Bridging The Gap: A Diane Martel Visual Double Mixtape

Today, Okayplayer remembers the late, great auteur Diane Martel with a mixtape of the most memorable music videos she directed.

Abe Beame Abe Beame Abe Beame Flatbush local, culture writer, former mayor of New York City.

September 22, 2025 - 2:24 p.m.

Screenshot from "Bring The Pain" by Method Man, YouTube.

There is a stunning moment in the midst of Onyx’s 1992 music video, “Throw Ya Gunz,” when the rapper Suavé kicks wet sand at the camera, spraying the frame with white clumps. That lens splatter occurring suddenly in an early ’90s, low-budget gangsta rap video is a moment of pure innovation that announced the arrival of a perspective that would have a profound impact on rap as a visual medium. “Throw Ya Gunz” transports the viewer through South Jamaica, from the streets to a dissonant beach shot like the face of an alien planet, where the bald-headed shock rappers mosh and wave illegal semi-automatic weapons in the air, draped in leathers and camo winter coats. It was the first music video ever directed by the great Diane Martel, who would be instrumental in ushering the rap video into its modern era, with an eventual filmography of over 150 videos across many genres, over four decades.

Diane died last week, on September 18th, at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in the city she was born in. She was 63 years old. She was from Brooklyn, an artist who called the creator of Shakespeare in the Park uncle, as well as a high school dropout who made the leap from choreographer to director at 30. She emerged at an exciting moment in the trajectory of the rap music video, when the medium was coming into its own as an art form, and where some of the greatest directors of that generation cut their teeth making them.

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Her peers were the likes of David Fincher, Michele Gondry, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn, who would “graduate” to feature filmmaking. But Diane was a career video director (aside from two documentaries in the early '90s before pursuing music videos) whose eye and ingenuity helped make lemonade for artists during an era that didn’t approach the bloated budgets rappers would secure for their singles by the late ’90s. It was a time for experimentation (as well as derivative shlock) and breaking rules with each subsequent contribution to Yo! MTV Raps’ canon, and Diane was part of this movement. One of “the good ones.” She helped define the way golden age rap videos looked, felt, and functioned when they were at their best; in a sweet spot when rap videos were no longer in their infancy, and the industry had not yet been gutted by YouTube and the iPhone and streaming.

If you were born in New York in the '80s and want to feel nostalgic about the passage of time and how much of your life has gone by, spend an afternoon watching Diane Martel’s brilliant videography from the '90s. This sounds like a bummer, but it is not. It’s a tribute to how thoroughly she is able to capture the dress, the attitude, and the vibe of an authentic moment in time she only has a few minutes at a time to relate. She had an incredible ability to pick “winners” and basically only worked with generational rappers who made fat f*****g hits, whether they’re anthems stuck in the collective conscious decades later, or lost gems from the era, the visuals are a pleasure to revisit.

As the testimonials that poured in after she passed away definitively prove, she was beloved by the artists she worked with, rarely making only one video with any collaborator, be it Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, the Clipse, or the Lords of the Underground. She spread through rap via word of mouth, starting with Mona Lisa and earning work with The Lox. From connecting with Meth then working with ODB. You may have missed her work, or didn’t ascribe it to a single auteur at the time because on its face, it had the same structure and flavor of much of the work that made up the rap video hour in the '90s, but when you compare the videos Diane made with videos made by the same artists with other directors from the same album cycles, you understand what made her special. In classic pieces for seminal songs like Method Man’s “Release Yo’ Delf” (dir. Steve Carr) or Onyx’s “Slam” (dir. Parris Mayhew), you understand that toggling between a few set-ups, even when they’re inventive, with a single filter, in one decrepit and scratch bombed location- symbolizing rap’s grit rather than feeling like it — can become a rote and staid exercise.

Diane was incredibly, impossibly prolific. In 1994, then again in 1998, she directed 10 videos in a year. But her videos never stayed in one place, finding visually distinct movements and energies for each verse. Her signature was videos with flow and contrasts, stories that begin in a project hallway, moving to the wheel of a car, ending in the Rockaways, the sand covered in snow, the sun rising over the ocean. She was a native and knew how to utilize New York’s subway cars, alleys, rooftops and infinitely diverse geography in service of her art.

It makes sense that the former choreographer embraced minimalism and wanted to center the artist. Her *best* videos weren’t Hype Williams’ elaborately costumed and set-designed spectacles, or Spike Jonze’s high-concept stunts. They were about the essences of her subjects, their personality and their talent conveyed in ways many of the big excess era of '90s and 21st century big budget productions couldn’t. In Diane’s videos, there is nowhere to hide. They live in the miracle of watching a virtuosic, syllable-dense technician like Keith Murray spit, or SWV- gathered around a piano- sing, or DJ Premier scratch. She was great at selling sex, filming the body, rendering both a Khia sex romp and a Christina Aguilera middle school cafeteria anthem — dramatic, tasteful and incredibly hot — a testament to her versatility. In Diane’s work, the performer and the performance always came first, the camera in close-up, focused on the rapidly twisting lips, the dimpled abs exposed below a crop top and above low-rise jeans, the dexterous fingers in motion, caressing vinyl. It’s an imperative she never loses sight of, even as the rap video, and her videos, go higher concept in the mid to late ’90s.

Diane’s style evolved with the times, a necessity if you’d like to remain relevant for over 30 years, and she occasionally strayed from rap and R&B, extending her minimalist style to mainstream pop with the likes of Miley Cyrus and the White Stripes. But even once she was well established, she’d mix the pay jobs with the passion jobs, chasing Disney Channel starlet videos with the Beatnuts. Her mantra was, “Stay true to authentic culture,” and she always did (she made her final video this year, for her collaborator, friend and fan Ciara, who spoke effusively of Diane’s attention to the detail of performance).

diane martel visual innovation 1990s home music videos rap home featured

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The following is the product of a languorous, wonderful weekend spent revisiting Diane’s videography. It’s not a true mixtape, (enjoy roughly an hour of mandatory Geico commercials), but it’s a curated list of some of my favorite songs and videos ever made. There are some classic songs and some classic videos that just missed the cut. I was pushing for the highlight moments, the best pairings of song and visuals. If you are old, it’s a tape that will immediately transport you to moments of your childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. But I envy the reader (who has likely skimmed most if not all of this) who is finding this incredible body of work for the first time. There is much to learn, and much to love. Rest easy.