The History of the Music Video

ProlificessayistNoah LefevreofPolyphoniclooked at the long history of the music video, from its early predecessors through to modern day. He notes how the matching of audio and video for The Little Lost Child", Disney animation, the Lumier Brothers, and the musical numbers of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers all contributed to combining recorded music with interesting visuals.

It reaches back before the Golden Age of Hollywood, when America's biggest stars were singing and dancing in technical spectacles. It even predates the early days of animation, when Fleischer Studios was rotoscoping Cab Calloway into surreal Betty Boop cartoons. For as long as film and recorded music have existed, artists, inventors, and businessmen alike, have been trying to find ways of combining the two mediums.

LeFevre also goes through more recent history, the advent of MTV, and its subsequent replacement through social media, particularly YouTube and TikTok, and beyond.

There are new ways of conveying their messages visually. There is absolutely no question that the nature of the music video is changing in a post TikTok era but despite its diminished role, I don't believe the music video is going away. Humankind has always been drawn to the combination of sight and sound, from folk dance to opera, from the Illustrated song to the modern music video, we love the magic that comes from this kind of hybridity and we have good reason.

This video is a compilation of a seven-part Polyphonic series called Hit Record: An Incomplete History of the Music Video.

via My Modern Met