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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: A brief history of the music video
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics. Click on the links in bold to be brought to the full piece.
A brief history of the music video
The music video had a huge impact on popular culture and the music industry. From Starman to Bohemian Rhapsody, videos have become cultural touchstones.
(Crack Magazine, approx 11 mins reading time)
And then, in 1981, a 24-hour American cable channel called MTV changed everything. It launched, tongue firmly in cheek, with The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star, the first on a repeating playlist of 250 curated clips hosted by video jockeys. MTV came to symbolise a particular aesthetic, one that music journalist Rob Tannenbaum describes as “aggressive dictatorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colours, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtaposition, provocation, frolic – all combined for maximum impact on a small screen” in his oral history of the network.
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