The 150 Greatest Hip-Hop Videos of All Time

This girls’-night-out-on-steroids clip had all the requisites for big budget-era rap videos. Tropical location: check. Speedboats, Jet Skis, and snorkeling: check. Cameos galore: check. It looked like the set was an actual party. Not only did Lil’ Kim, Left Eye, Da Brat, Missy Elliott, and Angie Martinez create what is arguably the most formidable all-female posse cut ever, the video is a who’s-who of Black women in Nineties entertainment. Members of R&B groups SWV, Xscape, Changing Faces, and Blaque, rapper Queen Latifah, and actress Maia Campbell all wave singles at male dancers, grab drinks from the bar, and enjoy personal massages in the video’s hideaway tiki cove. The definitive cameo, however, is a barefoot and nonstop dancing Mary J. Blige, who crashed the group-performance shot for the entirety of the clip. The result is the rare rap video to showcase a space without any male homies, producers, label heads, or even celebrity eye candy. The focus is completely on the women and their celebration of each other. “It was so much unity. We had a ball,” Da Brat told Ebony in 2014. “You don’t get that these days.” —N.C.

Travis Scott’s self-directed “Franchise” appears to take influence across 80 years of film history — Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, Hype Williams’ Belly, Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy, Ari Aster’s Midsommar and, well, Dennis Dugan’s Happy Gilmore. The video’s production and release was no less grand: It was filmed at Michael Jordan’s Illinois estate and premiered on IMAX screens before Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. In the clip, M.I.A. wears a dress constructed of 600 real flowers. “The sun was setting, so we needed to hustle to get the magic ‘golden hour’ shots. We were manically sticking flowers into the suit whilst she had it on, and we had to make our way through hundreds of sheep to adjust the piece between takes,” set designer Emily Davies told Vogue. “Flowers would fall off as she was dancing, and then the sheep started eating the flowers right off her while she was performing.” —C.W.

“[M]y aesthetic for videos now are more everything at once, just more chaotic, organized chaos,” A$AP Rocky told Complex. “I think it is a nice way to display my ADHD.” On “Shittin’ Me,” the Harlem rapper’s psychedelic visuals took a turn toward the trenchant. The concept is like an LSD-fried version of Weekend at Bernie’s: a rapper’s death fails to stop the activities of his crew, his label or the fame machine. Though released in an era where rappers end up with a constant stream of posthumous releases and collaborations, Rocky waved off accusations that the video was critical toward the industry. “I think it’s just art. Art is subjective, take what you will from it,” he told Hypebeast. “It’s supposed to strike emotion, and that’s all I wanted to do.” —C.W.

Gang Starr took four years to release their fifth LP, Moment of Truth, and rapper Guru spent that time growing displeased with the state of hip-hop. “You Know My Steez” roars out of the gate — it’s the LP’s first track and first single — with a hard-knock beat that goads Baldhead Slick to deliver a stern state of the union (“The wackness is spreading like a plague,” he intones). The video, by Terry Heller, merges Guru’s damning vision of late-Nineties hip-hop with George Lucas’ fascist bunker dystopia THX-1138, complete with S&M-chic centurions and bleached-white torturescapes. Guru breaks free, of course — DJ Premier’s beat on the track could knock down any wall. —C.P. 

Maybe all you need for a great video is one set, one car under one streetlight, one verse stretching on for three effortless minutes by one 17-year-old with outsized charisma, and a singular flow. Kodak Black’s premiere video is a case study in minimalism, the camera’s autofocus flinching beneath the head-on gaze of the rapper. Director BonesVision switches to night vision, sometimes doubling the image against itself, but the effect is almost documentarian. There’s some styrofoam or something on the ground behind Kodak, if you can take your eyes off him. —K.M.

Few cultural artifacts capture flip-phone-era virality as well as the video for Soulja Boy’s infinitely memeable “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” which follows the adventures of Atlanta record mogul Mr. ColliPark as he tries to find the source of a dance craze that’s captivated the kids both in his office and in blurry clips he watches on his phone. Soulja Boy is, of course, at home in front of his webcam, keeping tabs on his instant messages and the hit count at souljaboytellem.com — and the clip’s story ends happily, with Mr. ColliPark giving the kid a record contract and a celebratory amulet, and Soulja Boy leading a gym full of devotees in the dance he dreamed up. —M.J.   

