If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are not obviously music videos. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selection of MTV’s inaugural broadcast, must surely count as a music video — but then, it was produced a couple years earlier for the much different context of the British chart program Top of the Pops, much like Queen’s proto music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” from 1975. But is Bob Dylan’s much-parodied card-dropping “performance” of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from a decade earlier, shot for D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, a music video? What about A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles’ exuberantly narrative-light film from the year before?
All of these come up in the new history of the music video from YouTube channel Polyphonic above, which compiles into an over three-hour-long viewing experience all the episodes of its series on the subject. In its long historical view, the music video didn’t begin with the Fab Four, and not even with their epoch-making appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
One can trace it farther back, past Scopitone film jukeboxes (included in “the canon of Camp” by Susan Sontag in her famous essay); past Disney’s Fantasia (essentially eight animated classical music videos strung together); past even The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length musical “talkie,” which in 1927 put a definitive end to the era of silent film.
Perhaps the earliest identifiable predecessor of the music video is “The Little Lost Child,” which in 1894 was exhibited as an “illustrated song.” Its delivery of a narrative through projected still images accompanied by live piano was like nothing its audiences had experienced before, with an emotional power greater than the sum of its visual and musical parts. This was a brand new technology, and indeed, like any cultural history, that of the music video is also a technological history, one advanced by film, broadcast television, cable television, and in our time, internet streaming, which stayed the form’s looming prospect of pop-cultural irrelevance. Now, in the twenty-twenties, we must ask ourselves this: when TikTok users post themselves dancing, zooming in on pancakes, or skateboarding while drinking Ocean Spray, is it a music video?
Related content:
The 50 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club
Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radiohead & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods
Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)
David Bowie Releases 36 Music Videos of His Classic Songs from the 1970s and 1980s
Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talking Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dynamite
David Lynch’s Music Videos: Nine Inch Nails, Moby, Chris Isaak & More
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
