'80s Music Videos That Defined MTV's Bygone Era

MTV was born on August 1, 1981, when the first music video to beam from TV sets was The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." That sentiment proved to be prophetically right on the money. At the time, music artists had been producing their own promotional videos for decades, but they were usually viewed as afterthoughts. MTV, however, changed the game. As the channel's popularity spread like wildfire, artists quickly realized that filming themselves lip-syncing along to one of their songs would no longer cut it. Music videos quickly evolved into creative mini-movies — sometimes barely even featuring the musicians who'd cut the song. 

The popularity of MTV during the 1980s cannot be understated, as music videos influenced pop culture — hit TV police drama "Miami Vice" was nicknamed "MTV cops" for the way the series cinematically imitated the quick-cut, glossy look of music videos. MTV remained a force to be reckoned with throughout the '90s as well, with grunge acts and pop stars all creating memorable videos for MTV airplay. 

By the 2000s, however, the popularity of music videos was waning, and MTV began experiencing far more success with reality programming such as "The Osbournes," "16 and Pregnant," and "Jersey Shore." That decline culminated at the end of 2025, when MTV announced it was shutting down all its 24-hour music-only channels worldwide. As a chapter in pop-culture history comes to a close, these are five '80s music videos that defined MTV's bygone era.

When delving into the untold truth of ZZ Top, it's clear that no rock band more successfully reinvented itself for the MTV era. The Texas trio was known for grimy blues-rock until its 1983 "Eliminator" album, which adapted a sleeker, synthesizer-driven approach. "Eliminator" became the band's biggest album, selling more than all its previous LPs combined, and a big part of that success can be attributed to a trio of MTV music videos: "Gimme All Your Lovin'," "Sharp Dressed Man," and "Legs." 

The band appeared in the videos only tangentially, with bassist Dusty Hill and guitarist Billy Gibbons sporting shaggy beards and dressed like they fell out of the Old West while spinning fur-lined guitars. Together, the videos told three interconnecting tales, woven together by the appearance of the titular Eliminator, a tricked-out 1933 Ford Coupe. Of the three, "Legs" is the most iconic, the story of a teenage girl working a lousy strip-mall job until a bevy of sexy models pour out of the car to give her a rock 'n' roll makeover, while vanquishing the bullies who'd been keeping her down.

"The videos have given us a younger audience," Hill told Creem (via Rolling Stone) of how director Tim Newman introduced the band to the MTV generation. "You know, our audience grew up with us until the videos, and they were beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Then the videos came along, and now we've recaptured the 16-year-old girls," he marveled. 

By 1986, the tragic real-life story of Aerosmith was at a low point, with the band widely considered to be washed-up has-beens ready for music's scrap heap. Meanwhile, MTV had been receiving heavy criticism (even from David Bowie) for ignoring Black artists — particularly those from the burgeoning hip-hop scene that was changing the musical landscape. These seemingly disparate scenarios came together when the hip-hop trio Run-DMC was encouraged by producer Rick Rubin to sample Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" as a strategy to expand their fan base. 

"We didn't even know who Aerosmith was," Run told SonicScoop. Meetings were held, and with much persuasion, the two acts agreed to record a joint version of the track — under one condition. "Just don't make fools of us," Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler pleaded. Tyler credited director Jon Small for the concept, recalling to People that he "came up to me and said, 'I got a really good idea for this. Why don't we put Run-DMC on one side, Aerosmith on the other side, and there'll be a wall, and we'll cut out a piece in the wall.' The whole idea was to show that rock and roll and rap could live together. It was a giant step outside anybody's mind at MTV." 

The video quickly became an MTV staple, introducing Run-DMC to a whole new audience while reviving Aerosmith's career. "That video was the whole thing," Tyler insisted. "It was without a doubt the second step of our career."

"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" was the debut single from Cyndi Lauper's 1983 album "She's So Unusual," and the resultant music video was tailor-made for MTV. With Lauper bouncing around like a human cartoon character, the video begins in a tenement flat as she's berated by her mom and dad — the latter played by pro wrestler "Captain" Lou Albano — before morphing into a joyous dance party in the streets of New York.

Not only did the quirky video — made on a shoestring budget of just $35,000 — win Lauper a Moonman trophy at the MTV Video Music Awards, it continues to remain enduringly popular; as of late 2025, the iconic video has received over 1.6 billion views on YouTube.

Despite the video's popularity on MTV, Lauper admitted that she didn't receive a whole lot of financial benefits from it — at least not at first. "MTV was kind of like what the Internet is today," she explained in an interview with Go Upstate. "They didn't pay us in the beginning. That took a couple of years. It was a promotional tool. A great promotional tool."

Peter Gabriel's reinvention began in the late 1970s, when the former front man for British prog-rockers Genesis embarked on a solo career. After releasing four solo albums — each of which was titled simply "Peter Gabriel" — his 1986 album "So" proved to be his biggest ever, thanks in large part to MTV and the inventive video for the single "Sledgehammer."

The song itself was a winner, with a driving bass line and a dance-friendly vibe, but the video took MTV creativity to a whole new level by using the kind of stop-motion camera work typically used in animation (think beloved holiday special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"), transferring it to live action. The video's director, Stephen R. Johnson, enlisted the skills of animator Nick Park, who would later go on to fame as the creator of "Wallace & Gromit."

At the time, Gabriel largely credited the song's chart success (it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100) to the music video. "But I'm not sure that it would have been as big a hit, and I certainly don't think the album would have been opened up to as many people without the video," Gabriel told Rolling Stone. "Because I think it had a sense both of humor and of fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me."

If there's a single music video that epitomizes the glory days of MTV, it has to be Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Taken from the mega-hit album of the same name, the epic "Thriller" video represented the full evolution of the music video as an art form unto itself — and a cultural force to be reckoned with. The horror-themed 13-and-a-half-minute video was a complete mini-movie that sees Jackson transforming into a zombie for a tightly choreographed dance number with the undead. 

Directed by filmmaker John Landis (enlisted by Jackson after watching his 1981 comedy-horror classic "An American Werewolf in London"), the video was produced on a then-unprecedented hefty budget at a time when producing a music video typically cost about $50,000. "It ended up costing $500,000 — still enormous money at that time for that kind of thing," Landis told Today.com. Not only did the video go into heavy rotation on MTV, the CBS television network also distributed the video to its affiliates to air for their viewers. "For a while there, you couldn't turn on the television without seeing 'Thriller,'" Landis recalled.

At that point, Jackson's label figured the "Thriller" album, which had been released the previous year, had sold pretty much every copy it was going to sell. The surprising truth about Jackson's thriller video, however, was that its success caused the "Thriller" LP to rocket back up to the top of the charts, reportedly selling a million copies per week at the height of the video's popularity.