“It ain’t really a lot of people that represent females from the hood and ratchet females,” Memphis crunk star GloRilla told BET.com. “We was just in the video having fun, doing what we normally do, and people like the authenticity — the realness to it.” “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” was a TikTok smash that had the energy of a TikTok video, GloRilla and her all-female squad dancing, doing doughnuts in a parking lot, and dancing at a red light. The simple clip launched her from the video-sharing app to the Grammy stage within months. To keep the energy of their collaboration, Hitkidd pushed GloRilla to shoot the video the same day as a recording session. “I got to the studio by 12:00 and we got done at 1:00,” GloRilla told Billboard. “He was like, ‘We’re gonna shoot the video at 4:00 today. Go get all your friends.’” —C.W. 

“Fun-loving” isn’t a term often used for the serious-as-cancer Public Enemy, but there’s no other way to describe this satire of the way American medical care underserves the Black community. Flavor Flav lies in a funeral casket, enjoying life after death; his mom collapses from a heart attack, only to have an ambulance worker dribble bits of sandwich on her face; and some random guy falls onto a snowy street, convulsing after suffering a broken neck, while his homeboy calls for an ambulance that never arrives. Somehow, the whole thing is hilarious, thanks to Rupert Wainwright’s sitcom visuals — which earned him a 1991 Soul Train Music Awards nomination — as well as Flav’s flamboyant, indescribable “Flavor Dance.” Lookout for cameos from a pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson, Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C., and DJ Hurricane from the Beastie Boys and highly underrated Def Jam parody act The Afros. —M.R.

In a clip made to look like one continuous take — it was actually 13 shots craftily edited together — Xzibit raps with unflappable ease as his neighborhood roils with chaos around him: a swerving police car chases a suspect, a pickup truck explodes, someone with sticky fingers crashes through a pawn shop window. “Nobody wanted to shoot that video,” Xzibit told the Breakfast Club. “‘Cause I came up with the concept. And everybody was like, ‘Oh, it can’t be done, it’s too expensive.’” Still Xzibit estimated that they managed to do it for less than $100,000. Beyond explosive action sequences, the clip also features a cameo from human pyrotechnic Flavor Flav. Said Xzibit, “Flavor Flav wasn’t even on the schedule; he [was] just driving by, saw us, and hopped out and got in the video.” —C.W.

Like her Video Vanguard inspirations Beyoncé Knowles, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat is dedicated to adventurous fashion choices, chameleonic looks, and arresting visuals. Perhaps her most audacious video is the cyberpunk-meets-hyperpop clip “Need to Know,” a brutalist retro-future nightlife party conceived by Doja and her creative team. On Planet Her — inspired by Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles and The Fifth Element‘s New York— a blue-skinned alien Doja goes out for a night on the town with her squad (which includes Grimes and actress Ryan Destiny). Though filmed in the digital age, Doja and directors Miles Cable and AJ Favicchio opted for big sets on a soundstage and laborious makeup. “They had, like, a 20-person prosthetics team,” Favicchio told Nylon. “It was a huge undertaking to get that done. I think their call time was obviously hours and hours before ours.” —C.W.

“Outkast wanted me to film ‘Bombs Over Baghdad,’ but ‘Ms. Jackson’ really stood out to me,” director F. Gary Gray told GQ. “You never know if it’s going to work — animals bobbing their heads to the music and the guys fixing an old, broken-down house? But people really got it.” Gray matched one of Outkast’s most earnest songs with a color-saturated, bittersweet video where the duo tends to weather damage on a broken home. Soon, “Ms. Jackson” would become the group’s first Number One single. Remembered the group’s André 3000 to BlackFilm.com, “I was doing the close-up scenes, and he was looking at the playback monitor and he said, ‘I think you’re going to have a great career in film if you ever go in that direction.’” André would go on to his first starring role in Gray’s Be Cool, launching a career that would see the rapper working with action directors like John Singleton and Guy Richie as well as arthouse heroes like Claire Denis, Noah Baumbach, and Kelly Reichardt. —C.W.

