Attack!! Gang Army

[canman]

I like the music that goes with the video. Is this one of the first examples of music videos?

[Kuang_Grade]

While one can always debate the orgins of music videos (some say they started with the Beatles films), I've always thought this one comes pretty close to styles of many of the first stand alone videos in 70's and 80's (ie, intermixing high concept images with the song lyrics), Cliff Richards and the Shadows, albeit in puppet form...from 1966 film Thunderbirds are GO!

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[Charles]

While one can always debate the orgins of music videos (some say they started with the Beatles films), I've always thought this one comes pretty close to styles of many of the first stand alone videos in 70's and 80's (ie, intermixing high concept images with the song lyrics), Cliff Richards and the Shadows, albeit in puppet form...from 1966 film Thunderbirds are GO!]

You may come to regret making such uninformed declarations about the origins of music videos in front of someone like me, a member of the now-defunct Visual Music Alliance of Los Angeles.
Music videos far predate the existence of video, so they are often referred to as "visual music." The first true recorded visual music pieces were animated films by Oskar Fischinger, going back to the 1920s. Fischinger's films are rarely seen today, I happened to catch a full retrospective show of every film he made, wow was that a trip. The visuals in Fischinger's films are reminiscent of the first animated experiments in abstract film, particularly Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling's "Absolut Kinema" genre of Dadaist film. But Richter and Eggeling's works were silent.

However, live performance of visual music has a much longer history. I remember one VMA scholar's lecture about how the ancient Greeks invented a device like a piano keyboard, attached to levers that would move shutters to reveal light projected from candles through colored glass. He said the Greeks liked to take a potion of ergotamine, trip out on the light shows, and have big orgies. Sounds like it was a lot more fun than sitting around watching MTV.
One of the more notable modern experiments in live visual music performance was the "flame organ." These were large pipe organs like you might find in an old church, but instead of big brass pipes to produce sound, they had large glass tubes, and flammable gases were continuously fed into the tube, a keypress on the keyboard would send a spark into the bottom of the tube, causing a colored flame to rush up the glass tube. However, these instruments were dangerous and tended to catch fire or explode. As far as I know, only one working example of a flame organ survives in a museum and nobody dares playing it.

[GuyJean]

Music videos far predate the existence of video..

Uh.. Does that make sense?

So cavemen dancing by fire light, throwing shadows on the walls, were probably the first music video directors..

GJ

[kamome]

You may come to regret making such uninformed declarations about the origins of music videos in front of someone like me,

I doubt anyone regrets anything they've said to you or "in front of you" in the forums.

[Kuang_Grade]

You may come to regret making such uninformed declarations about the origins of music videos in front of someone like me,

Yawn.....If you actually look at the words I wrote you'd see that 1) I said that it is an open issue, 2) that this is my opinion not a declaration of fact, and oh, I even limited it to a very specific time and style...I didn't say it was the first music video....I said the clip seemed to have many of the elements that modern era music videos that we've all seen and was a fairly different than 'Elvis picks up guitar and everyone spontaneously starts dancing at the burger stand' style the was common in 60's films.

[Taro Toporific]

Music videos far predate the existence of video, so they are often referred to as "visual music."

I got all sorts of complaints on my blog about the prior artof "Thomas A. Edison Music Video Co.(tm)" (name trademarked before 1905!) and comparing it with Madonna's Japan-made "Jump" music video.

[Choeki]

It looks more like an extended intro to a film than a music video.

The over-acting on the guys "shooting" is pretty hilarious though.