The first-ever music video on YouTube
Beginning with the launch of MTV in 1981, the music video quickly became a staple in the industry. Video killed the radio star, and suddenly, musicians were expected to put just as much effort into their visuals as they did into their sound. Artists with big-budget backing thrived, using spectacular accompanying visuals as a promotional tool to encourage listeners to buy their releases.
Just over two decades later, it seemed that YouTube had killed the MTV star. Artists no longer needed label backing to produce their own accompanying visuals, while the music video became more available than ever. Vevo came to the forefront, and more home-made efforts thrived. Alongside this democratisation of the medium came the phenomenon of fan music videos.
Those more well-acquainted with the platform will probably have stumbled upon their fair share of fan-made music videos and trailers. Preempting the dance and lip-syncing craze of TikTok, YouTube provided fans with a platform to imagine their own accompanying visuals for their favourite songs. Though they can often serve as an annoyance to other fans seeking out official content, the practice was also an exercise in creativity and fandom.
Long before the One Direction and BTS edits took over the internet, and long before ‘Gangnam Style‘ and ‘Anaconda’ amassed billions of views, the first ever fan-made music video – and the first-ever music video – to hit YouTube came in the form of ‘Vernal Lullaby’. Made by Adam Quick, the video was uploaded on May 3rd, 2005, making it the seventh oldest video on the platform.
In an early iteration of the fan-made music video, Quick’s contribution to the craft borrows the opening track from Queens of the Stone Ages’ 2005 record, Lullabies to Paralyze. Titled ‘This Lullaby’, the short song has a runtime of just one minute and 22 seconds. “It’s been so long since the moon has gone, oh what a wreck you’ve made me,” Josh Homme sings over simplistic finger-picked acoustic guitars.
Quick’s accompanying visuals for the track open with a shot of a characteristically 2005 computer before panning outside of his window. The song plays amidst diegetic noise of car horns and muffled voices as Quick focuses on a city street. The camera zooms in on balloons blowing in the wind and a girl sitting outside of a café before settling on the roof of his building.
The remainder of the video sees a man, perhaps Quick, lying on a sunbed on the roof, with the skyline far in the distance. Despite its fuzzy, pixelated quality, the simplistic footage somehow matches the calming, uncomplicated song, invoking a sad sense of nostalgia.
Watch ‘Vernal Lullaby’ by Adam Quick, the first music video on YouTube, below.
