Beyoncé's 25 best music videos, ranked

As imagery, the “Crazy In Love” video is undeniably one of the most iconic moments in Beyoncé’s long career. Her first proper solo single, it introduced Beyoncé to the world, and the simple white tank-demin shorts look remains one closely associated with her. But as a music video? It’s just fine. It sees Bey strutting and dancing in different spots and wearing outfits. It’s perfectly okay, but as her career would progress, she would outdo herself again and again.

Compared to Beyoncé’s solo work, the videos of Destiny’s Child are fairly boilerplate Y2K-era pop stuff. But pop music is inherently formulaic, and the thrill of good pop is when someone nails the form. “Bootylicious” is just that, a massive, colorful, choreographed video made for heavy TRL rotation. Debuting in an era that prized thinness over anything, the song was something of a rallying cry. Even 22 years later, the body diversity on display here feels pretty progressive.

If there’s any “problem” with Lemonade, it’s that the album and the visuals are so entwined that collectively the songs and videos add up to more than the sum of their parts. When you watch them individually, though, the videos can feel a bit neutralized. Still, “Sorry” holds up by furthering the album’s Southern gothic aesthetic while also managing to stand on its own as a single. Beyoncé’s robotic moves in the track’s outro are some of her most hypnotic; even at her most furious, she’s still smooth.

For a Beyoncé release, Black Is King—the visual album she released alongside Disney’s 2019 The Lion King remake—was fairly unheralded. Despite being released in the middle of a pandemic on the then-new streaming platform Disney+, the project still contains some of Bey’s most dazzling visual work. Case in point: “Mood 4 Eva,” a joyful romp through the Beverly House.

If there’s a defining image from the Lemonade era, it’s Beyoncé in the yellow Cavalli dress, wielding a baseball bat, gleefully smashing everything in her path. When listening to/watching the whole album, “Hold Up” is the moment when the narrative clicks into place; even Beyoncé can be the subject of infidelity and can be hurt like anyone else. But even at her lowest, she still lives what would be a fantasy to the rest of us.

With Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album, there was a shift away from the more traditional, studio-filmed music videos that defined the first decade of her career toward visuals that feel more cinematic. “Jealous” is hardly the most iconic video from the album, but it does feature one of her most arresting video moments. In the final minute of the song, the camera follows an emotional Beyoncé as she simply walks down the street. The real pedestrians on St. Marks Place predictably freak out, providing maybe the most authentic glimpse we’ve seen of Beyoncé, the person, rather than the performer.

In 2003, Beyoncé was kicking off her solo career by proving not just that she was a consummate entertainer, but an all-around It Girl. The video for “Naughty Girl” has Bey glammed up like a disco-era Barbie, all the while turning the It Boy of the moment, Usher, into her own video girl. The nightclub setting and the dancing silhouettes feel like an early test run of the success that would come in the following decade—but more on that later.

“Apeshit” is pure flex. After Lemonade had fans and the entire world wondering about the state of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s union, they spent the next two years proving that whatever had transpired was in the past. They welcomed twins; Jay released an apology album, 4:44; the couple performed together during Bey’s landmark Coachella set. Their joint Everything Is Love album was a victory lap, and “Apeshit,” the project’s sole video, finds them celebrating in the Louvre. Renting out the museum to film a music video is a feat in and of itself, but the message is more powerful and provocative. This couple, and their work, demands to be in the conversation about what any curator defines as fine art.

I Am… Sasha Fierce is Beyoncé’s most trend-chasing album, debuting in the electropop boom of 2008. As an album it doesn’t hold up quite as well as her other work, but there are still plenty of standout moments to be found, and “Sweet Dreams” is a big one. The track feels like a throwback to the darker, ’80s-inspired Euro synths, and the video’s trippy green screen matches the theme. A Metropolis-esque costume for Beyoncé also got a reprise in some of the imagery for Renaissance.

Though technically only a featured artist on “Feeling Myself,” Beyoncé is absolutely everywhere in the video. Cruelly kept as a Tidal exclusive, the clip is a pseudo-historical document of the moment when Coachella culture and Instagram culture smashed into each other. Bey and Nicki Minaj look like they’re having such a good time together that it almost gets you over the insane amount of FOMO you feel watching it.

