MTV Rides: These 10 '90s music videos had the coolest cars

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The 1990s unleashed a new generation of music video auteurs onto the airwaves. No longer a fresh medium, these experienced directors and visual artists were eager to push the limits of what could be accomplished during the short span of a pop song, and it was also the last hurrah for massive production budgets and a nearly free-hand in terms of creativity as labels did their best to stand out during the glory years of MTV.

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Naturally, a good portion of the best videos of the 1990s put automobiles front and centre — but often repurposing them in ways that might not have been immediately obvious. Here are our picks for the ’90s music videos with the coolest cars and concepts.

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MTV Rides: These 10 '90s music videos had the coolest cars Back to video

Beastie Boys — “Sabotage”

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Is there a more perfect ’70’s TV cop show homage than the video that accompanied “Sabotage” off of the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication album? Inspired by a photo shoot that the group did with legendary director Spike Jonze, the trio had long been looking for an outlet for their undercover antics and found a willing collaborator with the filmmaker who had a penchant for exploring out-there video concepts.

Equal as important as the rappers starring in “Sabotage” is the car that slides, jumps, and smashes its way through the streets of Los Angeles. The ’80s-era square-body Ford Crown Victoria LTD is the perfect blend of anonymity, V8 menace, and unkillable toughness that saw these boxy beasts fill law enforcement fleets for decades. The specific example purchased for the shoot was on its last legs, so the Beasties — who did all of the driving themselves — had no qualms about hooning it to death. The video itself was filmed guerrilla style with no permits, which further adds to the rough and rushed look of the car chases and stunts that make it one of the best music videos of the ’90s.

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Chemical Brothers — “Block Rockin’ Beats”

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One of the benefits of being an electronic music artist is that you’re often freed from the requirement to actually perform in your videos. The Chemical Brothers have had a fantastic secondary career providing soundtracks to MTV mini-movies that range from cinematic to quirky to comic, all while appearing in only the briefest of cameos (and sometimes just showing up as a framed photo in a high school trophy cabinet ).

For “Block Rockin’ Beats,” the plot centres around a couple who are on the run from…the cops? Government agents? The mob? It’s not clear, exactly, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter as they spend a good portion of their screen time fleeing from their pursuers in a Porsche 911, which is more than a match for the Mercedes-Benz E-Class giving chase. They might end up executed in an alley at the end of the video (a twist that was excised from North American broadcasts), but not before one of the pair flips the bird at a speed camera while the other blasts through at 90-mph in the Porsche, all to trigger the radar and send the picture straight to “The Man.”

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Smashing Pumpkins — “1979”

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Nostalgia is a helluva drug, and that’s just as true when looking back on the music videos that themselves are a paean to a long-gone era. The song “1979” by the Smashing Pumpkins describes the near universal suburban boredom that transcends generations. These were days when just driving around the neighbourhood from noon to midnight was something you did with your friends because it got you out of the house, let you blast your tunes, and provided at least the illusion of freedom when faced with a future that often felt as stifling and scary as it did limitless.

The chosen chariot for the teens portrayed in “1979” is a 1972 Dodge Charger, a vehicle that zooms through a recreation of the Chicago subdivisions that lead singer Billy Corgan grew up in. Corgan himself performs from the back bench of the Charger in between internal camera pans that provide a 360-degree view of the days when you’d pack every seat in the car with as many friends as you could on a summer cruising quest that never seemed to end, until one day, all of a sudden, it did.

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Jamiroquai — “Cosmic Girl”

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Jamiroquai’s lead singer Jay Kay is nearly as famous for his inability to keep a valid licence as he is for lending his voice to the British band’s platinum albums. Notorious for speeding (and for capturing the top of the leader board on Top Gear ‘s test track in 2008), he owns a constantly shifting collection of exotic cars, including a rare Ferrari Enzo.

“Cosmic Girl” was released as a single in 1996, and it’s no surprise that the video features a who’s who of 90s-era supercars. A flotilla of exotica, Italian and otherwise, barrel down the roads that wind through Spain’s Cabo de Gata national park, highlighted by a Ferrari F40 belonging to (and driven by) Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason (another noted musical gearhead) and a purple Lamborghini Diablo SE30 that was significantly damaged by a stunt driver who smashed the camera off of the windshield midway through filming (at which point Kay took over hotshoe duties for the remainder of filming).

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R.E.M. — “Everybody Hurts”

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The music video for R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” makes use of the automobile in a way few other artists have ever attempted: as stationary prisons that seek to contain not just their drivers and passengers, but also the hopes, fears, passions, and sadnesses that are locked up inside them as well.

