THE ORIGIN OF THE MUSIC VIDEO

Music videos are especially positioned to teach us about the shifting contours of mainstream popular culture. The video is a time capsule, from Bowie's rainbow outfit to the way he casually wraps his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson. It's a four-minute reminder that in 1970s Britain, an unapologetic presentation of queerness on mainstream television generated shockwaves that began to shift cultural fault lines. Similar touchstones include Michael Jackson's Thriller, Madonna's Like a Prayer, Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again, and Beyoncé's Lemonade. All are more instantly transportive and revealing of their times than most art, novels, and films from 1983, 1989, 2000, and 2016.

One of the earliest examples is Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. It is credited as one of the first singles to have an accompanying video, though The Beatles pioneered this strategy ten years earlier, creating a clip for We Can Work It Out that could be played on Top of the Pops if the band was too busy touring to perform.

Early examples of short films set to song were invented in the 1930s (Warner Brothers' 'Spooney Melodies'), 1940s ('soundies'), and 1960s ('Scopitone' movies), all variations on performance-based snippets used to promote popular music at the time. In the mid-1960s, musicians collaborated with filmmakers on short art films that channeled the essence of their songs through dance, narrative, and location. Toni Basil performed a striptease to her single of the same name in American underground artist Bruce Conner's short film Breakaway in 1966, while The Beatles worked with Swedish director Peter Goldmann on films that saw the band climbing trees and riding horses in matching red coats for their 1967 double-A side Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane.

Then, in 1981, a 24-hour American cable station named MTV came along and changed everything. It debuted with The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star as the first in a repeating playlist of 250 handpicked clips hosted by video jockeys. In his oral history of the network, music journalist Rob Tannenbaum describes MTV as "aggressive dictatorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colors, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtaposition, provocation, frolic - all combined for maximum impact on a small screen." Music videos were no longer just about promoting an artist; they were also about selling sex, bling, and young culture itself.

Over the next decade, as costs grew, so did the form's creative potential.

Innovative examples, such as a-ha's sketchbook-inspired Take on Me and Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, which used claymation and stop-motion animation designed by Aardman Animations (soon to be of Wallace and Gromit renown), demonstrated the genre as a valuable art form. However, Michael Jackson's Thriller is unquestionably the pinnacle of 1980s music videos. The 13-minute spectacle, directed by Hollywood filmmaker John Landis in 1983, was a blockbuster production that cost more than $900,000 to produce. The 1950s B-movie atmosphere, synchronized zombie dance, and MJ's candy apple red leather jacket all contributed to the video becoming as instantly identifiable as any of the pop star's earworms.

Thriller also marked a watershed moment in MTV's attitude toward Black musicians, who had previously been underrepresented in the channel's rotation. MTV management blamed the whiteness of their programming on the fact that they were primarily a 'rock' channel, a poor justification for ignoring 80s pop titans like Michael Jackson and Prince. It took Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, whose video featured the single white glove and moonwalk dance that fans all over the world would imitate, to persuade the network that Black musicians had crossover potential and financial value.

While Prince's films were more focused on performance than spectacle, the eroticism of their content began to test the boundaries of what was considered acceptable television viewing. In the video for Prince & The Revolution's 1984 hit When Doves Cry from his film musical Purple Rain, he appears bareheaded first in a claw-foot bathtub, then on all fours, smoldering direct-to-camera.

Madonna, another artist associated with MTV's Golden Age, used music videos to excite viewers' sexuality (and to persuade them to wear pearls with ripped fishnet tights).

She created a cultural water-cooler moment and outraged the Vatican in 1989's Like a Prayer by dancing in front of KKK-style burning crosses in her negligée, kissing a Black saint, and depicting a racist criminal justice system (her character is gang raped by a group of white men, but a Black witness is arrested). Other videos, such as Material Girl, a sly riff on Marilyn Monroe's performance of Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend in the 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the racy, Metropolis-themed Express Yourself, and Vogue's black and white Art Deco stylings, elevated the form and placed the up-and-coming artist in conversation with the lineage of Classical Hollywood cinema.Meanwhile, she paved the way for directors like David Fincher, who directed four of her videos, to become full-fledged Hollywood directors.

Music videos had begun to migrate to the internet by the mid-2000s, as MTV began to focus its programming on reality TV. In 2005, YouTube, an online video platform, was founded, transferring power away from TV gatekeepers and into the hands, or rather the fingertips, of the average at-home viewer. It took Google less than a year to purchase it. Sony, Universal, and EMI joined up in 2009 to launch Vevo, a specialized streaming platform for music videos broadcast on YouTube. Another characteristic of YouTube that set it apart from channels like MTV? The feedback.