History Main / ConceptVideo

** The video for Christine [=McVie's=] "Love Will Show Us How" is also about the making of a music video for the song. HilarityEnsues.

* Music/SmashingPumpkins' video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOG3eus4ZSo&ab_channel=SmashingPumpkinsVEVO "Tonight Tonight"]] is a direct homage to SilentMovie pioneer Creator/GeorgesMelies.

* Music/TinieTempah's Wonderman video, basing itself on a kind of 'Bionic Man' superhero origin story, parodying most related tropes (Including having Ellie Goulding as a HotScientist throughout).

* Music/TheRollingStones's "Under Cover of Night": Man tries to sneak out of fascist Latin-American country.

* Music/MichaelJackson is one of the kings, though ''not'' the originator, of this type of video.

** "Remember the Time": He's a magician who tries to rekindle the flame with an old lover... who is now married to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

** "The Great Beyond" combines this with VideoFullOfFilmClips: The band is doing a live [=TV=] broadcast/recording session interrupted by commercials (clips from the film the song was written for, ''Film/ManOnTheMoon'') -- then Michael Stipe discovers the FourthWall: tap the camera lens, and any [=TV=] broadcasting them shakes...it ends when he smashes the wall and they emerge on a street one of the [=TV=]s was sent scooting along.

** One of the videos for "The World Tonight" is Paul playing with Linda outdoors--and I don't mean musically. (It's clean, though.)

** "Experiment IV", a horror movie pastiche in which a bunch of government scientists in a spooky military facility, including Dawn French and a pre-''Series/{{House}}'' Hugh Laurie, create an unstoppable sonic weapon. As you expected it might, the weapon, played by Kate Bush in a ghost outfit, rampages around and kills everyone horribly. Hoorah!
** "Cloudbusting" - this one is based on the life of Wilhelm Reich. The reclusive scientist pursued by naughty government types is played by Donald Sutherland, Kate Bush plays his eight-year old son (in a hilariously unconvincing child costume) and H.R. Giger designed the very cool rain machine.
** "Hounds of Love" - a pastiche Hitchcock thriller.

** As are All is Full of Love (lesbian incest robots being deconstructed), Cocoon (a naked woman being wrapped in a thread secreting from her nipples), Where is the Line (blob thingies attacking a pinecone), Triumph of a Heart (about a woman leaving her cat husband to go out partying, then coming back home with a hangover), Wanderlust (going travelling on a buffalo in a river with a rather aggressive backpack) and Army of Me (who knows).

* "Take On Me" by Music/{{Aha}}.
* Concept videos with no budget or plot: "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles & "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes.

* Music/SmashingPumpkins's video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOG3eus4ZSo&ab_channel=SmashingPumpkinsVEVO "Tonight Tonight"]] is a direct homage to SilentMovie pioneer Creator/GeorgesMelies.

* ''Music/SmashingPumpkins'': the video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOG3eus4ZSo&ab_channel=SmashingPumpkinsVEVO "Tonight Tonight"]] is a direct homage to SilentMovie pioneer Creator/GeorgesMelies.

** 1979's "D.J." contrasts the public life of a StepfordSmiler radio deejay with the mental breakdown he's undergoing in private.
** 1979's "Look Back in Anger" has him as an artist who finds that touching a portrait of himself as an angel affects ''his'' face instead of the portrait's.
** 1980's "Music/AshesToAshes" is a terror-enriched video which presents Major Tom's adventures as hallucinations of a man bound up [[CuckoosNest in an asylum]]. (The concept is loose enough that it also works as a SurrealMusicVideo.)
** 1984's ''Jazzin' for Blue Jean'', like ''Ghosts'', qualifies as a ShortFilm -- it's a comic tale of a CelebrityLie that features Bowie in two roles.
** 1997's "I'm Afraid of Americans" has Bowie fleeing the "Johnny" of the song...but is this would-be killer just a figment of his imagination?

* Music/DepecheMode's videos started pretty badly, [[TheNineties until]] Creator/AntonCorbijn introduced a more concept-driven impetus ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0AKJMGxwpE "Enjoy the Silence"]] being probably the most iconic from his era.)
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1of3nildR4 "Useless"]] looks like anormal just-the-band-playing video, [[SubvertedTrope until you reach the end]].
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K65PQiFfsrU Home's]] vouyeristic alien.

** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBG7P-K-r1Y Everlong]] tells a story involving bizarre dreams from which the dreamer can connect back to reality by way of a phone call. Also Dave Grohl's giant bitchslap of death. Combined with ''Franchise/EvilDead''.

** "The Great Beyond" combines this with VideoFullOfFilmClips: The band is doing a live [=TV=] broadcast/recording session interrupted by commercials (clips from the film the song was written for, ''Man on the Moon'') -- then Michael Stipe discovers the FourthWall: tap the camera lens, and any [=TV=] broadcasting them shakes...it ends when he smashes the wall and they emerge on a street one of the [=TV=]s was sent scooting along.
** The video for ''Man-Sized Wreath'' features an enigmatic figure being pursued by animated squares, playing a PacManFever - type video game, and finally imitating a certain Tianmen square protester, with a limousine composed of the aforementioned squares replacing the tank. It's... [[MindScrew odd]].

* Much of Music/{{Queen}}'s video for "I Want To Break Free" was taken up by a sequence which recast the band in drag as a parody of the British soap ''Series/CoronationStreet''.
** Queen's video for "A Kind of Magic" casts Freddie Mercury as a magician and Brian May, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor as bums living in an abandoned theater. In the middle segment, they are transformed into the actual band by ThePowerOfRock.

* The famous video for Music/{{Radiohead}}'s "Just" has the band playing in a room while, outside, passers-by stop and ask a man why he's lying down in the street. The conversations are related via {{subtitles}}.
** Radiohead has had several other concept videos as well. "Karma Police," from ''Music/OKComputer'' for example, is about a man on foot being pursued down a country road in the middle of the night, as seen from the perspective of the driver chasing him.

** 'Jesus He Knows Me' features the band as televangelists all asking for money. (A clip at the end parodies Michael Jackson's own dance at the end of 'Black or White'.)
** 'Invisible Touch' is a mix of PerformanceVideo and the boys just messing about.

* Music/{{Journey}}'s Steve Perry did two, the first, "Oh Sherrie", in which he gets fed up with his director's pretentious [[strike:Shakespeare]] HeroicFantasy-inspired ConceptVideo, stomps off the set, and sings the song to his girlfriend instead. The second is "Strung Out", a prequel to "Oh Sherrie" in which he meets the pretentious director and the clueless record company representative, and they rail-road him into the ConceptVideo idea.

* Music/BestFriend by Music/FosterThePeople tells the story of a struggling supermodel who furthers her career by [[ToServeMan swallowing her fellow supermodels whole]], and taking on attractive features of the women she ate. This starts to slowly warp her until she's unrecognizable and inhuman looking, [[spoiler: and eventually leads to her death when she [[SpitOutAShoe chokes on the dress]] of one of her victims]].

* Music/{{Genesis}} did a few of these too.

* Music/{{3 Doors Down}} has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpfhcljJ9bQ "It's Not My Time"]]. The video starts with the car's dashboard clock ticking over from 10:12 to 10:13, as a mother and her child pull out at a traffic crossing, only for a truck to barrel towards the side of their car. The screen whites out, and cuts to a man standing on a building across town, looking at his smart phone as it ticks over from 10:08 to 10:09. The video then becomes a RaceAgainstTheClock , cutting between the man doing LeParkour moves to get over cars and fences and between buildings, as the video keeps showing clocks getting ever closer to the destined time. The man is desperately running down the street as the dashboard clock ticks over, throwing himself in front of the car JustInTime as the truck passes by inches behind him.

* {{Nickelback}}'s [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JQiEs32SqQ "Savin' Me"]] is about a man who gets pulled out of the way of a bus by a man we don't get a good look at, who immediately disappears into the crowd afterwards. The man who was saved starts noticing that people have numbers over their heads, and tries to figure out what they are. These mostly are very large numbers, but eventually he spots some paramedics wheeling an old woman out of a building, with a very low number over her head, [[DeathsHourglass rapidly counting down to zero]]. Wandering the streets, wondering what to do, he sees a young woman walking to her car, and spots her large number start rapidly losing digits and closing in on zero. He rushes over to pull her away from the car moments before a suspended object overhead falls down and crushes it. He heads off into the crowd afterwards, leaving the woman looking around in confusion as [[HereWeGoAgain numbers start appearing over everyone's head]].
* 3DoorsDown has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpfhcljJ9bQ "It's Not My Time"]]. The video starts with the car's dashboard clock ticking over from 10:12 to 10:13, as a mother and her child pull out at a traffic crossing, only for a truck to barrel towards the side of their car. The screen whites out, and cuts to a man standing on a building across town, looking at his smart phone as it ticks over from 10:08 to 10:09. The video then becomes a RaceAgainstTheClock , cutting between the man doing LeParkour moves to get over cars and fences and between buildings, as the video keeps showing clocks getting ever closer to the destined time. The man is desperately running down the street as the dashboard clock ticks over, throwing himself in front of the car JustInTime as the truck passes by inches behind him.

