Introduction

Around twenty years ago a buzz about a "new" and "innovative" art form crackled through the music industry. This form, music video, paired popular songs with series of incoherent images held together by thin narratives. It became a unique promotional tool for performing artists and their record companies. Cable channel MTV offered an outlet for these videos and in doing so helped fuel the hype surrounding them. The hype focused primarily on the visual--cutting-edge editing, eye-popping special effects, and jolting imagery; the music became almost an afterthought. But, despite the hype, music video was, and is, not necessarily new or even innovative. Instead, it represents a step in the ever-evolving relationship between music and television, one that dates to early 1950s music-variety programming. According to Andrew Goodwin, "We cannot make sense of music video without locating its development within a nexus of far-reaching changes inside mass media" (24). One site for this development is the transition from radio to television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and programming on WCPO-TV, channel 9 in Cincinnati, offers a creative space within which to explore it. To show how this station's programming fits in the evolution of music video, I shall consider the early relationship between popular music and radio; the transition period from radio to television and the music-variety genre's place within it; the innovations of WCPO-TV and its programming in the context of another 1950s music-variety show Your Hit Parade; and the visual and aural links between this programming and contemporary music video.

Popular music and radio