History Of The Music Video

Birth and development of the Music Video

As part of our Media Project to create our own music video we will begin by researching the history of music and music videos, so we understand how they started and developed over time.

The first film which had audio in it was called the Jazz Singer, produced in 1927 starring Al Johnson as he sung ‘Dirty hands, Dirty face’. This was the first time ever that synchronised dialogue accompanied a visual performance, instead of singers or instruments (most famously a piano) being played live in the cinema itself. This new development began the craze of Hollywood Musicals in the 30’s and 40’s, with the Golden Age of musical film at that period as this genre became increasingly popular.

By the 1950’s and 60’s, musical performances took a different turn as bands started playing live during Television programmes such as Top Of The Pops and The Monkee’s TV Show. However, there still weren’t any proper video performances which advertised the band and their music, up until 1975 when Queen made Bohemian Rhapsody.

The first ‘real’ music video as we know it came into being in the

mid-Seventies with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The song came out in 1975, along with the promotional video which had the purpose of showing on Top Of The Pops, so the band didn’t have to perform live because of it’s unusual structure and impossibility to perform live.

After this, all artists and bands started creating their own promo music videos, with the intention to advertise themselves and show off to everyone else what they could do. By 1981, there so much demand that Nickelodeon created MTV, a 24-hour channel which played Music Videos non-stop.

In 1983, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was released with what has been referred to as the best Music Video ever, his 14 minute-long epic which sets the bar up for all videos. It shows that with effort and time, amazing-quality music videos can be produced and Thriller has now set the standard for what everyone else should be making.

Today’s music videos are a combination of band performances, music show-offs and originality- such as this video below.

Visual Music

The connection between music tracks and visual material can be linked backwards to the 1920’s and 1930’s, with work such as Oscar Fischinger’s abstract synchronizations, where a visual display of colour and shapes would be played along with a certain piece of music. He was the first person to use a visual production of video to promote a piece of music.

The Panarom, a huge jukebox-style machine which played music along with short films was popular throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s, until it was replaced by the smaller Scopritone in the 1960’s. This contained 36 small films which included barely-clad women and their body parts, the first time ever that woman had been used as a sex symbol in music videos. This however soon died out in the 1970’s as American programmes like Nickelodeon began showing promo pop clips which showcased the band and their music, but these never played the entire song.

Overall then, music videos were born out of the demand for 'visual music' and developed from early 1940's ideas with synchronized singing and instrument-playing. Nowadays every new hit song will have a music video showcase, in order to keep up the tradition and publicise themselves even more.