Who created the first-ever rock music video?
Rock and roll has never been solely confined to the airwaves.
Going right back to the days of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, the image of our beloved rock stars has always arguably been as important as the music itself, which is perhaps why the world of music video has been a core part of the music industry since MTV first emerged onto screens back in 1981.
Famously, it was beloved one-hit-wonders The Buggles who were given the honour of having the very first music video to be shown on MTV, but that is not to say that Trevor Horn’s new-wave outfit were the originators of the medium. By that time, countless outfits were experimenting with film, stretching across the musical landscape from the subversive outsider art of Devo to the glam rock revolution of David Bowie. In fact, you can trace the origins of music video back many decades further, to a time even before colour television was invented, let alone MTV.
Admittedly, the exact origin of the music video format depends on what exactly you class as a music video. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, Hollywood produced countless films featuring the prevailing musical artists of the day – typically big band jazz stars – which could, in one way or another, be construed as being a music video, albeit a very long, drawn-out one, which wouldn’t have the engagement nor interest to be shown on MTV.
Even if you determine that music videos should be short promotional videos for one specific song or artist, though, early examples can be found in the form of ‘Soundies’. In essence, Soundies were short pieces of film showing performances by various musical artists, and they were produced by the Mills Novelty Company in the United States throughout the 1940s. Countless iconic performers were captured within these short Soundies, including everybody from Louis Armstrong to Benny Fields.
These so-called Soundies certainly paved the way for the later landscape of music video, but the lack of rock and roll – both in the films and in the music industry of the 1940s in general – meant that the first bonafide rock music video didn’t arrive until years later. There is certainly a case to be made for Elvis Presley’s various film projects, which invariably involved him masking a lack of acting talent with countless musical performances, being the first rock videos, you once again run into the issue of their runtime.
So, who made the first rock video?
For the very first rock music video, we must look to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, as is so often the case. Again, there is some degree of dispute over who really got there first, with multiple contenders and technicalities at play, but Bob Dylan’s promotional video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is widely and rightly regarded as the inaugural rock music video, having been created in 1965 as the opening segment of the documentary film Don’t Look Back.
Dylan might have got there first, but Don’t Look Back wasn’t released until 1967, by which time multiple other artists had created their own promo films. The Beatles, for instance, created a few different films for their single ‘Paperback Writer’ in the spring of 1966, while their mod-rock counterparts The Kinks crafted some kitchen-sink surrealism later that year for their single ‘Dead End Street’.
As you can see, the answer to who created the first rock music video isn’t as simple as it might initially appear. While Dylan’s iconic video didn’t actually hit screens until after the likes of The Fab Four and Ray Davies’ clan, it is still difficult to dismiss the trailblazing importance of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ as being the first music video to capture the attention of the rock and roll sphere.
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