Richard Marx - Hazard

What this video is

Released January 28, 1992, 'Hazard' arrived at the apex of MTV's narrative music video era, when the channel regularly broadcast short films of 4–5 minutes with full story arcs. The video's small-town Nebraska setting, ambiguous morality, and social-outcast protagonist tapped into a broad early-90s cultural anxiety around community scapegoating and class prejudice. Its sustained audience debate about the…

Why it matters

A landmark of the cinematic narrative music video subgenre, 'Hazard' demonstrated that adult contemporary pop could sustain complex, morally ambiguous visual storytelling. Its production model — location realism, literary ambiguity, restrained aesthetics — prefigures the prestige-TV sensibility…

The director

American director, writer, and artist based in Rome, Italy. One of his earliest known credits is the 1992 'Hazard' video. His career spans music videos for Madonna, Justin Timberlake, Shakira, Chemical Brothers, and Kanye West, earning six MTV Video Music…