All this talk about 80s music videos and no one has mentioned one of the best:
“Rio” by Duran Duran
Ummm, yes? Unless a lot of folks from Curt Cobain to Katy Perry are time travelers, visiting us from their secret bases in the 80’s where they made their videos before beaming them into the future (the 90’s to the present day). MTV (and just about every local equivalent) long ago stopped being about videos, but between dance clubs and now YouTube, the art form certainly seems to be going strong.
As to the OP, there are quite a few 80’s videos that I remember fondly, but there was a fair amount of dreck as well. One could probably say the same today, but I don’t watch as many as I did when I was a teenager.
My 12 year old basically asked me the same thing a dew weeks ago.
I likened it to how “the first pancake in a batch is never quite right”*( We call them the mutant pancakes, )
“Oh. So they weren’t ready and threw any old batter in the pan and called the mess a video?”
Pretty much.
“I din’t know if I should be scared I’m the oldest or wonder about some older brother or sister starter kid you had.”
Yeah, but what’s your point? Asking why early 1980s videos sucked is about like asking why movies sucked in 1910. They were a sort of art form that hadn’t really come into their own yet.
You have to remember that at that time, cable TV was just about as new as MTV was. Prior to that, most people had the 3 networks, maybe a local UHF station or two, newspapers and radio. Not much room for music videos.
They matured rapidly- by the middle of the decade(1984-1985) or so they were pretty serious pieces of cinematic art and pretty creative.
Duran Duran’s videos were great. i also like David Bowie’s “Blue jean”-anybody have a link to the version that shows him dancing in reverse color? Many '80s videos were cheaply made, but many were quite good.
You know, “Funkytown” sounds silly now but I remember like it was yesterday the first time I heard it and it was fresh and new. Same thing with videos – they look silly now but at the time they were amazing.
I know it’s mostly become a latter-day joke, but Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up still has its charms.
I was hoping this was an anti-Rickroll. You did not disappoint. 
Not really a music video (it was made for dont look back) but Subterranean Homesick Blues is evidence that even decades before, people knew how to cheaply and tastefully set music to film.
nm
You been fragglerocked!
When MTV started, they had a lot of airtime and not much content. There was basically no bar production-values-wise, so nobody wanted to spend a lot of money.
Wizzard was Roy Wood’s band. Wood had been one of the leaders of the British band The Move; after Jeff Lynne joined The Move, it mutated into Electric Light Orchestra. Wood was on the first ELO album, then left to form Wizzard, while Lynne and drummer Bev Bevan remained in ELO.
Wizzard (and The Move) were both pretty big in England, but never had much of an impact in the US.
Speaking of Roy Wood, his album Boulders is a solo tour-de-force where he plays something like 15 different instruments (including “water bowl”).
The premise of this thread is ridiculous. Yes, there were some tacky music videos in the 1980s, but there were also some outstanding ones, many of which have already been mentioned.
And I don’t think anyone has yet brought up my favorite, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel. Absolutely brilliant video.
Dancing was what made 1980s videos awesome. Who can ever forget Pat Benetar’s “Love is Battlefield”, Stevie Knick’s “Stand Back”, or The Pointer Sister’s “She Works Hard for Her Money”.
You, apparently, since “She Works Hard For The Money” was by Donna Summer. 
Doh!
Interviewer: “Does it bother you that 90% of science fiction is dreck?”
Theodore Sturgeon: “Of course, 90% of science fiction is dreck. 90% of everything is dreck.”