Directed by Peter McCarthy, who helmed the 1994 slacker gem Floundering and co-produced indie films like Repo Man, the video for “Love’s Gonna Get’Cha” triumphantly illustrates BDP’s tragic fable. KRS-One plays both the song’s narrator — his JA-colored cap symbolizes knowledge of self — and the protagonist, a Black teen who sees crack dealing as a way out for his impoverished family. Several members of the BDP crew make cameos, including his brother Kenny Parker, the late Ms. Melodie, Heather B, and Harmony. They’re all cast in shadows illuminated by a single spotlight, like characters striding into a stage play. The way McCarthy shows dollar bills and Uzi machine guns circling in the air like dreams and nightmares gives “Love’s Gonna Get’cha” a poetic quality and enhances BDP’s classic story rap. —M.R.

This kinetic video by experimental filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński turns Grandmaster Flash and his rebooted mid-Eighties crew (which includes Furious Five alum Kid Creole and Rahiem) into a human game of Perfection, sproinging the group into the air over and over again, matching the beat with rhythmic editing. Complementing another one of the group’s post-“Message” message raps about contemporary chaos and disorder, the band raps as Rybczyński’s bespoke machine launches them alongside boomboxes, speakers, and trash. Two years later, the director would collect the MTV Video Vanguard Award. —C.W.

“Everything you see in this video was completely authentic. There wasn’t any treatment, any budget, any planning,” director Cole Bennett told Genius. “We just went with the flow, and we were seeing how things went.” A mix of the spontaneous and the chaotic, “Catch Me Outside” captures the off-the-cuff wildness of the SoundCloud rap era, with Florida rapper Ski Mask the Slump God bringing a one-man party to the middle of Times Square. Filmed during Bennett’s first trip to New York City, Ski Mask interacts with tourists and dances with a Statue of Liberty street performer (Bennett says Ski put $20 in his tip jar). “With every shot in this video, you didn’t know what to expect. Someone could look at you crazy, or someone could hop in the video and start dancing with Ski,” said Bennett. “So with every shot we took, it was fun because we didn’t really know what was going to happen.” —C.W.

“Get at Me Dog” was how DMX began 1998, a year in which he would make good on his long-simmering hype by releasing two Number One albums and starring in Hype Williams’ hallucinatory Belly. The track’s video, by J. Jesses Smith, does its best to capture an uncontainable talent. DMX rapped as physically as he sounds on record, lunging back and forth toward the audience with every line, falling into a boxer’s shuffle only long enough to catch his breath. His off-hand punctuates each syllable, lifting the crowd at legendary NYC nightspot Tunnel along with each pumped fist. “I knew that ‘Get at Me Dog’ was a hit at the Tunnel, and I knew what that meant,” DMX recalled in 2012. “They told me, ‘When this shit comes on at the Tunnel, motherfuckers go crazy.’ But I’d never been — until I performed there, when we shot the video.” —C.P.

“Triumph” was a victory lap: Four years after releasing their debut, the Staten Island nonet had held together, releasing a string of instant-classic solo records and keeping egos in check for a double LP. How else, then, to declare triumph but with “Triumph”? Six minutes, no hooks, just verse after perfect verse. Shit-hot (and since-disgraced) director Brett Ratner stages this moment with a video of almost psychedelically bad green-screen effects and endless highlights: GZA becoming a star child, Masta Killa giving sight to the blind, RZA showing up in a bee costume. “Triumph” enshrines the unrepeatable apex of the Wu. —C.P. 

The clip for newbie Bronx rapper Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” directed by George Buford in the home borough of hip-hop, offers a perfect example of how to grab the brass ring of rap success in 2023. The song’s 1:44 length makes it perfect for repeat streaming. And Ice virtually guaranteed the video’s virality by releasing it through Worldstar, the popular platform occasionally known for less savory, more pugilistic content. Ice Spice commands the camera by cheekily adjusting her bandeau boob tube and shaking her fanny in high-cut jean shorts in front of the Paya Deli bodega. Simple, suggestive, effective. —M.M.L.

