He would later expand on this idea with 1981’s Elephant Parts, an hour-long medley of music clips and comedy sketches that went on to win the first-ever Grammy for Video of Year (the forerunner of today’s Best Music Video and Best Music Film categories). Nesmith recognized that songs can create their own impressionistic narratives through even the most disconnected images (and if you can have some photogenic women dancing around you, all the better). Still, “Rio” was groundbreaking because it showed how “out there” those videos could be: they didn’t need to just be live performances committed to tape. Nesmith would call his “Rio” clip the “first music video,” though everyone from The Beatles to Queen to Cab Calloway would probably take issue with that. Instead, Nesmith and director William Dear created a surrealist montage of disjointed images: black and white shots of a tuxedo-clad Nesmith, crooning into a microphone Nesmith dancing with a woman in a red dress Nesmith soaring through space, held aloft by ladies wearing giant, Carmen Miranda–esque fruit hats. The record label wanted a nice promotional clip of Nesmith singing along to the music, like the kind that was in many of the Monkees episodes. Take the video for “Rio,” from his 1977 solo album, From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing. Once he did, he set down a defiant path of always doing the most uncommercial thing he could think of. He was an actual musician and songwriter who couldn’t wait to break free of his contract. Their very existence predicted the way personality would take precedence over artistry in the MTV age. Their songs were accompanied by short proto–music videos-and in the beginning, with a few exceptions, the Monkees didn’t write their own music or even play their own instruments. You likely remember Nesmith from the Monkees, the made-for-television rock band whose eponymous show could be today regarded as a precursor to MTV. A place like Texas may as well have not existed-which is ironic, considering that, without the Houston-born and Dallas-raised Michael Nesmith, MTV itself might never have existed. Drawing from a limited well of videos, those first hours were dominated by just a handful of artists, many of them from New York and England. Yet for a worldwide phenomenon, the channel had an incredibly narrow scope. Perhaps more importantly, the image implied that MTV’s premiere was a global event, uniting the whole world in awe (even if its initial hours were only broadcast in New Jersey). Plus, what better way to capture the upstart ethos of MTV than ripping some photos from the public domain, then slapping rock guitar over them? The debut of a cable channel devoted exclusively to playing music videos was-to its creators, at least-an epochal television moment, on par with that 1969 moon landing. There was a lot of symbolism in that image. PopClips was preceded by the video Elephant Parts (which won the first ever Grammy Award for Music Video), and followed by a second series titled Television Parts, both of which Nesmith hosted and produced.Forty years ago this week, MTV launched with a graphic of astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, planting an American flag, with the network’s neon logo replacing the stars and stripes. The channel's owners at the time, Warner Cable, wanted to buy the name and idea, but instead, according to Dear, "they just watered down the idea and came up with MTV." The program was broadcast weekly on the youth-oriented cable television channel Nickelodeon in late 1980 and early 1981. Besides Harrison, the production team was made up of Bruce "Buz" Clarke, Keith Cornell, Marybeth Harris, and Leslie Chacon. With an infinity cyclorama as the background, set flats were made from the Styrofoam packing used to ship laserdisc players and 3/4" video decks. Production began in the spring of 1979 at SamFilm, a sound-stage built and operated in Sand City, California by Sam Harrison, a Monterey Peninsula College instructor with a motion picture background. įormer Monkee Mike Nesmith conceived the first music-video program as a promotional device for Warner Communications' record division. PopClips is a music video television program, the direct predecessor of MTV.
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