It is difficult to appreciate how much modern video content is shaped in terms of direction, editing and post-production by the development and establishment of the music video as a genre.
Aside from the most extreme examples of feature films that were designed as long-form music videos such as Flashdance, Rocky IV and Top Gun, everything from non-scripted television shows, online videos and even advertising have been influenced by music videos.
The emphasis on high-energy non-diegetic soundtracks, hyperkinetic editing styles and post-production techniques such as colour grading that create a feeling of hyperreality created a particular style that catches the eye of a viewer and draws them in without necessarily requiring grounded realism.
Much of this is credited to Bohemian Rhapsody, which established the music video as a major part of both the art and promotion of pop music. However, even decades before Queen, early music videos were creating the foundations to change the medium of video.
What Was The First Music Video?
Identifying the first music video can be complicated because defining exactly what a music video is can be a challenge.
If it is simply a series of images set to music or used to illustrate a song, the first-ever music video was for The Little Lost Child, an 1894 ballad by Marks & Stern that was typically performed live accompanied by a rudimentary slideshow of pictures that told the story.
It was an instant success, and for the better part of four decades, illustrated songs became the primary promotional material for musical artists and their songs.
From The Talkie To The Musical
When the “talkie” arrived in the 1920s, several animation studios produced sing-along shorts with either musicians performing their hit songs for the camera or animations that were made to accompany pieces of classical music.
Whilst Walt Disney’s Fantasia was by far the most famous of these, Warner Brothers and Fleischer Studios also produced musical shorts. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies names were originally intended to be used for musical cartoons before they were used as a title for any animated short the company made.
Another incredibly unique early example of this was St Louis Blues in 1929, a 16-minute short film revolving around the song of the same name in a format which remarkably resembled long-form music videos such as the full version of Bad by Michael Jackson.
The concept eventually evolved into Soundies, a genre of early three-minute short films from the 1940s until the late 1960s that were played on video jukeboxes.
The early films were relatively rudimentary in terms of editing and treatment, in no small part because the turnaround time for the Soundies was remarkably fast.
It is likely that they would have eventually resembled the more abstract style and frame-perfect editing we expect from modern music videos, but materials restrictions caused by the Second World War limited their construction, and television quickly took the place of the Soundies by the 1960s.
Put It In The Apartment
In 1958, the Chekoslovakian song Put It In The Apartment featured what could be the first music video, featuring a distinctly abstract style that would only be widely replicated more widely in the 1980s.
Unlike something like St Louis Blues or the Soundies, which were meant to resemble live performances in front of a camera, Put It In The Apartment was heavily stylised and abstract, far closer to Bohemian Rhapsody than anything that had come before.
This would be taken to an even greater level throughout the 1960s, with the “filmed inserts” used by bands such as The Beatles transforming how music videos looked with the deliberate use of lighting, cross-fading and colour intensity to create specific effects.
