deprecation evident in Long Island rap trio De La Soul’s “Me Myself and I” video. Directed by Charles Stone III (known for Drumline by 2002), the visuals introduced Pos, Dave, and DJ Maseo in a classroom surrounded by students resembling LL Cool J: gold chains, Kangols, hard-rock visages. On the receiving end of disdainful scowls, pelted by balls of looseleaf, De La made their argument for individuality wearing leather medallions and, in Pos’ case, spectacles with a daisy-patterned button-down. The message: De La looked and sounded different, and that was OK. “I’m a big ‘Twilight Zone’ fan,” Posdnuos recalled in a recent interview, “so when it was time to figure out how to include [De La producer] Prince Paul in the video, we went with him being a hip-hop Rod Serling to set up the story.” —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: ALVIN HARTLEY

Alvin Hartley shot the groundbreaking clip for Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s seminal, genre-defining single during a one-day shoot in Harlem for $8000. “Not enough black videos are being shot and those that are use the same old stereotyped black imagery,” he told Billboard’s Nelson George in 1983. For “The Message,” he sets the group in a concrete tableau that looks misty and stark when bathed in afternoon light, and they stand out with their flashy leather outfits and casual B-boy poses. Sadly, Duke Bootee, the Sugarhill Records producer/songwriter who made the song with Melle Mel, is absent; Rahiem and Mel rap Duke’s parts instead. After Mel concludes his legendary verse about the “stick-up kid” whose life goes awry, a cop car pulls up and arrests the Furious Five for no apparent reason. It’s just another day in the jungle. “In a city like New York, there is all the visual variety you need for any song,” said Hartley.–M.R.

DIRECTOR: DR. DRE

This video’s indelible images of California Love — a daytime BBQ, a nighttime house party, lowriders in full sproing — helped recenter California as hip-hop’s new focal point, and cemented gangsta rap as America’s new feel-good pop music. “I think [the video was a success] because we went out to capture as opposed to stage,” art director Dwight Patillo told Ego Trip. “And even though things were staged, we just tried to keep it as loose as possible and get the little nuances that just popped up and happened. Nobody knew that Warren G was gonna be doing what he was doing in the video at that time. The little kid [in the video] actually just got into the moment and was grooving to the music all on his own. No one directed him to do that.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: HIRO MURAI

Donald Glover’s hip-hop alter ego struts, shuffles, and shimmies his way through a tableau of dancing kids, angry cops, and scenes of both social unrest and unfettered Black joy. References to everything from viral dance videos to the 2015 shooting in a Charleston church, minstrelsy to Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” car dance, collide into each other; given the way director Hiro Murai fills each frame with lots of moving parts and background business, it’s a clip that rewards dozens of viewings. The gut-punch impact remains, however, no matter how many times you see it. “The violence is harrowing,” Murai said “[but] there’s a part of it that also feels cartoony. There’s “Looney Tunes” logic in there somewhere.” —D.F.

DIRECTOR: MARC KLASFELD

The video for Juvenile’s “Ha” was an immediate standout when it debuted in 1998, from its sun-scarred tableau of weathered yet proud Black children to close-ups of Juvenile’s gold-pearled teeth as he punctuates each stanza with the word “ha.” It remains the moment when the world awakened to the world-class rapper — and his label, Cash Money Records. “It was the first video shot in the Magnolia Projects,” Juvenile told Vice in 2016. “Marc and them set up camp in the projects for three days. The neighborhood stood by me a hundred percent — all the drug dealers shut down. That ain’t easy to do, gettin’ people to put aside gettin’ their money so they could do something for me.” Meanwhile, Klasfeld conjured a reality that was light years removed from the fish-eyed fantasies typical of rap videos at the end of the Nineties. It felt rooted in the everyday struggle that lies at the heart of hip-hop culture.–M.R.

