The seventies were quite the era.
A time when afros, belt buckles, and shirt collars couldn’t get big enough, and everything was colored in Earth-tones. Groovy.
It was a kaleidoscope of culture versus counterculture, rock n’ roll versus disco, free love versus perpetual war, and your wallet versus gas prices.
You’re not just looking at it through rose-tinted glasses, you’re remembering it right: it was far out, man.
And so was the music!
Music videos, as an art form, were in their infancy. MTV was still a decade away, and streaming video was still two more.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some stunning videos that accompanied the grooviest, rocking-est tracks of the day.
So here’s our personal picks of the thirty best music videos of the 1970s!
Kicking off our list is a legendary track that needs no introduction.
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is such an epic, timeless song that it made the top ten in three different decades– the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2020s– sounding fresh and groundbreaking each time!
It’s fitting that with a song this unique, Queen would pull out all the stops with the production of its equally iconic music video.
And the video itself is worthy of its own blog post, but for now, here’s the Cliffnotes explanation:
Queen hated the idea of “performing” on Top of the Pops.
But in the 70s, it was all but mandatory for a band to say yes when invited to their television stage. What to do?
So Queen, ever the artistic rock renegades, opted to fight fire with fire by releasing what they called a “pop video,” embracing the theatrics that film cameras and post-production editing could offer.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the Bohemian Rhapsody video.
And we mean the video specifically, not just the song.
Long-time record industry insiders and legendary producers agree that Bohemian Rhapsody was the turning point of music videos, where they were no longer a sideshow or promotional tool, but a mandatory and critical element of any song’s success.
Going forward, it became standard procedure for a record company to focus on creating a music video for every hit song.
While this song wasn’t a huge hit or emblematic of the seventies in music, it makes our list for its historical significance.
It was the first music video aired on MTV!
And the title couldn’t be more fitting if they actually wrote the song for MTV.
By airing this video first, MTV declared to the world in 1981 that the age of the music video was here to stay.
Yes, the video first aired in 1981; but the song came out in 1979, so it counts on our list!
A personal favorite of ours, this makes our list for being one of the first-ever animated music videos.
In a time when regular live-action music videos were hardly a thing yet, and long before MTV first took to the airwaves!
Talk about a brave creative choice here!
Hats off to Elvis Costello, a true artistic pioneer.
When it comes to pure seventies-era American rock, this one-hit-wonder by Ram Jam is a perfect example.
Raw, unpolished, and simple, this track was born to rock your eight-track and inspire you to drive your all-American land yacht like you stole it, ideally with the top down and your hand throwing up devil signs in the air.
The video was, similarly, absurdly simple and powerful– just some longhairs rocking out in their back yard, sobriety strictly optional.
No frills, no glamor, just good old fashioned rock n’ roll, how we like to remember it best.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, rock music wasn’t all happy partying, or ruminating about the war.
A not-so-new species was emerging from the primordial pool of underground music: progressive, psychedelic rock.
Dealing with more introspective and philosophical themes like alienation, dehumanization, and deconstructing modern life in rigid social structures, Pink Floyd was starting to attract attention for their artistry and innovation in rock.
A key moment for them was Another Brick in the Wall, from the album The Wall.
Eschewing the glitzy partying and glamor typical of the few music videos at the time, Pink Floyd went for an artsy surreal horror movie for a video.
And we do mean a movie it’s a short film with some plot, dialogue, and all.
The videos paint a nightmarish image of schoolchildren on conveyor belts being fed into industrial meat grinders, and corporal punishment at school, where a child is humiliated by a teacher for daring to express some creativity (as artists, we can all relate to that last bit).
In a medium prone to fads and fashion trends that change quicker than the seasons, it’s the real artistry that stands the test of time.
The work of Pink Floyd is as fresh and relevant today as it was literally half a century ago.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that The Rolling Stones have been rocking since the 1960s.
And this is arguably where they first ascended into the spotlight.
Pioneering music video director Michael Lindsay-Hogg went on to direct the Beatles’ documentary Let it Be.
While there’s nothing too innovative about “It’s Only Rock n Roll (But I Like it),” he made the band mime their performance for the camera and unwittingly set a standard for music videos to come.
One of the few artists who realized the potential of the music video format really early was Blondie.
They worked closely with film director David Mallet to produce videos for every single track of their LP Eat to the Beat.
