What were the best rock music videos for each year of the 1980s? It was a decade that set the standard for what the music video can be and we saw the growth explode over the course of the 1980s.

The three rock songs below, all released in the 1980s, were questionable on paper. In practice, though, they worked like magic.

It’s easy to discount how referential music seems to be today. We don’t have the data, so perhaps the 2020s are the era most reliant on nostalgia. But musicians today certainly aren’t the first to ...