80s music videos & the Road Warrior syndrome

1980s America's morbid fascination with its own seemingly inevitable destruction in a nuclear war spilled over into almost every pop culture arena, especially the music video. MTV viewers were treated to a slew of devastated cityscapes strewn with evil mutants and battered guitars that somehow escaped the blasts that destroyed civilization as we know it.

Billy Idol - "Dancing With Myself"
Scandal - "The Warrior"
KISS - "Lick It Up"
Tom Petty - "You Got Lucky"
The Police - "Synchronicity II"

Am I leaving anyone out?

Tina Turner - "We Don't Need Another Hero", from Max Mad Beyond Thunderdome (or whatever the hell it was called), with real Maxian footage and all. I'm glad I was TV-free for most of that decade.

ZZ Top - TV Dinners. Set in a bomb shelter inhabited by a leather-jacketed cycle survivor.
Nena - 99 Luft Ballons. Post-nuke stroll through the ruins of Berlin?
Asia - Go. From 1985's Astra, cyberbondage-clad hottie with courier gig. Definitely dystopic, maybe postapocalyptic.

Of course, that was at least back when videos would have a theme or (gasp!) even a plot.

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mrichich: Love is a battlefield was pretty clearly World War II. I don't remember the Europe video; I must've blocked it. :-)

admiralh has quite properly corrected me: the video in question is Shadows of the Night, not Love is a Battlefield (which was a 1980's girl-runaway shtick). Thanks!

Oooh--Rush's Distant Early Warning with the Dr. Strangelove overtones, perhaps. . . Europe's The Final Countdown? This is fun!

It seems I could think up a lot more if I had a chance. Perhaps Pat Benatar's Love Is A Battlefield (Note: I've had two people tell me that they think Love is a Battlefield's video is about Nazis. That is Shadows of the Night. Love is clearly Pat in Flashdance clothes and lots of 80's choreography. Don't believe me? Check out www.benatar.com and look at the videos yourself.)

Amazingly, nobody has yet included the video for Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys', which has the singular distinction of being directed by George Miller, director of 'The Road Warrior', himself.

In a much less specifically 'Road Warrior' sense, Chris Cunningham's hilarious, brilliant video for Aphex Twin's 'Come to Daddy' is a modern revisiting of this hoary old theme. Nowadays, post-modernism makes it hard for people to associate muscle-bound, leather-clad, metal-studded oiled young men with heterosexual machismo.