post 6
Music Videos
In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired
electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song
"The Little Lost Child". Using a magic lantern,
Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live
performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song,
the first step toward music video.
In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies"
many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone
shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) featured many bands, vocalists and dancers.
Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons
called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to
sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball", which
is similar to a modern karaoke machine. Early 1930s cartoons featured popular
musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during
the cartoons.
The early animated films by Walt Disney, such as the Silly Symphonies shorts and especially Fantasia, which featured several
interpretations of classical pieces, were built around music. The Warner Brothers
cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned
around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films.
Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway,
were also distributed to theaters.
At
12:01am on August 1, 1981, history was made when MTV, the first 24-hour video
music channel, launched onto our television sets and literally changed our
lives with the birth of the music video.
The
first video ever played on the network was quite ironic — “Video Killed the
Radio Star” by The Buggles.
Though
virtually unknown in the States, The Buggles would be reborn and become one of
the biggest one-hit wonders of all time thanks in large part to the “Video
Killed the Radio Star” music video airing on MTV.
If I am going to
watch a music video then I will usually go on YouTube, however I usually stream
music from things such as Spotify and sound cloud which do not show you the
music video because it’s on your phone.
Comments
Post a Comment