music video

music video, promotional film for popular music, especially a rock song. 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 By the MTV era, performance clips had been all but superseded by a conceptual approach whose characteristic surrealism was often more stipulated than invented and whose glib stylistic hallmarks quickly became clichés: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.

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.