DIRECTOR: F. GARY GRAY

Directed by childhood friend F. Gary Gray, “It Was a Good Day” presents Ice Cube as a working-class hero eager to enjoy the fruits of life, resulting in his best-known and most accessible hit. Save for a handful of scenes where Cube raps along in a darkened studio, the clip literally illustrates his story rap. There’s “mama” cooking Cube’s breakfast “with no hog,” and Shorty of Da Lench Mob sadly shaking his head as Cube scores a rare “Lil Joe” in a game of craps. As a stark contrast to Cube’s fiery, controversial Black power image, “Good Day” feels dreamy and destined to turn sour …a premonition that comes true at the end of the video, when Cube gets home after a rendezvous with Kim and finds himself surrounded by cops as the phrase “to be continued” flashes across the screen. The moment set the stage for his follow-up video, “Check Yo Self (Remix).”–M.R.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

In a physical feat used to disorienting effect, the Pharcyde perform the lead single from 1995’s Labcabincalifornia in reverse. Following the lead of future Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze, the group defies gravity, gets clothes slurped onto their bodies and unpaint a mural, all mirroring a woozy beat from a young J. Dilla. “We had to practice talking backwards and walking and just the whole thing. It’s really difficult,” explained the Pharcyde’s Tre Hardson. A linguist was recruited to turn backward lyrics into phonetic nonsense for the group to memorize “Everything was just practice. A lot of practice,” said Hardson. “We had to take a flight to New York and we had to take our lyrics with us — our reverse lyrics — and the tape with us and study it.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: GODLEY AND CREME

The first musician to connect hip-hop with jazz as if they organically deserved to share the same space was pianist Herbie Hancock on “Rockit,” the Grammy-winning centerpiece of his 35th album, Future Shock. On “Rockit,” Hancock embraced GrandMixer DXT’s turntablism and the latest Fairlight synthesizers to explore a postmodern jazz with his Afrofuturist eyes and ears toward the 21st century. Its video — directed by the former English rock duo Godley & Creme — looked as bold as the song sounded, with robotic movable sculptures (courtesy of British artist Jim Whiting) flailing away on beat and the jazzman himself only visible as a projection on a television receiver. Hancock’s handful of MTV Video Music Awards (five in total) the following year scored an uncontested win for hip-hop. —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: SCOTT KALVERT

Part Style Wars, part Benny Hill, part Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, this colorful clip was the first time anyone shot the Fresh Prince, a.k.a. the teenage alterego of Will Smith. A star was born, and so was rap’s pop crossover potential. “I had the idea of doing a human cartoon, because the song was so funny,” director Scott Kalvert told the authors of I Want My MTV. “People were hesitant, though. They said ‘They’re rappers. You’ve gotta put them on the street.’” Jive Records’ Ann Carli saw sparks flying when she and Kalvert watched the video transfers from the one-day shoot. “Up until that point, Will to me had been this loud-mouthed, gangly kid who always had a pimple on the side of his face. He always wore ball caps, he wasn’t even bothered with grooming his hair. Basically, he was a kid,” Carli told author Brian Coleman. “But we were looking at the footage as it was synced up with the lyrics of the song, and we both turned to each other and said, ‘This kid is going to be a star’.”–C.W.

DIRECTOR: LIONEL C. MARTIN

The video for this anti-drug screed came with more chaos than the shrapnel bomb sampling techniques of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team. For nearly six minutes, this post-modern collage vacillates between news anchors, in-jokes, MC Lyte as an investigative reporter and Chuck D rapping in front of the ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated. “We have two turntables to work with in hip-hop,” said Chuck D in P.E.’s official biography, “why can’t you do it from a film perspective? If you come from hip-hop, going in and out of a song is not unusual.” Director Lionel C. Martin, long serving as “Vid Kid” on New York’s pioneering Video Music Box, wasn’t familiar with Public Enemy at the time. “They had some crazy ideas,” he recalled in I Want My MTV. “Hank Shocklee said, ‘Could we stop the music and insert a commercial?” The group’s loose cannon, Flavor Flav served as ersatz casting director, recruiting some real crack addicts to play the titular baseheads.–C.W.

DIRECTOR: KANYE WEST

Director Kanye West presents a culture clash of epic proportions on this visual gem from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a troupe of 27 Czech and Slovak ballerinas entertaining a highbrow(n) dinner party made up of African Americans and one sexy interstellar alien (model Selita Ebanks). Sporting gold grills and a white tuxedo jacket, he taps the upright piano’s E key like a spoon on a crystal glass, and dancers come running in black tutus. What follows (as Ye rouses sympathy for assholes and douchebags) is a company of white European dancers performing their purportedly elite art form for an audience of black-tie Black sophisticates, subversively turning the tables on hip-hop as a mainly Black performance art for its largely white fan base. How’s that for highbrow? —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: PAUL HUNTER

Hip-hop video as Hollywood blockbuster: yacht parties, black helicopters, speedboats, motorcycles, a backwards car chase, Puff Daddy literally throwing money, and the Notorious B.I.G. remaining as smooth as ever. “I just remember Diddy going, ‘Man, you better be on top of your game. ‘Cause I’ve got all kinds of people wanting to shoot this video, there’s Michael Bay … blah, blah, blah, blah,’” director Paul Hunter told Spin. “The whole thing was that we wanted to show this buddy comedy and really bring out the friendship and the personalities of Biggie and Puff together. They were like a dynamic duo, and it was really just saying if you get on the ride with Biggie that you’re gonna find yourself in a really unexpected place.” Tragically, Biggie never got to see the final product. —C.W.

