History of Music Videos

History of Music Videos.BRETT MOORE

Brief Outline.Music videos are often called promotion videos or simply promos, due to the fact that they are usually promotional devices. Sometimes, music videos are termed short-form music videos to distinguish them from full length movies pertaining to music. In the 1980s, the term "rock video" was often used to describe this form of entertainment, although the term has fallen into disuse.

Early Stages. The earliest music videos or music promos were filmed in the mid 1950’s, however, before then, as early as the 1920’s, films by animators such as Oskar Fischinger were accompanied by musical scores labeld ‘visual music’.

The early animated efforts of Walt Disney, his Silly Symphonies, were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theatres.

The Panoram jukebox with eight three-minute Soundies were popular in taverns and night spots, but the fad faded during World War II.

Source: Wilkepedia

1950-60. In 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking along The Serpentine in Hyde Park, London as his recording of "Stranger in Paradise" played; this film was distributed to and played by UK and US television stations, leading Bennett to later claim he made the first music video.

According to the Internet Accuracy Project, disk jockey-singer J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson (d. 1959) was the first to coin the phrase "rock video"

Around 1960 the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc to accompany their songs. Its use spread to other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented.

Continued…The defining work in the development of the modern music video was The Beatles' first major motion picture, A Hard Day's Night in 1964, directed by Richard Lester. The musical segments in this film arguably set out the basic visual vocabulary of today's music videos, influencing a vast number of contemporary musicians, and countless subsequent pop and rock group music videos.

Although unashamedly based on A Hard Day's Night, the hugely popular American TV series The Monkees was another important influence on the development of the music video genre, with each episode including a number of specially-made film segments that were created to accompany the various Monkees songs used in the series. The series ran from 1966 to 1968.

The Beatles took the genre to new heights with their groundbreaking films for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", made in early 1967, which used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, such as reversed film effects, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing. Created at the height of the psychedelic music period, these two landmark films are among the very first purpose-made concept videos that attempt to "illustrate" the song in an artful manner, rather than just creating a film of an idealized performance.

In 1966 the clip of Bob Dylan performing "Subterranean Homesick Blues" filmed by D A Pennebaker was much used. The clip's ironic portrayal of a performance and the seemingly random inclusion of a celebrity (Allen Ginsberg) in a non-performing role also became mainstays of the form. The clip has been much imitated.

Later Developments. The key innovation in the development of the modern music video was, of course, video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as chroma-key. The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era and this enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed music video directors increasingly turned to 35mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video. By the mid-1980s releasing a music video to accompany a new single had become standard, and acts like The Jackson's sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets; most notable with the video for "Can You Feel It".

1970. In the UK the importance of Top of the Pops to promote a single created an environment of innovation and competition amongst bands and record labels as the show's producers placed strict limits on the number of videos it would use - therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see the video again the following week.

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" also started a whole new era for using music videos as promos. American band Devo were one of the first to create

The early self-produced music videos by Devo, including the pioneering compilation "The Truth About Devolution" directed by Chuck Statler, were also important (if somewhat subversive) developments in the evolution of the genre and these Devo video cassette releases were arguably among the first true long-form video productions.

1980.1981- MTV is launched, The first video to be aired is Buggles ‘Video killed the Radio Star’ David Bowie scored his first UK number one in nearly a decade thanks to director David Mallets' eye catching promo for "Ashes to Ashes" . In the early to mid 1980s, artists started to use more sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film. A short film is a music video that has a beginning, middle and end. He did this in a small way with Billie Jean, directed by Steve Barron, then in a West Side Story way with director Bob Giraldi's Beat It, but it wasn't until the 1984 release of the Thriller short film that he took the music video format to another level. Top of the Pops was censorous in it’s approach to video content, so another approach was for an act to produce a promo that would be banned or edited and so use the resulting controversy and publicity to promote the release. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood with "Relax" directed by Bernard Rose & White lines by Grandmaster Flash

A non-representational music video is one in which the musical artist is hardly shown. Because music videos are mainly intended to promote the artist, such videos are rare; an early 1980s example of this is Herbie Hancock’s Rock it!

MTV Music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing.

Madonna, owed a great deal of her success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of her videos. Some academics have compared music video to silent film, and it is suggested that stars like Madonna have (often quite deliberately) constructed an image that in many ways echoes the image of the great stars of the silent era such as Greta Garbo. Although many see MTV as the start of a "golden era" of music videos and the unparalleled success of a new artform in popular culture, others see it as hastening the death of the true musical artist, because physical appeal is now critical to popularity to an unprecedented degree.

Timeline. (Wikipedia).