Combining music and imagery didn’t begin with MTV. Musical short films have been around as long as the talkies (or even since 1895 when Edison developed the Kinetophone, if you want to get really technical), but it wasn’t until the ‘80s that music videos as we know them today became common both as an artistic statement and as a marketing tactic. And even then, there was a history of promotional films made for singles that provided a foundation upon which MTV, and every music video service since, was built. These are 7 of the artists who helped make music videos what they are today.
The Beatles
The Beatles mastered visual media in the ‘60s almost as effectively as they mastered music, using both feature-length and short films to market themselves and their records internationally. Their feature film appearances in A Hard Day’s Night and Help are built around showcasing their songs with the same lip-syncing and frenetic, rhythmic editing techniques still used for music videos today.
They explored the trippier possibilities of the format with Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour, directed by the Beatles themselves. Perhaps most crucially, beginning in 1965, the Fab Four also made standalone music videos, then called “filmed inserts,” for songs such as “Penny Lane” and “Paperback Writer” as a way to promote their US releases without making in-person appearances.
The Rolling Stones
After the Beatles began relying on filmed inserts, many other prominent ‘60s artists from the UK began to do the same for promotional purposes, including Pink Floyd, The Who, The Moody Blues, and The Kinks, whose clip for “Dead End Street” is an early example of narrative in music videos.
Second only to the Beatles, The Rolling Stones released a string of promotional clips throughout the ‘60s, including their first for “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” and another for “We Love You,” which used the format to comment on the band’s well-publicized, then-ongoing drug charges.
Queen
Perhaps more than any other single song, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is responsible for the rise of the music video. It was not Queen’s first, but it was the first time an accompanying video, made for airing on TV shows like BBC’s Top of the Pops so the band didn’t have to mime such a complex song, was so crucial to a song’s success.
The single was an international hit upon release in 1975, still seven years before the dawn of MTV, and the video’s imagery — the band’s faces shrouded in shadow, singing the a capella opening lines — is still iconic today.
AC/DC
Australia discovered the appeal of music television before the US, in 1974, when former radio DJ Graham Webb launched a weekly music-oriented TV show called Sounds and commissioned a newsroom staffer named Russell Mulcahy to direct clips for popular songs. Sounds developed alongside another similar program called Countdown, and their success gave rise to a local music video industry that helped to promote international artists and Australian acts like INXS, Skyhooks, Kylie Minogue and AC/DC.
Likely the most influential video from this era was AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll),” directed by Countdown’s creator Paul Drane.
The Buggles
After getting his start at Sounds, Russell Mulcahy relocated to the UK and continued to make music videos, including for The Buggles’ version of “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
At 12:01am on August 1, 1981, Mulcahy’s landmark music video became the first ever shown on MTV, though the signal was only strong enough to broadcast to homes in New Jersey.
Herbie Hancock
It took a music video this terrifying to get a black artist heavy rotation on MTV. In its early years, the network was originally dominated almost exclusively by white artists, relegating black artists in rock, R&B, and hip-hop to niche networks like BET. Kevin Godley and Lol Crème, music video directors and former members of art rock band 10cc, changed that in 1983 with their surrealist video for Herbie Hancock’s jazz/hip-hop single “Rockit,” which showed Hancock on a television screen in the middle of a living room of nightmarish, malfunctioning robots.
Godley & Crème’s gimmick worked, and “Rockit” became an enduring hit thanks to its inclusion on MTV, paving the way for other black artists.
Michael Jackson
David Bowie had set records for the $582,000 budget of his most elaborate music video, 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes,” but his numbers were blown out of the water by the production costs exceeding $800,000 Michael Jackson’s 14-minute long “Thriller” video. Directed by John Landis of Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London, the horror-themed clip again forced MTV to weaken their discriminatory policies and became the most influential music video of all time, as evidenced by every time someone attempts the accompanying dance in public.
“Thriller” pushed the music video beyond the song length to create a short film with dialogue and narrative, paving the way for all such music videos that have come since. Plus, unlike some we see today, “Thriller” is never indulgent, only wildly entertaining.
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