Monday, 30 November 2009

Video killed the radio star - The history of music videos

By Em, Kat and Jasmine
-Started off with the invention of the talkies, adding sound to the video rather than having a man on the side playing the piano...
-1950's introduced the viewers to colour in film and TV, stars like Julie Garland embraced this as film started to include their own soundtracks eg musicals

-In 1955 came the rock'n roll movement which inspired rock'n roll films including Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley. Scenes in the film with the music soundtracks would lay the foundations for the modern day music videos



-Inspired by the American billboard charts that was established in the 1940's the UK singles chart first accounted for based on sales on the 14th of november 1952
-When shows like top of the pops came around in the 60's it was highly popular in Britain. When music acts could not appear, they would usually send in videos of themselves performing their single. An iconic example of this is the Beatles's "Strawberry Fields".
-In 1975 Queen released "Bohemian Rhapsody". This was first influential music video, as they made it not just for not being able to appear on a certain show, but to bring their album cover to life. The budget was only £3,500 and the effects were all done by camera work, compared to today's music videos that normally have budgets of at least hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars and all the effects are done by computers. Overnight, the music video was born.
- In 1979, the TV show "Pop Clips" was aired. A "video DJ" showed different music videos during the programme.
- In 1981, MTV was first launched by Mike Nesmith, an ex member of the pop group "The Monkees". He collected different music videos and compiled them together to create a 24 hour channel of music videos. The first ever video played was "Video killed the Radio Star". 200 videos were only available to air at the time, but MTV hoped it would be successful, and more record companies would hopefully produce more videos.
-Some artists such as New Romantic musicians like Adam and the Ant and David Bowie embraced this new invention. Image became more and more important because it was no longer like live concerts where the artists would be small and hard to see by the audience, and only the music made the impact. Fans could now recognise and see clearly their favourite musicians. Other musicians over the last 28 years since MTV has been around, have rejected and disliked this new media because of the channel's obsession with "Pretty Young Things" like Britney Spears and Duran Duran: they certainly looked good, but weren't credited initially as really talented musicians like acts such as Led Zeppelin for example. Those opposed to music videos thought that they were killing the music because of the new desire for images.
- Fans found this new medium as quite strange at first because their favourite artists were playing different roles and characters to what their audience were used to. Music videos included everything from cameo appearances (e.g. John Malcovich in Annie Lennox's Video, Courtney Cox in Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark".) to inspirations from different films. Anything went as long as it was cheap and cheerful to produce.
- Producers and record companies didn't realise at first how this convention could really sell lots of albums. Musicians that would have gone "unseen" in the past now had a platform to market their music to a large audience. (For example, Boy George and his colourful, crazy style took America by storm because he was accessible through his videos.)
- Two artists who really took hold of the music video were Madonna and Michael Jackson. Madonna started out in 1983, just as MTV was starting to grow in popularity, and her provocative, sometimes controversial videos made her a huge star. It was even believed at one time that the "M" in MTV stood for Madonna! Michael Jackson paved the way for modern music videos when he too released "Thriller" in 1983. "Thriller" went where no video had gone before: it had a full set, plot and characters, turning a simple music video into a mini-style movie, and kick-started big budgets. To fund the project, they agreed to make a "behind-the-scenes" programme for ABC. It was a huge phenomenon and they eventually released a video version of it in the shops. This was the first time this had ever been done, and began the idea that not only could you buy cds and albums, but videos along with it.



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