Thirty years ago, MTV began to beam a budding art form — the music video — into homes across the U.S. TIME takes a look back at the most memorable clips from three decades' worth of music television
The Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video is so odd, so ’80s, so David Byrne, you can’t look away. Thirty years later, it’s still an iconic video for a band that was never commercially successful or had huge radio hits. But when MTV debuted a year after its 1980 release, “Once in a Lifetime” became one of its most rotated and popular clips, giving many music fans their first look at Byrne’s brilliant bizarreness. In the video, the singer dances around like a demented marionette, jerking his arms and crouching into a ball, then swimming through a fake blue sea. He’s joined by a chorus of Byrnes in the background who mimic him (or is he mimicking them?). The video was later exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
For all his star power, Michael Jackson never had much success on the silver screen. His one major movie role — as Scarecrow to Diana Ross’s Dorothy in Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz — was a critical and financial flop. But on that set, Jackson met impresario Quincy Jones, who would help produce the mega-hit albums Off the Wall and Thriller. What the King of Pop lacked in movie roles, he made up for by luring major talent (including Martin Scorsese) to direct and star in his videos. His first coup de Tinseltown was on the video for Thriller‘s title track. Director John Landis, fresh from An American Werewolf in London, invited collaborators Elmer Bernstein (who composed incidental music) and makeup artist Rick Baker to create a nearly 14-min.-long trip across horror genres. Add überghoul Vincent Price as narrator and a much imitated zombie line dance — not to mention a line of dialogue that was the understatement of the decade: “I’m not like other guys” — and no mere mortal could resist it.
