There is a frequently perpetuated myth that the first music video was Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (Bruce Gowers 1975) and whilst it is almost certainly the case that the video for the track made the difference between it being a minor hit and one of the biggest selling singles of all time in the UK (2.1m copies sold), it can neither be said to be the first music promo nor to have precipitated the arrival of MTV.
Indeed, the close relationship between music tracks and visual material can be traced back to at least forty years earlier with the experiments of Oscar Fischinger in Germany in the 1920s and in the USA in the 1930s after he fled the Nazis, notably his abstract synchronisations or visual interpretations such as ‘Komposition in Blau’ (1935) and later his work on the Disney film, ‘Fantasia’ (1939). Indeed, some of Fischinger’s films were made on a contract with Electrola Disks, with an end title advertising the track which the audience had just heard and a suggestion to ‘get it at your local record store’.
Short films with the precise purpose of showcasing the artist emerged in the relatively early days of sound film-making. Short films of anything up to eight minutes in duration were used to display the talents of singers from Billie Holiday to Bing Crosby, some in cinema screenings as a small part of a full programme of newsreel, cartoon and main feature but mainly as reels on the forerunner of the video jukebox, the Panarom.
The Panarom weighed about two tons and contained a 20 inch screen with back projection. Used in juke joints and bars they showed a wide variety of music in their heyday. The short films were often more daring sexually and at times politically than the features of the day as they were less likely to be checked by the censor. The machine contained a reel of eight shorts which were set to play in sequence; thousands of these 16mm films known as ‘soundies’ were produced in the heyday of the Panarom from 1939-46, but the technology fell from favour and died out quickly after the war.
In the 1960s the idea was resurrected in France with the Scopitone. The machine provided individual selection, play and rewind for 36 short films. The films were in colour and gave the consumer choice rather than the pre-determined reel of the Panarom. Mainly song-and-dance performances shot on cheap sound stages or outdoors, they tended to follow a formula involving a high level of female display and garish use of colour. The machine was a success in France before being picked up in the USA, where by mid-1965, around 1,000 machines were installed.
The US films tended to be produced by a company called Harman-ee and cost an average of $8000 to make. The use of unnatural colour and fantasy sets developed to produce an artificial-looking world. As with the French films, highly suggestive sexual content predominated, with camera shots often close up on the (covered) female crotch and highly sexualised dance routines, frequently bordering on the pornographic, in many ways prefiguring the overt sexual display of contemporary music video, particularly evident on MTV Base.
Again, however, the form was short-lived and failed to fully adapt to changing times. As the music tastes of the youth audience cemented into the new rock music of the late 60s, Harman-ee began shooting films of bands like Procul Harum (Whiter Shade of Pale 1966), but these were the exception rather than the rule so that the dominant content was that of pop like Petula Clark and Debbie Reynolds, which really reached a different audience. Competition from television proved too great and the Scopitone died out at the end of the 1960s.
Another antecedent of the music video was the musical feature film itself; the setpiece production numbers in films from ‘The Jazz Singer’ (Crosland 1927) through the lavish MGM musicals of the 1940s and on to the beginnings of the rock n’ roll movie such as Little Richard’s appearance in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ (Tashlin 1956) can all be seen to have influenced the style of the music video. Indeed, it has become common for promo directors to pastiche or at least quote moments from Hollywood in their music videos.
More obviously, the films of Elvis Presley, placing the star in a variety of fictional contexts, notably ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (Thorpe 1957) and British imitations such as Cliff Richard with ‘Summer Holiday’ (Yates 1963) and ‘The Young Ones’ (Furie 1961) show clear roots for later music videos. An additional dimension emerged in the 1960s from The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Days Night’ (Lester 1964) onwards, with the rock movie using stylistic devices borrowed from both documentary and the French Nouvelle Vague. Sequences such as ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ prefigure some of the music videos of the early 1980s in particular. Indeed, documentary itself became a common form for the visualisation of popular music in the 1960s, with memorable sequences such as Bob Dylan’s much-copied ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ from ‘Don’t Look Back’ (Pennebaker 1967).
Television coverage of pop music attempted to capture the new teenage audience from ‘American Bandstand’ in the USA in the 1950s through ‘Ready Steady Go’ and ‘Top of the Pops’ in the mid 1960s in the UK. The need to have musical acts on TV every week, particularly for chart-based shows led to the creation of short promo films often used in place of a studio appearance, especially when acts were on tour on the other side of the Atlantic. Beatles clips for ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ costumed in Sgt.Pepper outfits and created using a variety of surreal and Dadaist techniques not only provided material to save them appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’ in person but also signalled a shift for them from being a touring band to studio recording artists. The other major British acts of the 1960s such as the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who also recorded promos.
In the USA, the creation of The Monkees, as an answer to The Beatles, also used many devices which would later find their way into music promos- surrealism, jump cuts, wacky comedy and lots of action mixed in with music performance by the band. The four band members were selected for how they would look on TV, a device which has become even more familiar with the creation of boy bands in the 1990s right through to ‘Popstars’ and ‘Pop Idol’ at the start of the 21st century.
In the 1970s ‘serious rock’ gained slots on TV such as ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ (1971) and many films emerged which made use of pop and rock artists, from ‘Saturday Night Fever’ (Badham 1977) to ‘Quadrophenia’ (Roddam 1979). An increasing number of bands went down the route of producing promo clips which gained airplay within TV shows. In America, AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) was increasingly dominating radio and making it harder for pop singles to break through. At the same time, cable TV was growing rapidly but had not yet generated sufficient income to pay for its own programming. A combination of these factors meant that the time was right for music television.
