Rhythm Nation - Music Video

Music Video

The famous black-and-white, military-inspired dance video was directed by Dominic Sena in August 1989. It was the finale in the Rhythm Nation 1814 Film. Famous for its high-octane choreography in an abandoned factory, the video won for Best Choreography (shared by Jackson and choreographer Anthony Thomas) and was nominated for Best Dance Video at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, where Jackson also received the MTV Video Vanguard Award. "Rhythm Nation" ranked thirty-seven on VH1's Greatest 100 Videos and forty-four on MTV: 100 Greatest Videos Ever Made. The video features a young Tyrin Turner.

Through her choice of Anthony Thomas, a black American street dancer, as her choreographer, Janet Jackson secures a threefold achievement: she satisfies the dictates of commercial pop music industry by creating a dance image which is significantly different from her earlier work; she demonstrates that, despite fame, she is still in touch with contemporary youth pop culture and its fashions; and finally, she utilizes, not the dance traditions of the Hollywood musical which, although often black in inspiration, remained very much under the control of white choreographers, but the work of a black young man who's training is outside the institutions of Western theatre and clearly an Afro-American cultural expression of the late 1980s. —Stephanie Jordan and Dave Allen, Parallel Lines: Media Representations of Dance, 1993

During MTV's first ever mtvICON in 2001, singers Pink, Mýa, and Usher each paid tribute to Jackson by performing dance moves from Jackson's earlier hits including "Pleasure Principle", "Miss You Much", and "Alright". At the end of the performance they all gathered together and performed "Rhythm Nation".

In 2003, it was named one of the 100 Greatest Music Videos of all time by Slant Magazine, ranked at number 87. In a 2011 poll by Billboard, the song's music video was voted the tenth best music video of the 1980s.