A Brief History of Martin Scorsese References in Music Videos

In the mid-’90s, rappers started recreating his classic films in their own clips. Scorsese’s influence on the music video medium has been consistent ever since.
Martin Scorsese circa 1985
Martin Scorsese circa 1985, photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images

It’s worth remembering that one of Martin Scorsese’s first professional film credits was on the original Woodstock documentary. He was an assistant editor then, but as Scorsese emerged as one of the 20th century’s great American directors, he continued to make music—specifically the rock’n’roll of his generation—a crucial part of his work. He revolutionized the way pop songs were used in films, leaning on them to bolster or counterbalance the emotional tenor of a scene in the way most filmmakers previously relied on composed scores. In the gangster films that he’s best known for, he exhibited a devotion to tracks by the Rolling Stones. Early on in his career, Scorsese directed one of the greatest concert movies of all time, The Last Waltz, chronicling the Band’s final show. He has returned to rock docs and live films in more recent years, capturing the Stones in concert, helming an expansive George Harrison biography, and making multiple Dylan documentaries, including the fascinating recent farce Rolling Thunder Revue.

In 1987, Scorsese directed the only two music videos that exist in his filmography: “Bad” for Michael Jackson, and “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” for his friend and longtime collaborator, the Band’s Robbie Robertson. (Looking back at these videos 30+ years later, they are both preposterous and innovative, which was 1987’s entire vibe.) But Scorsese’s influence on the music video medium goes far beyond that duo of clips. His cinematic techniques and stylistic choices have been mimicked and recontextualized again and again in artists’ visuals, particularly over the last 25 years. Some have even tried to recreate his movies as their own videos—to varying degrees of success, of course.

With his new film The Irishman now streaming on Netflix, we compiled a brief history of videos that pay homage to Scorsese classics.


Fat Joe, “Envy” (1995)

Director: David Shadi Perez
Scorsese Film Referenced: Raging Bull

Early rap videos like the Juice Crew’s “The Symphony” and Eric B. & Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” generically evoked old Westerns and gangster movies, but it wasn’t until the mid-’90s that these clips started directly referencing specific films. By 1995, Redman and Method Man were refracting Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams (plus some Beavis and Butt-Head) for “How High,” and the Notorious B.I.G. was going full Tony Montana at the end of Scarface in “Warning.” Naturally, Scorsese was going to be in the mix. Fat Joe’s “Envy” is in part a riff on the end of Raging Bull, the director’s 1980 biopic about obsessive and abusive boxer Jake LaMotta. The high-contrast black and white imagery and incorporation of home-movie-style footage is there, but Fat Joe’s Miami feels like paradise, not purgatory. In Raging Bull, LaMotta closes out his time in the Sunshine State by banging his head against the wall of a prison cell and wailing, “I’m not an animal”; “Envy” ends with a special appearance by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony in matching suits.


Nas, “Street Dreams” (1996)

Director: Hype Williams
Scorsese Film Referenced: Casino

Hype Williams became the preeminent auteur of ’90s rap videos thanks in part to his twin trademarks, his use of a fisheye lens and his vivid film recreations. (His tribute to Coming to America, Busta Rhymes’s “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” opted for both.) Scorsese’s Las Vegas epic Casino had been out for less than a year before Williams took a swing at it with Nas’s “Street Dreams.” He even incorporated a role for Frank Vincent, one of the original film’s co-stars, and its mind-searing needle drop of Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.” For his part, Nas essentially does De Niro karaoke; his hot pink suit is the most electrifying part of the performance.


The Murderers, “We Don’t Give a Fuck” (2000)

Director: Hype Williams
Scorsese Film Referenced: Raging Bull

Williams returned to Scorsese’s oeuvre for “We Don’t Give a Fuck,” a posse cut from the Murder Inc. compilation album that features Ja Rule, Tah Murdah, Black Child, and Vita. The video looks to the visual signatures of Raging Bull’s boxing sequences, all flashbulb pops and closeup brutality. The best moment is probably the callout to the film’s slow-motion title sequence at the beginning, but I can’t help but think that they went with this concept just so Ja Rule would have another excuse to take off his shirt in a music video.


Ashanti, “Foolish” (2002)

Director: Irv Gotti
Scorsese Film Referenced: Goodfellas

Now sitting in the director’s chair, Murder Inc. co-founder Irv Gotti rode the Scorsese wave for “Foolish,” a video that focuses on what some might consider the love story in Goodfellas. The roles that Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta made famous in the 1990 crime masterpiece are recast with Ashanti and a young Terrence Howard (post-The Best Man, pre-Hustle & Flow). While the song “Foolish” took Biggie’s “One More Chance (Remix)” and made it even more palatable for the pop world, the video similarly sanitizes and simplifies the source material. Gotti doesn’t even try to mimic Scorsese’s cinematic heroics; the famous single-shot Copacabana sequence is broken up with 12 cuts.


Ludacris, “Slap” (2007)

Director: Philip Andelman
Scorsese Film Referenced: Taxi Driver

The New York nihilism and alienation of 1976’s Taxi Driver contributed to the disturbing feel of videos like Prodigy’s “Mac 10 Handle” and El-P’s “Deep Space 9mm,” but it turned out to be Ludacris, of all people, who mucked his way through Travis Bickle’s bootprints. He even attempts the “You talkin’ to me?” speech. “Slap” will have you hoping that some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the video streets.


Au Revoir Simone, “Crazy” (2013)

Directors: Alex Braverman and Poppy de Villeneuve
Scorsese Film Referenced: After Hours

It wasn’t until more recent years that indie rock bands began doing their own takes on Scorsese (unsurprisingly, they’ve mined the films of his most underrated decade, the ’80s). While Chicago quartet NE-HI takes on The Color of Money in “Rattled and Strange,” the standout of this music video microgenre is Au Revoir Simone’s “Crazy,” which retells the plot of 1985’s After Hours in just three-and-a-half minutes. The emotional undercurrent of After Hours is Scorsese’s fascination with and fear of the women who inhabit downtown Manhattan, but in “Crazy,” the all-female trio handles every character, even the lead role of horny try-hard Paul Hackett.


Peewee Longway, “I Can’t Get Enough” (2018)

Director: Omar The Director
Scorsese Film Referenced: The Wolf of Wall Street

In 2018, Peewee Longway either had the most terribly fantastic or fantastically terrible mixtape cover of the year with Spaghetti Factory. He also recreated the excruciating but hilarious Quaalude scene from 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street in the video for “I Can’t Get Enough,” subbing in lean as the era-appropriate substance of choice. The Atlanta MC skips straight to the drool phase and commits fully, spending the entire video crawling out of a living room, down a flight of stairs, across a driveway and through his car’s suicide doors. Like Leonardo DiCaprio before him, Longway offers an Oscar-worthy performance.


T-Pain, “All I Want” (2019)

Director: Edgar Esteves
Scorsese Film Referenced: The Wolf of Wall Street

T-Pain also recently looked to an iconic sequence from The Wolf of Wall Street for inspiration, opting to do a variation on DiCaprio’s “I’m not leaving!” speech as he rallies a group of office workers to bacchanalian madness. It would’ve been funnier if he Auto-Tuned it.


Bonus Footage: King Missile, “Martin Scorsese” (1992)

Because Scorsese really does make “the best fucking films.”