DIRECTOR: MARK ROMANEK

“I wanna shoot the ghetto like a photographer would shoot it,” Jay-Z remembered telling “99 Problems” director Mark Romanek. “I wanna shoot it as art.” Filming hours upon hours of footage, Romanek captured Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects in an evocative black-and-white “street reportage” style. “I never felt like I was making a rap video, I felt like I was making a rock video that had rapping in it,” Romanek said on his Director’s Label DVD. “We did really deep location searching all through the fringes and the deep pockets of Brooklyn. And I was just looking for stuff that felt raw and rock & roll and transgressive, but was still connected to Black culture.” For “99 Problems” this meant streetball, step dancing, motorcycle stunting, dog fighting, mattress flipping, a street brawl, jailhouse dehumanization, and a coda where Jay-Z gets shot and killed, kick-starting a battle with MTV over what they could and could not air on the channel. “It’s Brooklyn, New York, it’s real life,” said Jay. “It’s harsh realities, and then there’s beauty there.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: RIC MENELLO

Directed by the late Ric Minello, LL Cool J’s contribution to the Less Than Zero soundtrack is suffused in the kind of grainy black-and-white artistry that marked MTV clips during the Eighties and reached an apotheosis in Madonna’s “Justify My Love” and sundry Dennis Leary bumpers. Resplendent in a Kangol and turtleneck that he easily fills out with his muscles, Ladies Love Cool James strikes a cool, haughty flow and homeboy demeanor. Visually, the song is a marked upgrade for hip-hop videos during that era, and Minello fills the screen with faded glamour and po-faced wit — from LL posing at the Griffith Observatory to go-go girls shimmying on telephone booths — so that even an L.A. partisan can’t help but enjoy the clip. It’s also a sly putdown of West Coast style from a Queens native — months later, West Coast rap pioneer Ice-T would return fire on “I’m Your Pusher.” Ironic, then, that both LL and Rick Rubin would later decamp to L.A. for Hollywood glory, making the chorus “I’m going back to Cali … man, I don’t think so” sound like a harmless in-joke. —M.R.

DIRECTOR: COLIN TILLEY AND THE LITTLE HOMIES

Super timely given 2015’s nascent Black Lives Matter movement, “Alright” deserved some high-concept visuals considering its position as a newly minted anthem, and Kendrick Lamar (courtesy of director Colin Tilley) didn’t disappoint. Filmed in stark black and white, the clip contains images of law enforcement officers at various points: carrying Kendrick and his Black Hippy crew aloft in a car like ancient emperors; blowing Kendrick out of the sky with a finger gun. But the video mostly centers on Black joy, as youth dance with abandon in front of stacked boomboxes, and later point in wonder at Kendrick ambling through the sky in Timberlands like an urban warrior from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Embodying the whole message of the song, Kendrick ends the video with a smile after he seems to succumb to police brutality — letting viewers know that in the end, he’s alright, and we will be too. As director Colin Tilley put it, the clip is about how “one man can basically spread positivity through all of the madness that’s going on and how everything is gonna be alright.” —M.M.L.

DIRECTOR: BRYAN BARBER

“B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” remains Outkast’s peak glorious freakout, a 155 beats-per-minute joyride that never lets up. So it was appropriate that the boundless Atlanta duo of Andre 3000 and Big Boi tapped visionary director Dave Meyers to helm the video for the revolutionary first single from their masterpiece Stankonia. In Outkast’s euphoric, Technicolor world, the grass is purple, a tour bus transforms into a dimensionally transcendental nightclub on wheels, and pimped-out Cadillacs travel at the speed of light. “I had it shipped to India for individual painting of each frame in the early days of accessible online effects,” Meyers recalled. “So it was quite special at the time.” Yet there’s a grounded message that permeates the trippy euphoria of “B.O.B.” This is an unapologetic Black gathering where project kids, corner boys, booty shakers, church folk, dance crews, and freaks unite for an Afrofuturistic throw down for the ages. —K.M.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE JONZE

