music video
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What is a music video?
A music video is a promotional film, especially for a rock song, that began to be widely broadcast on television in the early 1980s. The advent of MTV in 1981 made music videos an indispensable part of marketing a song.
Music videos may qualify as the quintessential postmodern art form because they are hybrid, parasitic, and appropriative. The techniques used in music videos have had a noticeable effect on motion pictures, commercials, and television. Looking good on MTV became as important as sounding good when it came to selling recordings, and artists such as Madonna and Michael Jackson became superstars through their music videos.
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Why do musicians create music videos?
Musicians create music videos as promotional tools for their songs, especially after MTV launched in 1981, making them essential for marketing music. Music videos augment a song’s qualities and help artists establish, decode, or invent a song’s essential meaning. The rise of music videos increased the importance of a band’s visual appeal.
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How are music videos made?
Music videos, promotional films for popular music, gained prominence in the early 1980s with the advent of MTV. Initially, bands substituted filmed clips for TV appearances; punks recognized its usefulness for sales and promotion.
Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975) demonstrated video's ability to define a song’s qualities. Performance clips evolved into conceptual approaches characterized by surrealism, associative editing, and a readiness to rework imagery from various sources. Artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna peaked in the 1980s, pushing the boundaries of the form. In the 21st century, with the rise of internet platforms, music videos have shifted towards less complicated visual imagery, often employing bizarre or clever concepts.
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How do music videos use visuals to tell a story or show emotion?
Music videos use visuals to communicate narratives and evoke emotions through various techniques. Conceptual approaches often supersede performance clips, employing surrealism and associative editing. Multiple dramatized situations are chosen for their visual impact rather than narrative appropriateness, creating an air of significance even without actual meaning.
Videos also readily reference and rework imagery from movies, TV, painting, and news photography. Choreography and mood, as seen in Michael Jackson's videos, have been highly influential. In the 21st century, visual imagery has become less complicated, with bizarre or clever concepts remaining central, such as in OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again”.
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How have music videos changed with the rise of the internet and social media?
With the rise of the internet and social media, music videos have undergone significant changes. The visual imagery used in music videos has become less complicated and dense, but still remains arresting. As platforms like YouTube gained prominence, the approach to music video creation shifted, with "centre framing" becoming the norm.
Social media has enabled everyone to be a producer, distributor, and consumer of content, which has changed the dynamics between media producers and audiences. YouTube's accessibility has also diminished the importance of traditional airplay on channels like MTV, confirming its obsolescence as a primary platform for music videos.
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How do music videos influence pop culture and fashion?
Music videos, promotional films for music, gained prominence in the 1980s with MTV. They have since significantly impacted pop culture and fashion. MTV's rapid-fire presentation and sophisticated video techniques influenced motion pictures, commercials, and television.
Looking visually appealing became as crucial as sounding good for selling records. Artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson became superstars by using the medium effectively. Madonna was the first female artist to fully exploit the potential of music videos, collaborating with top designers and photographers to create distinctive images.
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Music videos began to be widely broadcast on television in the early 1980s. Like the commercials they essentially are, music videos may qualify as the quintessential postmodern art form: hybrid, parasitic, appropriative, often compromised by commerce or undermined by aesthetic pretension, ideally compact, and assimilable.
Bands with the clout to swing it—the Beatles, first and foremost—had begun substituting filmed clips for in-person TV appearances in the late 1960s, and bands marginalized by conventional commercial outlets—punks, first and foremost—were among the first to recognize the form’s usefulness as both sales pitch and agitprop a decade later. But music videos did not become ubiquitous until the advent of MTV (Music TeleVision) in 1981 made them an all but indispensable adjunct to marketing a song. Their stylistic foundation came from the Beatles, too, via A Hard Day’s Night and Help!—whose director, Richard Lester, freed song on film from even a vague subordination to plot or context, only to substitute silent-movie antics, the new function of which was to celebrate an attitude.
In 1975 the stir created by Queen’s clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody” showed how video could augment if not outright define a song’s qualities (whether they were virtues or vices was up to the listener-viewer). In the late 1970s key videos by Devo and other new wave artists crystallized the nature of the form—including an inherent irony that only the most earnest artists in their wake even tried to overcome, usually with hapless attempts to ignore it. By the MTV era, performance clips had been all but superseded by a conceptual approach whose characteristic surrealism was often more stipulated than invented and whose glib stylistic hallmarks quickly became clichés: associative editing, multiple dramatized situations chosen more for their visual impact than their appropriateness, an air of significance undeterred by lack of actual meaning, and a breathtaking readiness to refer to, pilfer, and rework the 20th century’s vast trove of talismanic imagery—drawn from movies, TV, painting, news photography, and so on.
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One result was that in not many years virtually everything that could be tried had been. Aesthetically, music video broke so much ground early on that later would-be experimenters were often left straining for new effects. Significantly, the form’s two preeminent auteurs both peaked in the 1980s: Michael Jackson, whose groundbreaking “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” clips (both 1983), with their highly influential choreography and equally influential mood of paranoia, soon yielded to the self-indulgent braggadocio of “Thriller,” and Madonna, responsible in her prime for both one of the most acclaimed videos ever made (“Like a Prayer,” 1989) and the most deliberately salacious (“Justify My Love,” 1990).
Yet in the right imaginative hands, —including Madonna’s, though no longer Jackson’s—video remained a richly expressive means of establishing (Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1991), decoding (R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” 1991), or simply inventing (David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” 1983) a song’s essential meaning. Good songs still help, of course; while MTV exposure has helped sell many a mediocre tune, in the long run music still wins out often enough to seriously qualify if not disprove the gleeful prediction of the first clip the network ever aired—the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
In the 21st century, as the importance of airplay on MTV diminished and as more and more people watched music videos on the Internet (e.g., on YouTube and MySpace) and on the smaller screens of mobile devices (e.g., MP3 players and cellular phones), the approach taken by many music video makers began to change. The visual imagery employed became less complicated and less dense, though not less arresting, and “centre framing,” which places images in the middle of the screen, became the norm. Still, bizarre or clever concepts remained front and centre, as in OK Go’s “Here It Goes Again” (2006), in which the choreographed cavorting of band members on treadmills becomes a fluid modern dance.