While we know MTV as the channel that gave a platform to some of the most iconic music videos to ever hit our screens . It’s to question where these visuals emerged and all began? 

Before music videos were even a thing, they were often described as ‘short films’, little visual journeys meant to accompany sound. Long before MTV hit the airwaves in 1981, artists were experimenting with the relationship between image, sound and how this regarded visual effects in ways that were abstract, raw, and even cinematic. This post-cinema era birthed a new wave of music visuals, a kind of hybrid form where imagination met performance and the beginning of this new visual feeling (Shaviro, 2010).

When MTV launched it didn’t just air music, it sold it. This was a heavily industrialised space, where artists often had to play within a certain budget for their projects and videos but it also became a playground for creative expression. It gave rise to a whole new visual aesthetic, from DIY punk edits to surreal, dreamlike narratives, (Vernallis, C. 2004) . Exampling Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which basically set the blueprint for what a performance-based video could look like at the time. 

Notably many anti-MTV, underground visuals came out this era but these videos pushed back against the polish of mainstream TV, music videos were potentially free from any pressure to follow narrative conventions, exampling “Windowlicker” by Aphex Twin (1999).

These anti-commercial visuals carved out a different space, one where distortion, lo-fi effects, and unconventional editing created their own kind of visual poetry.

MTV may not have invented the ‘music video’, but it redefined its possibilities. Its influence continues to bleed into everything from TikTok loops to the VFX-heavy aesthetics we now see in different genres of film and visual arts.

REFRENCES

Shaviro, S. (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books.

Vernallis, C. (2004) Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press.

Queen. (1975) Bohemian Rhapsody [Music video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ

Aphex Twin. (1999) Windowlicker [Music video]. Directed by Chris Cunningham. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBS4Gi1y_nc 

33742304- Naomi Nemi