The never-ending argument about who invented the music video has to go through the Monkees. They have a good claim for it, but ultimately I come down on the side that says that their romps filmed to music are too close to movie musical scenes to qualify as true music videos.
Until “Goin’ Down.” That’s a track in and of itself, not shots of romps but a studio-generated true video set apart from the show. It’s so well conceived and produced that it could have been held back a dozen years and played on MTV when it started and not looked a bit out of place. It’s also a virtuoso singing performance by Mickey that’s astonishing.
The music video has lots of precursors, but “Goin’ Down” is the closest to a definitive beginning as we’ll ever get, November 20, 1967. It was followed very closely by true music videos on Laugh-in in January and February 1968. Why the genre didn’t take off then is still puzzling. All the pieces were there.
If you count that, then you have to count all the Monkees romps from the beginning of their show, which were filmed earlier in 1966 even than the promos **woodstockbirdybird ** mentions.
You can. There’s no agreement about what a music video is. You can go back to the Soundies of the 1940s if you want to play it that way. If you search for Soundies on YouTube, you’ll find scads.
But I already said that I considered the earlier Monkees’ romps to be like numbers from a musical. Soundies are so exactly numbers from a musical that they’re completely interchangeable. If I don’t count one, I can’t count the other.
That rules out The Beatles as well. Romp? Check. Originality? Nil. Whatever you say about that “Strawberry Fields Forever” promo, you can say about an earlier Monkees piece.
“Goin’ Down” simply has a different look and feel about it. Sure, it’s subjective. Give me an objective criterion and we’ll go with that. But there isn’t one.
Nah. Those Monkees romps were part of a show. The Beatles clip was filmed as a stand-alone work, to promote a song.
Those were made for video jukeboxes, and so were not strictly analogous. They were not filmed to be broadcast for purposes of promoting a song.
If you want to count “romps” from a larger work, you can pull musical numbers from any movie. The Beatles’ “romps” from Hard Day’s Night predate anything the Monkees did in that category.
“Strawberry Fields” was filmed and used as a stand-alone piece. It (and maybe also the earlier “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” clips with which I am not familiar) is the closest precursor to the modern rock video in terms of the reasons it was filmed and how it was used.
No, but they make the same arguments against AI contestants as they did against The Monkees (though much more deservedly so in the case of the Idol kids): that they’re prefabricated “fake” artists who only exist as corporate shills.
My husband and I have discussed this on occasion in the past; we came to the conclusion that if The Monkees started up today, they would be another boy band with some adequate or better singers, and who cares if they play or write? In other words, any of the criticisms would be non-issues.
Dudette, I think the Monkees are better singers than any of the current boy banders.
Okay, maybe not Peter Tork, who’s generally considered to be their weakest singer. Even Pete tends to shine when given the right kind of music though, and his instrumental skills are absolutely amazing.
I’m w/Sir Rhosis on Listen to the band, and how about Magnolia Sims?
Just as an aside, I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that during the late '80’s/early '90’s, Douglas Adams & Michael Naismith tried to get together to do a film of the Hitchiker trilogy.