Jonas Åkerlund: the man behind music’s most iconic videos
Think about the most iconic pop videos to have emerged since the 1990s, and you’ll likely find that a few of them were directed by Jonas Åkerlund, a Swedish filmmaker who has worked with everyone from Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga to Rihanna and Rammstein.
The music video format boomed in popularity in the 1980s when MTV was launched, revolutionising the very concept and transforming it into something decisively more cinematic, and Åkerlund came at the right time – making his first music video in 1988 for Swedish doom rockers Candlemass. Having previously played in the black metal band Bathory, Åkerlund was familiar with the act of making music as much as he was capable of making videos, and his background as a musician certainly helped him to tap into the rhythms required to create unforgettable visual accompaniments.
Throughout the 1990s, Åkerlund predominantly made videos for Roxette, but by the end of the decade, he’d widened his scope, directing the high-octane ‘James Bond Theme’ for Moby and the banned ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ video from The Prodigy. The video really put Åkerlund on the map, even if it was hardly broadcast because of its shocking themes. Shot from a first-person perspective, the video sees a party-goer doing drugs, smashing up DJ equipment, attacking men, getting off with (and even sexually assaulting) various women, yet when they look in the mirror, it’s revealed that this was the POV of a woman.
Designed to shock, the band were initially unhappy with the video, but Åkerlund was convinced that it could be something great, and in the end, it was Keith Flint who came round to the video and gave it the seal of approval. The following year, he was hired to shoot Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ video, which was much less controversial, but iconic nonetheless. He won a Grammy for the video, although it’s arguably not as good as another video he released that year – ‘My Favourite Game’ by The Cardigans.
The video was shot in the Mojave Desert and sees lead singer Nina Persson driving a car and looking effortlessly cool, while other vehicles flip and crash around her. At the end of the song, though, she crashes, and she flies out of the vehicle, and several endings were filmed, like one where she stands up, only to get bonked on the head by a stone, while another sees her walk away unscathed – five different versions of the clip were made, but the most shocking is the one where she appears decapitated, with a dummy head rolling across the ground, covered in blood.
Åkerlund found his artistic vision censored by MTV, but he wasn’t going to dilute his ideas. Over the coming years, he continued to push the boundaries of the music video, and in 2010, he made one of pop’s most unforgettable videos. The director was hired by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé for ‘Telephone’, and what he delivered would be era-defining.
We see Gaga strut into a homoerotic women’s prison, get naked, cover herself in yellow caution tape, and dance with other inmates, only to be freed by Beyoncé, where the video then takes a Thelma and Louise-esque direction – they stop off at a diner to poison a man, but they end up killing everyone inside, not before they can dance, of course.
The colours are bright, the outfits are immaculate, and the Tarantino influence is strong. It’s arguably one of the greatest music videos in the history of pop music. Åkerlund also made Gaga’s iconic ‘Paparazzi’ video, which sees actor Alexander Skarsgård play her boyfriend, pushing her off a balcony and leaving her in a wheelchair, which she eventually gets out of while wearing a bizarre metallic corset and headpiece on crutches.
There are so many more videos that Åkerlund has been responsible for, from Jamiroquai’s ‘Canned Heat’ to ‘Beautiful Day’ by U2, ‘Moves Like Jagger’ by Maroon 5, and ‘I Miss You’ by Blink-182. But who can forget the shocking ‘Pussy’ by Rammstein? In the X-rated clip, the band dressed up as pornographic stereotypes, with the video eventually descending into hardcore porn. There’s plenty of naked women touching themselves and even ejaculation shots from the band at the end of the video. You can only find the edited version on YouTube – if you want to watch the whole thing, you’ve got to hit up a porn website.
When Åkerlund isn’t making controversial music videos, you can find him directing features, too, with his most successful being Lords of Chaos, which captured the rise and fall of the iconic black metal band Mayhem. Still, it’s his music videos that remain his greatest assets, because with everything from ‘Telephone’ to ‘Pussy’, you can’t really deny the impact that Åkerlund has had on the art of the modern music video.
