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Culture |
Music Videos The music video really did become a 80s symbol. Its popularity can be pin pointed to one date; August the first 1981, when MTV was launched by playing its first video, the aptly named 'Video killed the radio star' by the Buggles. Anybody watching this first introduction to the music video would have been amazed to know this strange new idea was going to become a huge pop culture sensation worth millions to the music industry. Still this was the 1980's, the decade when multi-coloured plastic cube puzzles could reach market saturation amassing millions of dollars on the way. So, why shouldn't something as colourfull and excitingly new as the music video manage too as well? What it had going for it, and against it in some ways was that nobody really knew what a music video was supposed to look like. OK they weren't new by any means since Bob Dylan had a primitive form of a music video as far back as 1966, but they were still uncharted territory in 1981. Many of the first ones were strange arty scenes that didn't make sense, they were only there to go with the music and reflect how the artist wanted them to look. They could be like Duran Duran's 'Rio' almost a couple of minutes out of an abstract film, there were no expectations to live up to. Neither were there any companys that would just make you a perfect video for the right price, the artists were on their own with the new music videos, and this was shown in the way they were produced and directed. This arty abstract image it created stuck with music videos throughout most the decade, even as recently as Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' which is a whole small film in its self. Now people are expected to produce several videos for every album, not like in the 80's when artists with videos were the creative entropronours of the music industry, the fore front of technology as it were. Those early videos that were made by people who didn't know what a music video was actually shaped the whole industry as it is now. They didn't know what they were because they created them. Or more truthfully they re-created them. What they did was take something unusual and turn it in to a whole new concept that appealed to a generation that would be watching MTV, by breaking away from the idea that they could only be shots of the band singing. They could also be scenes of places, abstract images that complimented the music, or even computer generated, there were no limits to what could be done. They literally became visions of the music on your TV, and now some twenty years later these visions are everywhere with several channels dedicated to them and many compilation video tapes on store shelves. The music video, Just another one of those things that reshaped pop culture in our favourite decade, the 1980's. |