Today, this wouldn’t be all that surprising.
But this was well before anything similar to MTV was on the air, and even home videocassette recorders wouldn’t be a common household item until after the mid-1980s.
That said, what was common at the time was disco.
And Blondie were pioneers of pop music, blending everything from funk, rock, reggae, and even early rap into a string of mainstream top ten hits.
Heart of Glass is one of their biggest hits, infectiously catchy and iconic.
It’s one of those songs that’s so good and ahead of its time, that if it were released today, nobody would bat an eyelid.
They’d just head straight to the dancefloor with no questions.
It’s easy to forget that the seventies weren’t all rock and disco.
Seemingly modern forms and styles of music have been around for a lot longer than most people think– like electronica, for example.
It might surprise some people to think there was electronic music back in the seventies when computers took up entire warehouses just to do simple calculations.
But it’s true. Kraftwerk, Electric Light Orchestra, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Yellow Magic Orchestra were early pioneers of the genre.
What the iconic Kraftwerk were to Germany, Yellow Magic Orchestra were to Japan.
Crossing the ocean to make their mark stateside, their techno-funk “Firecracker” was such a hit that it was featured on “Soul Train.”
We forget, but it’s hard to overstate just how crazy, innovative, and fearlessly artistic Queen really was back in their time.
How crazy?
How about making a music video that couldn’t be broadcast on any channel, back in an era before MTV, before late-night television, and even before the home video cassette recorder!
And yet, they did it.
Because why not?
Most rock stars then (and today) like to act like they’re totally in it for the art, don’t care what anyone thinks, and don’t care about the money (or losing money).
And then there’s Queen, the real thing.
The Police brought a refined and sophisticated side to pop music, blending influences like jazz and reggae and fusing them into a new wave.
Like the Pet Shop Boys in the 1980s, The Police showed pop could be serious and intelligent and still be radio-friendly popular music, and that mainstream audiences weren’t deterred by layers of artsy-ness if you could still tap your foot to it.
Walking on The Moon is a great example of their work, a whimsical reggae-flavored track that’s happy-go-lucky with a pinch of melancholy for flavor.
Their music video is nothing so groundbreaking today, but it shows that The Police understood how to delight audiences and appeal to the masses in a modern era while experimenting and innovating like real artists, at the same time.
The great thing about music videos is that there’s really no constraint, no formula.
You’re truly free to experiment and do whatever you want.
Imagine a spectrum, with artistic freedom to experiment all you like at one end; and at the other end, there’s commercial success that demands formulaic, “safe” investments for the shot-callers who put their money on the line financing said art.
Music videos came along and shattered that spectrum. So long as you don’t offend or outrage television audiences, you’re free to go wild. No concept is too crazy, the weirder the better.
Take, for example, Do or Die by Grace Jones.
While technically not a true music video, it makes our list for its sheer audacity in going all-out with imagination and creativity.
Grace Jones, not one to be afraid to be different, fully embraced this format with videos like these.
A performance on a rather bizarre Italian television show called Stryx, we see Jones vamping about in a cape and corset in a dry-ice-drenched cinematic set of a medieval castle.
It pushed the boundaries of acceptable television with its strange and lurid visuals, and a prince character languishing nearly nude at her mercy.
The airing drew complaints which eventually got the show taken off the air for good.
But Grace was simply ahead of her time, as controversy is practically a badge of honor for many music videos, and time vindicates their vision as critics often come around to praise them later.
Another track that needs no introduction. It’s one of those songs you can’t help but crank the volume up and sing along with as loud as you like.
“I Will Survive” is more than a hallmark of the disco era, it’s a veritable war cry for anyone who’s ever suffered a broken heart.
While everyone else was singing about finding true love and being complete with the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend, this song stood out for its determination to go on after a devastating loss and find happiness whether alone or with someone better.
The video was shot at New York’s iconic disco Xenon, with Gaynor alone and lit harshly, and a solo roller skating dancer, a homage to the inextricable link between disco and roller skating culture at the time.
Notably, in the following decade, the single became an anthem for the LGBTQ community, especially in light of the all-too-common issues of familial and social ostracization, the fight for civil rights, and the fallout from the AIDS epidemic.
Disco may be all about good times and dancing the night away.
But rock is a genre that’s never been afraid to tackle dark and taboo subject matter.