“We wanted to bring slam dancing to rap,” Onyx’s Fredro Starr says in Brian Coleman’s Check the Technique. “Believe it or not, Nirvana was a big influence on us. Red Hot Chili Peppers too.” Hey ho, let’s go: “Slam” is one big mosh pit of grimy Queens hip-hop and hardcore punk, with a room full of crowd-surfing, body-slamming, slap-happy hooligans. The director: Parris Mayhew, from the NYC hardcore band Cro-Mags. “Slam” made these baldhead rappers massive on MTV and broke their classic debut, Bacdafucup. The whole project was influenced by some serious psychedelic chemicals. “While we were recording the album, n***as was on LSD the whole time, straight up,” Fredro said. “We was dropping papers, taking meth tabs, during that whole album. That’s just the creative side of making music. We were like Jimi Hendrix.” —R.S.

In a little gem of fake reality TV, LL Cool J takes his candid camcorder to the streets of New York to film “regular girls” — “I don’t want Ivana,” he says at the clip’s start “I want Tawana.” One of those girls was Leslie “Big Lez” Segar, who would go on to be a storied choreographer and host of Rap City. “[Y]ou don’t expect LL to be someone who’d dance. Not to say he doesn’t have rhythm, but he’s too cool for school! This is ‘Gimme my radio! I’m thugalicious, on the block, Hollis, Queens! I don’t dance. I may bop side to side in my Timberlands,’” Segar told Rock the Bells. “[S]ometimes you have to pull teeth with artists to get them to dance. But he was open, and he was ready and very participatory in regards to whatever the choreography was.” —C.W.

A straightforward battle of the sexes scene, this Neneh Cherry music video — directed by French fashion photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino — might not ordinarily qualify as a hip-hop video at all, if not for the evolution of the genre pushed forward by MC’ing vocalists like Drake, Juice WRLD, Travis Scott, etc. As an early hybrid of the rapping chanteuse, Cherry leads a posse of female feminists speak-singing into a broom handle and taking a cheating man (reportedly rocker Lenny Kravitz) to task about his infidelity in front of a crew of misogynistic men. But her closing salvo takes it: She removes her panties and tosses them to the guys as a drop-the-mic gesture that effectively ends the argument, the song, and the video. —M.M.L.

A simple brick backdrop, goofy dance moves, and Banks — clad in a Mickey Mouse sweater and braided pigtails — spouting obscenities through a gleaming grin. It was a simple image that created a viral moment that felt equal parts endearing and intimidating. Though the black-and-white clip was filmed in Montreal, quick clips of a bodega and Yung Rapunzel’s charming, no-nonsense lyrics brought undeniable NYC energy to this Vincent Tsang-directed video. Canadian musician Lunice, who appears in “212” alongside electronic producer Jacques Greene, told Billboard, “The shoot was a perfect moment of spontaneous creativity. The kind you can’t rehearse or re-formulate.” —J.J.

“What she goes through to create these images, people will never know,” said makeup artist Billy B. while making Missy Elliott’s $2 million blockbuster “She’s a Bitch.” “The prosthetics and the airbrush, makeup, and then two hours of gluing on rhinestones. She’s a trouper.” For Elliott’s first video after returning from the success of 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly, Hype Williams, the director of the most colorful videos of the ’90s, took a sharp turn into an Tron noir world of blacks, grays, and silvers — fewer hues, but no less dazzling. Here Missy emerges from the water with a bedazzled look that’s part bondage, part punk, part Matrix, and all visionary. “Back then every1 thought I was a lil off because I rocked a bald head,” Missy Elliott posted to Twitter, “but me & Hype & [Timbaland] was just decades ahead.” —C.W.

“The Heart Part 1,” from 2010, is all grainy digital footage, convenience stores, and van rides. By “The Heart Part 5,” Kendrick Lamar is wielding state-of-the-art technology to transform into figures old (O.J. Simpson) and new (Jussie Smollett), still spitting minutes-straight bars but now speaking with sweeping conviction for a nation of millions. Lamar and longtime collaborator Dave Free created the clip’s series of deep fakes with the help of Deep Voodoo, a studio launched by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Like other “Heart” tracks, “Part 5” hypes an album but sits outside it; where Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is gnarled and conflicted, “Heart” is sanguine, resolved. This tone even carries into the video’s heart-stopping final moments, when Lamar assumes the form of his late friend Nipsey Hussle. ” “I look at everything as a social experiment,” Free told The New York Times. —C.P.

