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[Liam.k.]

03. Madonna, "Justify My Love"

"A four-minute homage to French cinema that snuck its way into the pop charts, the black-and-white clip for Madonna's woozy devotional "Justify My Love" featured bondage play and group sex amidst its dreamy tableau. "I didn't have any concept at all, except the idea that [Madonna] was arriving in the hotel tired, broken; and when she was going to leave the hotel, she was full of life, she was full of energy, full of everything," director Jean-Baptiste Mondino told Rolling Stone. Madonna's "energy source" proved to be so outré for 1990 that MTV refused to show it, leaving ABC's Nightline – and the revived concept of the "video single" – to pick up the slack. "Why is it," Madonna told The New York Times as the controversy blew up, "that people are willing to go to a movie and watch someone get blown to bits for no reason and nobody wants to see two girls kissing or two men snuggling? I think the video is romantic and loving and has humor in it."



13. Madonna, "Express Yourself"

David Fincher's 1989 video for Madonna's second Like A Prayer single is an homage to Fritz Lang's dystopian Metropolis, although the eroticism is kicked up a notch or 10; while workers in an imposing building's nether regions grind gears and drip with sweat, Madonna engages in a bit of a costume show, playing chilly diva, gender-bent orator, and rich man's plaything. The happy ending – in which a vulnerable Madonna gives herself up to one of the beautiful, muscular men seen toiling down below – is liberatory and pretty hot, repurposing Lang's epigraph "Without the heart, there can be no understanding between the hand and the mind" into a call for sexual freedom.