* Nickelback's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JQiEs32SqQ Savin' Me]] is about a man who gets pulled out of the way of a bus by a man we don't get a good look at, who immediately disappears into the crowd afterwards. The man who was saved starts noticing that people have numbers over their heads, and tries to figure out what they are. These mostly are very large numbers, but eventually he spots some paramedics wheeling an old woman out of a building, with a very low number over her head, [[DeathsHourglass rapidly counting down to zero]]. Wandering the streets, wondering what to do, he sees a young woman walking to her car, and spots her large number start rapidly losing digits and closing in on zero. He rushes over to pull her away from the car moments before a suspended object overhead falls down and crushes it. He heads off into the crowd afterwards, leaving the woman looking around in confusion as [[HereWeGoAgain numbers start appearing over everyone's head]].

* Depeche Mode's videos started pretty badly, [[TheNineties until]] Creator/AntonCorbijn introduced a more concept-driven impetus ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0AKJMGxwpE "Enjoy the Silence"]] being probably the most iconic from his era.)

** And ever since ''Series/TerminatorTheSarahConnorChronicles'', it's [[ReverseFunnyAneurysm kind of hilarious]].

* Creator/EdKowalczyk has a three-part story about a man who's hanged, and wanders around as a ghost in the videos for "Seven", "Angels on a Razor" and "The One".

* Stabbing Westward's "Shame" alternates footage of the band playing in a rehearsal space with subtitled scenes of a woman trying to escape her psychotic stalker ex-boyfriend (fitting its ObsessionSong lyrics). Despite being full of creepy and dramatic moments, there's a humorous TwistEnding - throughout the rehearsal space scenes, band members keep covertly mouthing things and gesturing to each other, then leaving the room, eventually leaving lead singer Christopher Hall to play the song by himself... [[spoiler: It turns out the entire plot was a [[ShowWithinAShow movie-within-a-music-video]], and everyone in the band decided to ditch practice to see it in the theater]]

* Stabbing Westward's "Shame" alternates footage of the band playing in a rehearsal space with subtitled scenes of a woman trying to escape her psychotic stalker ex-boyfriend (fitting its ObsessionSong lyrics). Despite being full of creepy and dramatic moments, there's a humorous TwistEnding - throughout the rehearsal space scenes, band members keep covertly mouthing things and gesturing to each other, then leaving the room, eventually leaving lead singer Christopher Hall to play the song by himself... [[spoiler: It turns out the entire plot was a [[ShowWithinAShow movie-within-a-music-video]], which everyone in the band decided to sneak out of rehearsal to watch in the theater]]

* Depeche Mode's videos started pretty badly, [[TheNineties until]] Creator/AntonCorbijn introduced a more concept-driven impetus ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0AKJMGxwpE "Enjoy the Silence]"] probably the most iconic from his era.)

** Two of her other videos — "Luchshye" and "Goodbye" — are also connected to each other, although the connection between the two is much looser than the one between the aforementioned trilogy. They tell a story about a different fictionalized version of Elvira, and are more action-packed compared to the previous narrative, though just as compelling.

** Three of her videos — ''Devochka Na Reyvye'', ''Zaraza'', and ''Khorosho Bez Tebya''/''Brillianty'' — are connected and tell a compelling story about a fictionalized version of Elvira and her relationships.
** Two of her other videos — ''Luchshye'' and ''Goodbye'' — are also connected to each other, although the connection between the two is much looser than the one between the aforementioned trilogy. They tell a story about a different fictionalized version of Elvira, and are more action-packed compared to the previous narrative, though just as compelling.

* Dethklok's Thunderhorse. It tells the story of a barbarian (Played by Nathan) who recieves word that his queen is being held captive and defiled by an evil dude (Skwisgaar). So he rushes to save her, killing the guards (played by the rest of the band) in the process.
** Murmaider, which is about mermaid murder, tells the story of a group of mermaids who murder some other creatures and their eggs, so a demon mermaid murders them, then the only survivor attacks the demon one.