ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the visual (re-)presentation of popular music, examining the relationship between popular music and film, television, and, in particular, music video and MTV. As was shown in Chapter 2, 'music became a thing' (Eisenberg 1988) with the advent of recording technology in the late nineteenth century enabling its development in commodity form, independent of its 'live' performance aspects. Until its twentieth-century reproduction on disc and dissemination on radio, music was not purely an aural experience but one also involving the pleasure of seeing the performance. While 'live' performance continued to be important, music was now often mediated by the new visual media.