The seventies saw the music video evolve as an art form and narrative vehicle, experimenting and taking creative risks to find out what’s possible.
“I Don’t Like Mondays” was an angsty, mournful track examining the motivations of a school shooter. The title was the shooter’s response when asked why she did it and inspired the song and gave it its name.
For the music video, David Mallet blended shots of the band’s performance with snippets of movie-like scenes of expressionless, almost inhuman schoolchildren.
Frontman Bob Geldof famously talked about the video in an interview on the “Merv Griffin Show,” predicting that the video format would take rock into the future.
Before MTV even existed, ABBA were already masters of the music video format.
In the mid-’70s, when few bands were making videos, this Swedish quartet churned out an impressive 18 videos between 1974 and 1979.
Their prolific output positioned them alongside the biggest MTV stars of the ’80s and ’90s. It’s no surprise, considering ABBA’s career took off on television with their iconic “Waterloo” win at the 1974 Eurovision competition.
“Take a Chance on Me” followed the massive success of “Dancing Queen,” cementing their global superstardom. Don’t expect flashy crane shots or special effects, though.
The video’s charm lies in its simplicity: soft-focus closeups of Agnetha and Frida, a Brady Bunch-style quad-screen during the song’s acapella intro, and scenes of Frida and Benny jamming in a mod Stockholm apartment.
Add to that Frida and Agnetha’s delightful mom-dancing and Benny and Bjorn’s striking poses in a stark white studio, and you’ve got a quintessential ABBA video.
With a song this good, minimalism works perfectly, capturing the heart-on-sleeve dorkiness and masterful simplicity that make ABBA so endearing.
This one has a special place in our hearts because it’s animated of course.
That too, fully animated like a short cartoon.
The seventies were a time of suddenly increased social awareness of all sorts of issues, from human rights and war to the environment.
It was a time of introspection and debate, questioning the way things were going and asking if we could do it differently and better.
“Big Yellow Taxi” laments the loss of our connection with nature, with “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” striking a familiar chord with almost anyone who hears it.
The animated music video adds layers to the lyrics by narrating the story of Adam and Eve being kicked out of their proverbial paradise by a bulldozer.
It’s a beautiful example of how a well-made music video can enhance the song and even add elements of storytelling and creativity to it, proving that a good music video isn’t just an accessory to music but an art form in and of itself.
Sylvester James didn’t utilize drag culture to promote his disco music, but rather, started out as the real thing: touring as a drag performer while recording some R&B on the side.
At some point he realized his theatrical approach might be perfect for the glitz and glam of disco, combined with the rise of the music video.
And the hit 1979 single “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” was a major turning point, not just in music, but in black LGBTQ culture getting a proud mainstream platform.
His showmanship and confident performance are on full display in the video, a one-two punch of opulent wardrobe and his piercing, confident gaze directly into the camera.
It’s easy to forget that the seventies was an era of rampant creative experimentation and paradigm-shattering in everything from culture to music and art.
The Residents are a great example of what we mean.
They took the definition of the music video format and stretched it to its most extreme: a ten-hour long experimental movie, Vileness Flats, shot over four years. And that was their debut!
And the weirdness continued with the group’s second album, Third Reich n’ Roll, which imagined the history of rock as told by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
The album cover depicted Dick Clark in Nazi regalia and the opening track was “The Twist” by Chubby Checker performed in German.
The video, which was critically acclaimed by MoMA, blends stop-motion animation with a wide range of bizarre imagery.
It would have been too weird even for MTV, which was still half a decade away.
This is only proof that if anything, music videos were even more bizarre back in the day than they are now.
Michael Jackson was, undisputedly, the King of Pop.
There will never be another.
So it might be hard to remember a time when he was still relatively new on the scene, at least as a solo artist breaking away from the Jackson Five.
Jackson was inspired by the iconic and highly exclusive Manhattan nightclub Studio 54 and poured his experience there into Off the Wall.
The video for “Rock With You” was created on a shoestring budget, but Jackson made it work, showcasing his legendary dancing in a stark spotlight framed by real lasers, like an otherworldly angelic alien descending to Earth to amaze us mere mortals.
There have been few artists as unique and pioneering as Kate Bush.
Plenty of rock stars like to promote the idea that they’re so creative and different, but Bush has always been the real thing.