Beyoncé videos are often fun, but rarely are they this loose. For “7/11,” a bonus track off the Beyoncé album, Bey parties with her girls in a Los Angeles hotel (reportedly, the über-bougie Beverly Wilshire). While the track itself is just fine, the video is a pure, goofy endorphin rush. On an album where Bey preached embracing imperfection, “7/11" sees her take it to a logical, loopy endpoint.

Shot mostly on drones in the California desert, “Find Your Way Back” is a gorgeous psychedelic trip. Though not technically a music video proper, this clip from Black Is King sets off much of the story’s motion, with Beyoncé taking on the role of an ancestor to guide a young prince on his journey. This is a role that Bey sells well, seeming to embody the sun, the moon, and indeed the entire universe.

Leave it to Beyoncé to relegate one of her most fun, cutting-edge music videos to a bonus track. The “Grown Woman” video is one of her many autobiographical celebrations, reveling in her success and how far she’s come with throwback footage of pre-Destiny’s Child summer bootcamps, digitally altered to lip-sync the new lyrics. That feat of technology aside, the video feels very 2013, complete with a VHS filter over a pseudo-vaporwave aesthetic. It may be one of the few times the aesthetic has been used by an artist of this stature in a way that makes sense, calling back memories of an analog, 1980s childhood.

“Why Don’t You Love Me” was produced by The Bama Boyz, and the story goes that while they thought the instrumental might be too weird for Beyoncé at the time, they sent it to her sister Solange to write over anyway. The song was a bit of a left-turn from the bullet-proof pop of the “Single Ladies” era, but it became a big clue about where Beyoncé would go in the 2010s: stranger, funkier, more vulnerable places. The video sees Bey alone in a Leave It To Beaver-esque household, failing to complete the chores of an ordinary housewife. The message is clear: if that traditional mode of womanhood is what you want from her, you will be disappointed.

Part of the reason Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 erotic masterpiece Basic Instinct is so thrilling is because you’re never quite sure whether Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell killed Johnny Boz. In the “Ring The Alarm” video, Beyoncé’s take on the story, she definitely killed someone. She is mad as hell, thrashing around, kicking and screaming. At the time, that the song and video was about Jay-Z’s rumored infidelity with Rihanna. The video was clocked as an attempt to get in on the tabloid cycle, and it probably worked. When Bey isn’t thrashing, she’s doing some of her best acting to date, looking incredibly sad and sympathetic. If the rumors aren’t true, she’s doing a great job of pretending.

If “Ring The Alarm” was Beyoncé responding to rumors about her and Jay-Z, “Upgrade U” was her contemporary comment on how much fun it was to be them. The video has the tacky opulence of a Trump Tower bathroom, giving the impression that the couple’s Midas touch has turned everything to gold, including Bey herself. The video also gets bonus points for Beyoncé’s goofy Jay-Z impression, mimicking his posture and lip curl until the real Hov shows up halfway through. There are no imitations here.

Blue Ivy Carter was born into music royalty, and her family has always presented her as such. “Brown Skin Girl” is an ode to Black beauty, and the video is dedicated to presenting it. But it’s the inclusion of Blue (along with Kelly Rowland, Noami Campbell, Lupita N’yongo, and many more) that makes this broad topic personal to Beyoncé. The clip is relatively simple, letting the love and beauty speak for itself incredibly effectively.

Filmed in the third trimester of her pregnancy with Blue Ivy, “Countdown” is a feast for the senses. While the track itself is one of Beyoncé’s most unique, the video garnered criticism after choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker accused her of plagiarizing her choreography; she later said she was neither “angry or honored.” While this may turn some people off from the video, its other reference points—Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, Twiggy, Dreamgirls—come together to create something both timeless and unlike anything else that existed in 2011. The video is absolutely frantic and overjoyed; she has her man, her career, and her baby, who could ask for anything more?

