BRIEF HISTORY OF MUSIC VIDEOS

The first form of music videos came to be in the 1930's, when short films/clips were made based on music. Jazz musician Louis Jordan had short films made for his music which were then put together to create a feature film named 'Lookout Feature'. The video to the song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen was the first proper music video as we know it to be made.



Soon enough more followed, and the US video channel MTV was launched in 1981. As a new way of promotion, the music video grew to play a central role in music marketing. Music videos began to change from their original use of just simply promoting the artist to showing a narrative or a concept of some kind. Sometimes the artists themselves did not even appear in the video; an example of this is the video to George Michael's song 'Freedom 90'.

Artists started using influences from films for their music video material, one of the most famous example being Michael Jackson who's video 'Thriller' contained many intertextual references to the horror genre, and his video 'Bad' was influenced by the choreographed fighting dances seen in 'West Side Story'.



In 2005, YouTube was launched, making music videos extremely internet-friendly. This also allowed for many many artists to become well known through music videos which had been viewed almost entirely online - for example, rapper Soulja Boy found his succes through this way. Many videos are deemed controversial for their content of sex (such as Bjork's 'Pagan Poetry', which showed depictions of intercourse), violence (M.I.A.'s 'Born Free' shows the US military killing kids through ways such as blowing them to pieces), and drug use (Soulwax's 'E Talking' cycles through various club-goers taking drugs).