Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007 Gunnar Strøm The Two Golden Ages of Animated Music Video

Music videos have been being made since the mid 1960s and had their breakthrough in the mid 1970s. Since then it has been the main marketing tool for breaking new pop and rock artists in the international market. When MTV opened on August 1st 1981 by showing the video Video Killed the Radio Star (Russel Mulcahy, 1979) it was prophetic programming. Within a couple of years MTV was the main source for an artist to reach the American market. The enormous success of Michael Jackson and Madonna in the 1980s was at least partly caused by their clever use of the music video medium. Since then almost all pop and rock artists have music videos. The prestige of the medium has been variable, since the first golden period in the 1980s to the subsequent loss of this prestige in the 1990s. However new dance music, rap and hip hop have continued to use it extensively, and there is a new attention given to the videos in the last ten years, both as an underground phenomenon, an internet medium and as traditional advertising for popular music. While animated images to music have been made all through film history, the animated music video did not arrive until the mid 1980s with highlights like Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Take on Me by A-ha. They initiated what I call the first golden age of animated music video