This loving, hilarious tribute to cop shows like Baretta and Starsky and Hutch was the creative pinnacle of Nineties artists cheekily paying homage to Seventies culture. “The wardrobe fitting was where it all began as far as creating the characters,” said director Spike Jonze on his Directors Label DVD. “Mike D would start putting on clothes with a salt-and-pepper wig, and he was suddenly the boss, yelling at everyone. I always wished we would’ve recorded dialogue ’cause the stuff those guys were saying was so funny, especially when the chief would start chewing out the rookie for pissing on his shoe or something.” In making the action-packed clip, the team ended up destroying two rented cameras — one by wrapping a Ziploc bag around the lens for an underwater shot, the other in a car-chase mishap. “The camera was mounted up on the hood,” said Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch. “Somehow we went really fast, like down a curb or up a curb, and I just remember seeing the [magazine] go flying off the camera and then the spool actually come out and the film was unrolling, like rolling up an alleyway.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

“When we were mixing the record, the TV in the studio is on, but no sound is coming out,” Busta Rhymes told XXL. “We mixing the song and Coming to America came on … no audio. The record sounded like some African shit, and the movie was some African shit. I bugged out when I looked at that shit. I said, ‘Nigga, I’m going to call Hype.’” Hype Williams was on his way to becoming the most iconic, game-changing music video director in hip-hop history, and “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” was just one more notch in his slam-dunk 1997. Loosely inspired by Coming to America, the video explodes past that video’s margins into black-light insanity, feather-flailing dance sequences, an elephant chase and the always-electric Busta. ”I wasn’t seeing what I wanted to see in videos,” Williams told The New York Times. “There was no color, no originality. Record companies assumed that the people who bought rap records didn’t need to see quality, so nobody was putting in the effort or the money.” For a while, his fish-eye perspectives and skyrocketing budgets became rap’s most wanted look. Sylvia Rhone of Elektra told Complex, “My colleagues at other companies used to blame me for raising the price of videos ’cause now all their artists wanted the same kind of videos.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: SPIKE LEE

One of the most inflammatory protest anthems of all time gets its own Brooklyn rally — making for some of rap’s most indelible images. Director Spike Lee had used the “Fight the Power” song as the electric leitmotif of 1989’s Do the Right Thing. Though Public Enemy didn’t get paid for its use, this blockbuster video, according to producer Hank Shocklee, was “a really good thank-you that Spike did for us.” Shot on the same block where director Spike Lee filmed Do the Right Thing, the clip played like a hip-hop update of 1963’s March on Washington. They put a call out for people to appear in a Public Enemy video, and they came out in droves. “It was like a rose really sprouted in Brooklyn,” Chuck D told Rolling Stone. “It was seriously a Black movement of just being able to stand up and demand that the systems and the powers that be don’t roll you over. And this was a threat to America, and it was a threat to the record companies at the time. That video was really powerful.” —C.W.

DIRECTOR: HYPE WILLIAMS

Missy Elliott started her career working behind the scenes as a songwriter for other artists, but the individuality and ingenuity she unveiled in the first of her many Hype Williams linkups allowed the Virginia rapper to become a front-facing, overnight sensation in her own right. The cartoon-like visual introduces what would become hallmarks of Missy’s creative identity: out-of-this-world concepts, women supporting women, and en vogue yet future-forward fashion choices. Per Essence, when Williams asked her for ideas for the video for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” she answered simply, “Do everything in the song.” The results flipped the script and brought a new type of bravado to hip-hop.

The track’s onomatopoeic “vroooooom” is illustrated with an effortlessly cool joyride in a 1994 Hummer H1. Elliott’s friends serve as her video vixens, with rapper Yo-Yo and SWV singer Coko dancing in the fish-eye lens as Misdemeanor references them. The video’s iconic patent-leather blow-up suit put up a proud middle finger to industry standards, worn in spite of her omission from Raven-Symoné’s 1993 music video for “That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of.” “I said ‘I’m-a show them … I’m-a stay my size and have a big record,’” she said during her 2011 Behind the Music episode. It has since become one of hip-hop’s most renowned sartorial staples. Missy’s official step into the spotlight with “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” kicked off a decades-long career of expectations-defying genius, proving that being true to yourself will always be in style. —J.J.

From Rolling Stone US.