And like any true artist, she was unafraid to dive into a new artistic format, like the music video.
While most bands were trying to figure out whether they should bother making music videos, and producers and executives calculated the financial worth of the format, Kate Bush put out not one but two videos for “Wuthering Heights,” one for the US and the other for the UK.
Having studied mime and dance, the minimalistic and dreamy video platformed Bush’s fluid, ethereal choreography.
Director Keith MacMillan let her dancing take center stage and added only a few visual effects to enhance, rather than distract from Bush’s graceful movements.
A good music video avoids distracting the viewer from the song.
But a great music video will amplify the artist, as seen in this iconic example.
In the modern era, you know a song made a lasting impact when it becomes a meme.
Every September 21st, netizens post references to this iconic disco track.
And every year, it gets a huge surge of traffic from streaming platforms on that day– mostly enjoyed by people who weren’t even born yet when the song was at number one in the Billboard R&B charts.
The music video is very much a staple of its time, with that familiar trippy ghosting special effect, and oodles of earth-tone disco wardrobe.
And the track is as infectiously catchy today as it was in 1978.
If we may get philosophical for a moment, let’s consider how we can draw parallels between movie genres and music.
You have romantic films, and you have love songs.
You have serious dramas and epics, and similarly you have classical and progressive rock.
Special effects-laden science fiction flicks can be compared to avant-garde electronic music, with all its post-processing and effects. And so on.
But what about… horror movies? What’s the musical equivalent?
There’s an unverified anecdote that Ozzy Osbourne was contemplating this when he started pushing the boundaries of rock music and dug deeper and deeper until he began pioneering the precursors to heavy metal.
Try as we might, we can’t find evidence for this story, but you have to admit it’s compelling.
Metal is the music equivalent of horror movies. And one of its undisputed godfathers is Black Sabbath.
“Paranoid” dove deep into the abyss of the human psyche, exploring the darkest places of the mind and giving it form and a voice.
Its anguished lyrics are supercharged with powerful, driving wails of rock and pounding, thrashing drums, taking the listener on a roller-coaster ride to the dark side of life.
The video, fittingly, is devoid of all color, with the band raging on their instruments on a set with a subtly psychedelic background.
It seems primitive and basic by today’s standards, but what you’re watching is the birth of not just a new musical genre, but an entire family of genres and styles today.
If metal is the musical equivalent of horror movies, then David Bowie’s “Major Tom” astronaut character and story arc is rock’s lovechild with science fiction.
It’s a concept so shockingly original and wildly creative that it’s hard to imagine Bowie did this in the seventies.
To say he was ahead of his time with his art is an understatement.
The video, similarly, had a visual style that wouldn’t be that surprising today, with its bleached-out white lighting and oversaturated shock of colors from Bowie’s androgynous glam-rock makeup.
But bear in mind this was a full decade before MTV.
David Bowie was such a pioneering force in music that he makes this list twice, and that’s no accident.
“Space Oddity” didn’t just break new ground in music—it also set a high bar for music videos.
The first video, produced by the UK-based company Peerless, was a simple yet effective black-and-white affair that introduced us to Bowie’s astronaut persona, Major Tom.
In 1972, as Bowie’s star began to rise, the song was re-released, and with it came a more polished video.
Directed by Mick Rock, it featured Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase, complete with his otherworldly glam rock look.
This version added a layer of theatricality and style, capturing the essence of the era’s flamboyant visual culture.
Fast forward to 1980, and Bowie revisited “Space Oddity” yet again with another video to promote its re-release.
This time, it was a mix of live-action and animation, showcasing the artistic evolution of music videos over the decade.
Each version of the “Space Oddity” video reflects not only the changing face of David Bowie but also the rapid development of the music video as an art form.
Does this song even need an explanation? “Imagine” by John Lennon is one of the most famous and enduring anthems in modern times, and never fails to stir powerful emotions no matter how often it’s replayed, even decades later.
Yoko Ono described "Imagine" as a complete vision, a succinct bible of truth.
The song and film, with its symbolic imagery of opening shutters to let light in, represented their shared beliefs and hopes for a unified world.
As Lennon eloquently put it, if we can imagine a world of peace, without religious or cultural divisions, then that possibility can become a reality.
For Yoko, the vision of "Imagine" was about oneness and happiness—a future where we all come together, café-au-lait in color, living in harmony.