While Lemonade is known as Beyoncé’s marital strife album, it also zooms out to connect that pain and betrayal to a larger history of being a Black woman in the United States. “Love Drought” comes after Beyoncé has turned from pure rage toward a quest for understanding, wondering what she could have done to deserve her situation. Visually, the film is widely understood to use this moment to reference the Igbo Landing, an 1803 instance of slaves killing their captors and committing group suicide in defiance of remaining enslaved. The clip is hard to detangle from the rest of Lemonade as a standalone video, but the imagery is so striking that even without the full context it still goes down as one of Beyoncé’s best.

Beyoncé has never been shy about shouting out her hometown of Houston, but “No Angel” fully welcomes the audience into this world with a cinematic tour of the city’s Third and Fourth Wards. The video is one of her least choreographed and most naturalistic, meditating on Houston’s residents and several of its homegrown rap stars. Regardless of subject matter, Bey’s music and videos often propel, explosively, forward. The pause is notable; her hometown is something she doesn’t seek to run from, but embrace with both arms.

“Blow” is an ecstatically horny, disco-tinged track about marital love. There aren’t too many of those. Beyoncé combines the images of MTV-era excess—the big hair, the neon lighting, so much dry ice—with nightclub and roller rink settings; places where you go to have fun and blow off some steam. A lot of Beyoncé’s sexiest tracks up to this point—“Naughty Girl,” “Cater 2 U”—centered on what she wanted to do to make someone else happy. But “Blow” is specifically about what Bey wants done to her, in no uncertain terms. It’s a demand to make her feel good, and it’s a good look on her.

If there’s one image people know of Beyoncé, it’s her in black and white, flanked by two dancers, in the “Single Ladies” video. The clip was one of the first viral music videos, and the choreography was parodied again and again. The images are effective, not just because of how immaculately choreographed and shot they are, but because of the way they cleverly play with Bey’s own history and iconography. She was part of a famous three-woman lineup, and she’s with them here, but also standing alone. Her hand, sheathed in a chastity glove, is a weapon as much as a treasure to be protected. The choreography, inspired by a Bob Fosse routine synced up to an Unk song in a viral video, also aligns with Beyoncé’s own career: an old-school, song-and-dance performer with a hip-hop sensibility.

Had she been born 40 years earlier, Beyoncé would have made one hell of a Bob Fosse starlet. The proof is in “Get Me Bodied,” a riff on the famous “Rich Man’s Frug” dance number from Sweet Charity. Reuniting with Destiny’s Child members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, Beyoncé shuts down a nightclub, stretching the track to twice its normal length for a blustering, play-along dance number. The video is a bit of a relic from the earliest chapter of her solo career, when the artist was in her 20s and set on world domination. As a video, it’s the high-water mark of that era.

In Beyoncé’s videography, there really is a before BEYONCE the album and an after. In the after era, the videos got more artistic, more natural, more creative. Off this album, “Partition” remains the crown jewel. The clip is a seduction, not unlike the one Bey performed a decade earlier in “Naughty Girl,” but the advancement in the artist’s vision and message is obvious. “Partition” is the fantasy of Beyoncé as both a lover and a performer, stalking and seducing Jay-Z. The performance is almost frightening; the shot of Beyoncé creeping in front of headlights is positively chilling. Her silhouette on the chair at the Crazy Horse club in Paris is as iconic as any image she’s made before or after. Watching this video in 2013 felt Earth-shattering, and 10 years later it remains a work of art.

Sometimes the most obvious choice is the correct one: “Formation” is Beyoncé’s best music video. Directed by Melania Matsoukas, “Formation” feels in some ways like a culmination, not just of Beyoncé’s career, but of American, and specifically Southern Black American, history and culture. For every shot referencing tragedy—a slave plantation, a flooded New Orleans, a Black child before a crowd of police—there is a moment of exaltation and joy: parades, church worshippers, and yes, Beyoncé performing. Beyoncé has never been shy about making her reference points known, but “Formation” does far more than just woo an audience with familiarity. She is part of this history, both by birth, and because she wants to be. So much of Beyoncé’s career has been about collecting and curating cultural history to preserve and protect it, and there is no better single instance of that than “Formation.”