My all time favourite artist since the age of eight, Queen and Freddie Mercury have changed my life. In the 1980's/90's music videos first became mainstream and mainly featured the artists performing the song.
Below are three examples: Who Wants To Live Forever (my favorite), Under Pressure and I Want To Break Free
Who Wants To Live Forever, 1986
I love the simplicity of the this video. It makes the song so much more emotional, especially the irony of Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. The candles create such an intimate, almost holy or angelic atmosphere, working well with the song's soft opening. Mercury in a suit compliments this perfectly, strengthening the power of the song.
Under Pressure, 1981
The fact that the video features neither Queen or David Bowie, the artists of the video, is unusual for a music video and thus makes this stand out for me. Taking the theme of pressure, director David Mallet
edited together stock footage of traffic jams, commuter trains packed
with passengers, explosions, riots, cars being crushed and various
pieces of footage from silent films of the 1920s, most notably Sergei Eisenstein's influential Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, the silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and F.W. Murnau's chilling Nosferatu, a master work of the German Expressionist movement.
The video celebrates the pressure-cooker mentality of a culture willing
to wage war against political machines, and at the same time love and
have fun (there is also footage of crowds enjoying concerts, and lots of
black and white kissing scenes).
I Want To Break Free, 1984
One of the craziest (and most fun) music videos I have ever seen. Two women wanting to break free from their mundane lives, miners in a coal mine and finally the liberation through an unusual dance scene.
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