The accompanying film, released in 1972, captures Lennon and Yoko Ono in their home, adding a visual layer to the song’s profound message of peace and unity.
As Lennon plays a white piano in an all-white room, Yoko pulls back the drapes one by one, slowly taking them from darkness into light– a metaphor as simple and powerful as the song itself.
If you watch this video for the first time, with no context, you’d assume it was on heavy rotation on MTV alongside Bananarama and the Pet Shop Boys, and get a mental image of 1980s-era teens in fluorescent colors playing it on their Walkmans.
But you’d be wrong.
Another “this song was ahead of its time” entries, “Cars” by Gary Numan fully embraced the synth-soaked, clean and sharp pop aesthetic like it was heralding the decade beyond.
Rather than dancing and flying around the stage, Numan and company stand stoic and expressionless, playing their keyboards like robots.
The video took full use of what was then cutting-edge editing and effects, with layers of videos and green screen cutout shots.
But above all, this video is obnoxiously catchy and memorable.
If you love Daft Punk and similar electronic music giants today, you have to thank Kraftwerk for laying the foundations they built upon.
The earliest successful pioneers of electronic music, they put down the roots that gave rise to many artists even entire decades later.
The German group took electronic and synthesized music to the charts in an era well before home computing, when computers could barely manage to do word processing.
It’s hard to overstate just how ahead of their time they were, and they managed to be successful at it too!
The seventies gave rise to the power rock anthem– loud, exuberant and infectiously catchy.
One of the best examples of this is “Since You’ve Been Gone” by Rainbow.
It’s one of those iconic tracks that you can’t listen to at a low volume, and few can resist the urge to sing along and enjoy a surge of endorphins from the feel-good tune.
The music video is a blend of the band performing on a slick and polished soundstage, interspersed with a brief short story, a trope that became a mainstay of most Top 40 music videos even today.
It’s hard to think of the 1970s without remembering the Village People, the iconic disco band with the crazy outfits and even crazier big hits.
It may not be obvious to some people that the Village People were known for lyrics which seem innocent at first glance, but subtly hint at various aspects of LGBTQ culture and tropes under the surface, for what was at the time droll tongue-in-cheek humor.
And “Y.M.C.A.” was just another example of this, leading to the real YMCA (The Young Men’s Christian Association) taking them to court over it.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, the organization decided their depiction in the song was ultimately a flattering homage, and the case was settled out of court.
The music video is fittingly cheerful, with the band in their iconic costumes showing off their impressive dance moves for the camera on a typical city street.
You know you’ve made your mark in history when your song has its own iconic dance moves that anyone can perform; and even today, few can resist the urge to get their arms up to form the letters when this track blasts over the speakers, keeping the spirit of the seventies alive and kicking.
A lot of the videos on our list are examples of artists being ahead of their time, debuting elements and entire genres to mainstream music far earlier than most of us today realize.
“Low Rider” by WAR is no exception.
An intoxicating mix of funk, disco, R&B, and early rap, the song celebrates lowrider culture, long before the rappers of the 1990s popularized lowriders in their music videos.
The music video, too, is more like a short film thoughtfully produced with love and care, rather than quickly filmed as an afterthought, complete with credits rolling at the end.
Glorious heavily customized works of vehicular art roll casually down the streets in a visual tribute to lowrider culture and individual expression.
Just makes you want to get in your car and go for a slow, chill ride with no destination in mind– with this funky track playing nice and loud, of course.
Some bands are great at what they do. Others pioneer and shape their genre.
Then there are artists who practically define the entire genre.
You can’t think “punk” without the Sex Pistols coming to mind, even if you know almost nothing about the punk subculture.
“Anarchy in the UK” is the seminal punk anthem– subversive, shocking, and about as subtle as a shot of chili pepper in your eye.
Raw, noisy and unpolished, the track announced to the world that punk was no longer an underground subculture.
The video is fittingly no-frills and amateurish, in keeping with the DIY ethic of punk culture.
And there you have it, our list of the best music videos from the 1970s!
This was a tad tougher than our list of best music videos from the eighties and nineties because, well, there were simply fewer videos to choose from, since the format was still in its infancy at the time.
But there were still enough amazing examples that this era still counts.
What do you think? Do you agree with our list?
Do you know of any really stand-out music videos that should have made this list? Let us know in the comments!
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