Former Monkee Mike Nesmith had the idea of creating a promo based programme for Nickelodeon, ‘Pop Clips’ which he then touted with Warner Brothers with the grander aim of filling an entire network with music video. It was the ideal solution, very popular programming round the clock paid for by someone else. The only cost to the channel was royalties for airplay and the concept quickly became attractive to advertisers making it potentially very profitable.
Though there was insufficient contemporary material to justify such a move, the New Wave of British pop acts with their singles-based music which came out of Punk rock, itself a reaction against AOR album-based music, soon provided an ‘invasion’ to fill the space. British groups often had video airplay well in advance of radio play and took full advantage of the first few years of MTVs existence to break the American market. Notable successes were Duran Duran with their high budget sexy and lavish videos shot on location and The Eurythmics with their often surreal narratives, particularly ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This” (Stewart/Ashbrook 1983).
MTV, which began broadcasting on the Warner satellite feed in 1981, made big claims:
“It will show state of the art video records of contemporary artists…highly stylised visual interpretations of the music” (MTV Press Release 1981)
The rise of Music TV 1981-2003
The growth of MTV in the USA was rapid. American artists soon realised the potential of the medium and followed the British invasion with promo clips of their own. In the early years, however, assumptions about the demographics of the audience led to dominance by white acts and a preponderance of male rock. Despite the success of the huge budgeted productions of Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ (Landis 1983), Bad (Scorsese 1987), it was almost the end of the decade before any other black artists’ work broke through.
The reluctance to play black videos merely ensured that rap videos were only able to acquire very small budgets and tended to be distributed through alternative means, not finding a mass audience. Gangsta rap was seen as enormously threatening to the white audience and it was only through using crossover in the shape of Run DMC and Aerosmith’s ‘Walk this Way’ (1986) and later the humour of the work of MC Hammer and Coolio that rap could become acceptable and eligible for bigger budget videos.
Hype Williams led the way for black artists and black directors through his extravagant productions for the likes of TLC, R. Kelly and Missy Elliott, by the late 90s commanding budgets of $2 million. These higher budget videos in turn generated record sales and led to Hip Hop effectively replacing rock as the dominant music form
The success of the New Romantics’ highly visual style was exemplified by their videos and a combination of visual excess, high camp performance and comedy typified MTV output. Duran Duran were perhaps the ultimate example of this with four high budget videos ‘Girls on Film’ (Godley and Creme 1981) ‘Hungry like the Wolf’ ‘Rio’ and ‘Wild Boys’ (Mulcahy 1982 and 1984), using expensive and exotic locations, high quality cinematography and a filmic look, as well as considerable numbers of females on display.
Gradually ‘serious’ rock acts realised the importance of music video and by the time Bruce Springsteen (the ultimate in ‘authenticity’ amongst rock artists) released his first videos, such as ‘Dancing in the Dark’ (DePalma 1984), it was clear that there was no alternative.
The form had also started to propel some acts to mega stardom bypassing the traditional route of live performance. This was particularly exemplified by Madonna, whose music videos have always been interesting and innovative. She led a host of female artists whose rise to prominence has undoubtedly been precipitated by the availability of music video to showcase their talents. Image, performance, choreography and the use of the close up have suited the success of female acts in particular.
By 1984, MTV was established as central to the music business and instituted its own version of the Oscars, the Video Music Awards, with a whole set of categories from best video and best direction to most experimental, best choreography and best special effects. Some directors moved from music video to feature films, using video almost as a training ground for Hollywood or independent production.
By the mid 80s, MTV, now owned by Viacom, a major media conglomerate, but one without significant interests in a record company, had diversified, with the establishment of the more album-oriented VH1 for the older audience. The launch of the European version of MTV in 1987 led to a swift acceleration in the number of subscribers eager to get the same benefits as their American counterparts.
Viacom was responsible for the shift away from the narrow rock video market towards a wider range of music genres, eventually including rap and indie , also succeeding in bringing MTV to the major cities where it had previously not been available and developing more conventional scheduling, beginning to produce programmes other than video clip compilations, giving a much greater sense of a ‘lifestyle’. The concert programme ‘Unplugged’, where artists performed stripped down versions of their hits, usually with acoustic guitar, led to a series of successful CD releases.
This was followed by the forerunner of ‘Big Brother’ and perhaps the start of Television’s obsession with ‘reality’ programming; ‘The Real World’, which followed the lives of a group of young people brought together to share an apartment. MTV later introduced the ‘satirical’ cartoon characters ‘Beavis and Butthead’, which became an important element in attracting younger male viewers to stay tuned longer to the channel rather than ‘hopping’ to the available alternatives. More recently this diversification has spawned further successes with ‘The Osbournes’ and ‘Jackass’, placing MTV as a leader in innovative programming in a range of youth-orientated genres.
In combination with the introduction of the new format of CD, there is plenty of evidence to justify the claim that MTV and music video as a form were responsible for the rescue of the ailing music industry. Music video quickly helped establish visual style as a key factor in promoting all artists. By the end of the 1980s the music video was an absolutely essential element in the promotion of all singles. However, as this brief history has illustrated, the music promo is really just the most recent (and most successful) development of the fusion between music and image.
OYP Group 