The 10 Best Music Videos of 1998 (2023)

• by Marc Hogan

  Senior Staff Writer

• Electronic
• Jazz
• Rock
• Rap

February 14 2018

It was a time of visionaries—on both sides of the camera lens. In 1998, era-defining directors including Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Hype Williams were putting their highly stylized twists on artists like Madonna and Busta Rhymes, expanding the creative possibilities of music videos in the process. MTV dictated what audiences saw back then, but some of the year’s best visuals took advantage of the platform, beaming striking images into the homes of millions of teenagers worldwide. Many of those clips combined ingenious special effects to profoundly dramatic ends, while others took a cinéma vérité approach toward a local scene long before YouTube and WorldStar, or else cast a fisheye lens on a hypercolor future that hasn’t quite arrived yet.Each video inour top 10is a dazzling display of sound and vision, and you can watch all them below.

10. OutKast: “Rosa Parks”
Director:Gregory Dark

OutKast’s Aqueminiis the best album of 1998, and “Rosa Parks”is its triumphant visual manifestation. Big Boi and Andre 3000 playfully lay out the video’s concept at the outset, a mix of muscle cars and “space, futuristic-type things,” and director Gregory Dark somehow makes it all a brashly colorful reality. With both man-from-Saturn costumes and a marching band stepping past the local barber shop, it’s a testament to the outsized creative ambitions of the era’s most restlessly forward-thinking duo.

9.Madonna: “Frozen”
Director:Chris Cunningham

On Madonna’s Ray of Light, the protean pop star reinvented herself yet again through a mix of electronic ambience, austere folk, and earth-mother mysticism. And for the record’s lead single, the no-longer-so Material Girl turned to… the guy who directed Aphex Twin’s freakish “Come to Daddy” video (yes, that one). With temperatures plunging in the bleak California desert, the shoot was famously frustrating for both the artist and her director. “I was barefoot for the entire video, and then it started pouring rain and everyone got really sick,” the singer once recalled. But the finished product, with a shape-shifting Madonna dressed in fluttering black,brings out her inner goth in a way she had never revealed before.

8. Juvenile: “Ha”
Director: Marc Klasfeld

The breakout video for Juvenile and, by extension, New Orleans’ Cash Money Recordsis a fiercely regional document depicting a day in the life of the Crescent City’s Magnolia Housing Projects. Complete with kids on a front porch, silver-haired ladies in church clothes, and a threatening police presence, the video also introduced director Marc Klasfeld, who would later bring a similar slice-of-life feel to Nelly’s St. Louis and Cam’ron’s Harlem in subsequent clips. With gold teeth in his mouth and sticky sweat on his brow, Juvenile serves as an animated ambassador here, a host to the vibrant humanity surrounding his alien-transmission drawl.

7. Portishead: “Only You”
Director: Chris Cunningham

For this moody single from Portishead’s second album, director Chris Cunningham filmed singer Beth Gibbons and a young boy floating in a giant tank of water. Then he layered that footage atop a darkened alleyway scene lit by a full moon, with unexplained men watching from windows above. “We couldn’t communicate through the water, there was divers splashing around, Beth had snot bubbles coming out of her nose,” Cunningham said later. “It was a nightmare.” You don’t want to wake up from it.

6. Pulp: “This Is Hardcore”
Director:Doug Nichol

Those expecting an explicit video to match this Pulpsingle’s racy lyrical content might be confused by its pastiche ofoutdated Hollywood styles, butthe clip matches up nicely with the track’s sense ofregal decay. Rather than a cavorting rumination on porn, director Doug Nichol transports “This Is Hardcore” through film noir, Douglas Sirk melodramas, and splashy Busby Berkeley musicals. The money shot is a glamorously disheveled Jarvis Cocker leering out from among the feather-waving dancers, like a past-his-prime lounge act stuck in a limbo of his own making.

5. Stardust: “Music Sounds Better With You”
Director:Michel Gondry

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, who formed this side project with his fellow French house pioneer Alan Braxe and vocalist Benjamin Diamond, once suggested that Stardust never released another single because they didn’t want to tarnish their one-hit wonder. Michel Gondry, who had worked on Daft Punk’s choreography-driven “Around the World” video a year earlier, captures the childlike pop idealism of “Music Sounds Better With You” with his signature homemade flair: A pre-teen escapes adult realities with the help of a model airplane kit and, in a delightful meta touch, a cheesy, keytar-laden music video. It’s a love letter to the imaginative powers of the medium itself.

4. Lauryn Hill: “Doo Wop (That Thing)”
Director: Big TV!

Lauryn Hillshowed off both her soulful vocals and cold-as-hell raps on this No. 1 hit, and the “Doo Wop (That Thing)” video illustrates her two sides brilliantly. Directing duo Big TV! make simple and deadly effective use of the split screen here: One side is set in 1967, the other in 1998. But as some things change, some things stay the same; whether in bob-cut wig or dreadlocks, Hill throws an incredible New York City block party.

3. Brandy and Monica: “The Boy Is Mine”
Director:Joseph Kahn

The chart-ruling duet between Brandy and Monica was already a conceptual coup on record, with the singers updating the lovers’ triangle from Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney’s “The Girl Is Mine” in a slinky late-’90s R&B style. The song’s video goes one better. The pair don’t only a share a man, but neighboring apartments, too (and, for some reason, their remote controls keep switching the other’s channels). Eventually the two women confront each other, but this is no “Jerry Springer”–style catfight: By the time their beau, played by future 8 Mile co-star Mekhi Phifer, arrives at the door, female solidarity is waiting to greet him.

2. Busta Rhymes: “Gimme Some More”
Directors: Hype Williams and Busta Rhymes

This supremely psychedelic origin story of a music video still feels strikingly contemporary. Yes, Hype Williams’ signature fisheye lens is synonymous with its time, but the cartoonishly fantastical images, whether of a Street Fighter–like monster, a Yosemite Sam–style cowboy, or Busta as a boxer of comically inflated proportions, still rush past as dizzyingly as the rapper’s rapid-fire cadences. It’s difficult to imagine some of the more adventurous recent videos—such as Tyler, the Creator’s phantasmagoric “Who Dat Boy” from last year—without “Gimme Some More.”

1. UNKLE: “Rabbit in Your Headlights” [ft. Thom Yorke]
Director:Jonathan Glazer

In 1987, Thom Yorke was in a automobile accident that ended up informing several Radiohead songs with titles like “Killer Cars” and “Stupid Car.” And with “Karma Police,” director Jonathan Glazer had already done one video with Yorke involving a car menacing a mysterious man. The clip for UK electronicact UNKLE’s Yorke-featuring “Rabbit in Your Headlights” continues—and perfects—this anti-automobile theme, highlighting the devastating power of a common car while offering a surreal vision for humanity’s revenge.

The video shows French actor Denis Lavant mumbling what sounds like vaguely religious nonsense as he stumbles through a tunnel filled with traffic. Some of the drama comes from how people interact with him, whether that’s offering him a ride, complimenting his coat, or, excruciatingly often, running him over. And yet, he keeps getting back up. It’s as harrowing to watch as it is fun to interpret afterward: Who is this Christ-like figure? Are we the drivers? The man’s ultimate victory is surprising and satisfying in equal measure, a comeuppance to end all comeuppances.