Queen - Another One Bites the Dust

JUL 01 1980 · 12:00

Queen - Another One Bites the Dust (1980) Director: Daniella Green Era: Early MTV Era (1980) - Pre-MTV promo clip from Queen's commercial peak, released the same year as The Game album and shot as a live-concert performance promo before the music video format had been codified as an art form. High. This is a primary source document of one of the best-selling singles of 1980, capturing Queen during their commercial zenith in an unmediated concert-promo format that preceded the music video art form's codification. Its quantitative profile, dark, warm, moderately paced, authenticates its period origins and offers rare contrast to the glossy, high-concept videos the band would produce in subsequent years. Essential for any archive of early 1980s rock visual culture. Context: Released in 1980 from Queen's eighth studio album The Game, 'Another One Bites the Dust' represented Queen's most successful crossover into funk, disco, and R&B-adjacent territory, a commercial gambit that proved spectacularly successful. The song spent 15 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 top 10, the longest of any song in 1980, and became Queen's best-selling single with over 7 million copies sold. Its bass-driven groove, consciously inspired by Chic's 'Good Times', positioned Queen at the intersection of rock and Black music traditions at the very moment those genres were converging in mainstream American radio. The video's raw arena-promo aesthetic captures Queen at the apex of their stadium-era power, just one year before MTV would transform how music videos were produced and consumed. Director notes: The video was filmed at Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas, during Queen's 1980 touring cycle in support of The Game album. It functions as a concert promo clip, a format standard before the launch of MTV in August 1981, captured with multiple cameras during a live performance. The dark, warm, high-saturation visual profile (brightness 36.83, color temp 2.92, saturation 85.40) is consistent with tungsten-lit arena filming on film or early video stock of the period. The 38 scene changes over 222 seconds yield a moderate avg shot length of ~5.86s, closely tracking the locked, repetitive rhythmic structure of the song itself.