Set in a traffic jam in San Antonio, the camera moves from one trapped set of souls to the next, with subtitles providing context for the introspective, and occasionally chilling thoughts ascribed to the vehicle occupants. Eventually, singer Michael Stipe emerges silently from the car containing his bandmates and climbs up on top of a bright yellow hunk of Malaise metal, an act that eventually convinces the entire highway to abandon their own immobile rides and walk down the road toward whatever uncertain destination might await them.

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The video won a Video Music Award from MTV in 1994, an achievement that so enraged the Beastie Boys (whose “Sabotage” had been completely shut out) that Adam Yauch stormed the stage in character as Nathaniel Hornblower in protest .

Metallica — “Fuel”

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Any video that opens with a bias ply drag tire deforming under the awesome pressures of a burnout is worthy of inclusion on our list of the best 90s music videos. This unusually low-key video pairs a short-haired Metallica performance with repeated images of muscle cars staging, doing smoke shows, and then tearing down an improvised quarter mile track in the dead of night as crowds of scofflaws look on.

James Hetfield, the band’s frontman, is a longtime gearhead who has commissioned a number of old school hot rod builds to be added to his personal automotive collection. The vehicles on display in the video for “Fuel” are more modest, however, ranging from early ’70s Mopars and Chevrolets to G-body GMs to full-on wheelie bar pro stock cars. And tires. Lots and lots of spinning tires.

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Radiohead — “Karma Police”

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The idea of a hulking automobile as a relentless pursuer is one that’s been explored time and again on the big and the small screen, with highlights including Steven Spielberg’s Duel and of course the teen horror classic Joyride .

Radiohead’s video for “Karma Police” took the trope in a somewhat different direction by putting viewers in the perspective of the vehicle rather than the victim. The majority of the narrative has us looking out the windshield of a 1976 Chrysler New Yorker as it slowly chases down a man caught in its headlights until he finally stumbles to his knees from exhaustion. It’s here that he turns toward his tormenter, and the car, for reasons unknown, beats a hasty retreat while leaving a stream of highly flammable gasoline in its wake. The rest of the story writes itself, but at least singer Thom Yorke escapes the back seat before the entire land yacht is immolated.

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The idea for the video was actually second-hand, having been cast off by Marilyn Manson after director Jonathan Glazer put the concept together in response to his request for visuals that resembled David Lynch’s Lost Highway , and indeed the sequence does bear some resemblance to that movie’s opening credits.

Spice Girls — “Say You’ll Be There”

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What happens when you mix the Spice Girls, a desert, and a few iconic ’60s classics? You end up with the video for “Say You’ll Be There,” one of the better songs off of the Girl Power group’s debut album.

The entire shoot revolved around giving each of the Spice Girls their own identity based on Russ Meyers-style exploitation films, but once you start layering characters (Trixie Firecracker! Katrina Highkick!) on top of characters (Scary Spice! Sporty Spice!), the pop culture references start to get a little muddled. Instead, the video is most memorable for the Dodge Charger Daytona, a late-’60s suicide door Ford Thunderbird, and a Chevrolet Corvair rampside pickup. Oh, and that male model who gets tied up, bondage-style, and tortured by some kind of giant mirror.

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And the space boomerangs.

Primal Scream — “Kowalski”

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Primal Scream was a band that had zero issue morphing its sound to fit its current range of interests, or the shifting tastes of the pop music industry. When the Vanishing Point album was released at the tail end of the ’90s, it contained a lot less rock and a lot more electronic beats than their previous efforts.

It also featured the song “Kowalski,” and paired with the album’s title, there was no way the group was going to resist putting a Dodge Challenger front and centre in the music video for the single. Sure, the car was the wrong colour to serve as a direct homage to the 1970s existential drama from which it took its name, and we don’t remember Devon Aoki or Kate Moss playing kidnappers in the original either, but remember that this was American culture filtered across the Atlantic and repurposed for a British audience. It’s the thought that counts.

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Alanis Morissette — “Ironic”

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What’s the most Canadian music video of all-time? Our vote goes to “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette, a clip that’s so achingly specific to the experience of driving during the nation’s winter season that it almost comes across as a rejected Heritage Minute.

Anyone who ever had to coax a hunk of aging Detroit iron through the ice and snow will immediately be able to smell the frozen, outgassing plastics and feel the chill of the stiff velour upholstery in the 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V driven by Morissette in the video. With a different Alanis sitting in each corner of the car, it’s a ’90s alt-rock road trip through Canada’s collective subconscious, complete with a sequence where Alanis #2 gets covered in the white stuff after rolling down her window just a bit too far, and then of course the requisite breakdown on the shoulder that is the fate of all clapped out winter beaters.