CHAPTER 20 | CDS, MTV, AND POP SPECTACLE 505
videos, Dylan’s visual complement to his own song hints at the artistic possibili-
ties of combining music and image. For the next decade and a half, record com-
panies occasionally made promotional videos to boost the popularity of their
acts, but with no obvious venue for their distribution, these early music videos,
which usually consisted of unimaginative lip-synching, played only a small part
in the marketing of popular music.MUSIC TELEVISION (MTV)
Spurring further artistic development was the launch in 1981 of Music Televi-
sion (MT V), a cable channel designed to broadcast nothing but music videos.
Cable television had emerged in the 1970s as a way to bring network broadcasts
to regions where conventional antenna reception was poor; consequently, MT V
was at fi rst seen primarily by viewers in the Midwest and South, parts of the
country distant from cutting-edge popular trends. Only gradually, with the
growing success of premium cable channels such as Home Box Offi ce (HBO),
did MT V and other cable channels come to be a fi xture in most American homes
with television sets.
At the time, the idea of a channel devoted to music videos seemed strange
to most people both inside and outside the music industry. Record companies
thought of videos as promotional tools for bands—as advertisements for records,
where the real money was to be made. A cable channel that aired nothing but
commercials struck most people as a folly. But the audience for MT V rapidly
grew, and by the mid-1980s MT V took its place alongside radio as an effective
way to launch a hit record.
At fi rst, MT V was at the mercy of the record companies and
would air just about anything the major labels sent its way. As
the number of videos grew and they began to compete for air-
time, however, the artistic quality of the visual images began
to matter. In short time, some musicians and fi lmmakers real-
ized that music videos could aspire to the artistic level of the
songs themselves. The video for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”
(1983), a fi ve-minute homage to classic Holly wood fi lm noir,
simultaneously raised the artistic status of the music video,
brought widespread attention to MT V, and made Jackson a
solo pop star of the fi rst magnitude. For a follow-up, Jackson
collaborated with the feature fi lm director John Landis to cre-
ate a fourteen-minute narrative video for the title song from
his blockbuster album Thriller. That landmark ushered in the
so-called golden age of music video—an era, extending into
the early 1990s, when record companies put their full fi nan-
cial and technological resources into supporting the making
of videos as meticulously crafted as the studio-created music
they helped promote.
Close on the heels of Jackson’s successes came the second
major music video star of the 1980s, Madonna Louise Cic-
cone. Her debut album, Madonna (1984), was followed a year
later by her breakthrough Like a Virgin, by which time she was aK Madonna (b. 1958)
and Michael Jackson
(1958–2009), the fi rst
music video superstars.172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 505 23/01/13 11:15 AM