Here is a surrealist peak behind the curtain of the record industry during hip-hop’s initial commercial boom. The snarky but poignant call-out of shady record executives (embodied by a perfectly cast Gilbert Gottfried), racist stereotypes in media, and commodification of rap culture was among the first of its kind. MC Serch and Prime Minister Pete Nice were unlikely guardians of hip-hop purity, but cameos from respected names in rap including Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav, EPMD, Run-D.M.C.’s D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay, and Def Jam head Russell Simmons provided necessary credibility. Through the lens of rap history, the video is now best remembered primarily for two things: a scene where MC Hammer is stomped out in effigy, and the introduction to the world of Zev Love X, then of rap group KMD, who years later became better known as the elusive underground legend MF Doom. —N.C.

Quite possibly the original bohemian B-boy, Q-Tip set a standard for anti-bling hip-hop with a quartet of A Tribe Called Quest albums from 1990 to 1998. So much so that his first glitzy singles as a solo act—“Vivrant Thing” and “Breathe and Stop”—felt like a jarring commercial grab with Hype Williams-directed clips full of sexy models and beaucoup gluteus maximus jiggling under a fish-eye lens. With decades of hindsight, Q-Tip planting a flag for his relevance in the jiggy era by speaking the lingua franca might have been his smartest move. The bandana holding his Afro in place seems way more Hendrix than 2Pac, as he ambles about in a long leather poncho owning his rep as a hip-hop sex symbol. Eye candy Leila Arcieri (Miss San Francisco 1997) practically launched King magazine and the video vixen era with her appearance here as well.—M.M.L.

Filmed over three 16-hour days at the height of the group’s multi-platinum popularity, “Ready or Not” is widely considered the first rap video to cost over a million dollars, and its production forecasted the eye-popping visual excesses of Y2K hip-hop. In the clip, Pras Michel, Lauryn Hill, and Wyclef Jean are rebels on a “quest for justice,” and dodge military helicopters on ski boats and motorbikes. They also hide out from the Illuminati while rapping in a submarine, courtesy of Universal Studios’ backlot. Veteran music video director Marcus Nispel, who eventually graduated to directing genre flicks like the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, films the trio in shadowy lighting reminiscent of an adventure film. When faced with criticism from fans upset with the big-budget theatrics of “Ready or Not,” Michel responded, “I don’t believe in laws or rules.”–M.R.

The Jora Frantzis-directed visual acknowledges Cardi’s stripper past, and through clips of the rapper breastfeeding, provides glimpses of her maternal present. Pepper in nipple flashes, money guns, and sexy bank tellers, and you have an iconic take on the power of female sexuality in all forms. The video is bolstered by eye-popping fashion choices, like Cardi appearing in a Cleopatra-inspired outfit made entirely of watches — a look Rihanna famously dubbed “the most ghetto shit.” Even though she’s draped in designer looks these days, the Bronx-bred MC has never forgotten her roots, and “Money” doesn’t shy away from highlighting what gives her — and all women — the right to flex. —J.J. 

Let’s pretend for a moment that Friends wasn’t a whitewashed remix of the African-American sitcom Living Single to begin with. For the first five minutes of this clip, directed by Master of None co-creator Alan Yang, an extremely A-list cast (Issa Rae, Tiffany Haddish, Tessa Thompson, Lakeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery, Jerrod Carmichael) shoot the third season Friends episode “The One Where No One’s Ready” beat for beat on the series’ original set. (An opening montage set to Whodini’s “Friends” looks fabulous.) A disillusioned Carmichael eventually wanders off set as Jay-Z’s lyrical critique of hip-hop’s superficiality and creativity begins in the background. Things end poignantly with Carmichael pondering a full moon as the video references the titular inspiration of the Oscar-winning indie drama, Moonlight. Like a lot of the song’s source album, 4:44, “Moonlight” leaves plenty to ponder.—M.M.L.

El-P’s solo debut Fantastic Damage is a deeply cinematic affair, its boom-bap blasted to shit by shifty cyberpunk unease and its narrator a snarling wise-ass who keeps falling face-first into trouble. Brian Beletic’s video for “Deep Space 9mm” follows El-P through a grainy post-9/11 NYC in which violence lurks around every corner, quite literally: cabbies, bar patrons, nuns, even boy scouts pull shimmering red revolvers on the emcee. El-P wrote the record before 9/11, but none of it was intended as prescient: “It’s meant to tap into something that I think lurks underneath it all, all the time,” he told NPR.–C.P.