One of the reasons that Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) is so regularly cited as definitive of some new era in popular music video is that it exemplifies the grammar of popular music video. While the codes and conventions of the genre are broad, the key feature of popular music video is that moving image is edited in time to the music. Consequently the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Walt Disney and even Busby Berkley are major landmarks in the development of the modern popular music video. However, to view the clip directed by Bruce Gower for Queen as the first music video is inaccurate.
While the Panorama Soundie jukebox played film clips over popular songs of the 1940s the rock and roll films of the 1950s introduced audiences to the idea of band performances. Although it started life as a B-movie, Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley, was one of the biggest hits of 1956. The film is composed principally of band performances by Haley, The Platters, Alan Freed and Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. Just as it is impossible to isolate one single factor in the transformations that took place in youth culture at the end of the Fifties, the reasons for the proliferation of popular music television in the period were as complex as they were dynamic. Suffice it to say that since the advent of the popular music chart it would seem that increasingly the lifestyle choices of the affluent demographic of baby boom consumers were cohered around the purchase of highly symbolic popular music products. Music shows like Top of Pops in the UK, American Bandstand in the US and Beat Club in Europe were centrepieces in the emergent youth culture revolution.
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