Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:

(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);

(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).

In order to take advantage of the promotional potential of the music video, the country music industry was forced to adapt a medium with conventions and aesthetic elements established by other musical genres – by pop and rock. And to reach its distinct market country music video also had to incorporate country's own established iconographic elements. This iconography is constructed and understood in two ways: through the traditional concerns of country music lyrics; and through the history of visual media based on and developed around the genre. Country music has, in fact, been associated with the screen since movies could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers' 1929 movie short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing cowboy movies to the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw.

Almost since their inception film and television have employed music as background accompaniment. Despite this obvious fact, the significance of such musical accompaniment has been underestimated by most researchers (see Tagg 1979). The contemporary conjunction of video technology, communication satellites and cable-TV has created a media environment in which television featuring music videos has thrived, and in which media researchers are no longer able to ignore the synchronisation of aural and visual content. While the idea of synchronising musical and visual presentation is itself not new (see Aufderheide 1986), its realisation in the modern music video presents those seeking to describe and explain media behaviour with a new set of problems and tasks.

Rock music has not only provided the soundtrack of our lives, but a large part of the image repertoire as well. Neither the conjunction of popular music and other media (including television and film) nor the inseparable relation between rock and roll and visual iconographies, styles and attitudes is new. Nevertheless, it is clear that the force of these conjunctures in our cultural lives is rapidly spreading, viral-like, across media, genres, contexts, interests and generations. This is neither surprising nor necessarily bad; as rock and roll generations have grown up and asserted their plurality and influence, it is their music which is taken for granted, offered as capitalist entertainment and sometimes exploited for marketing purposes. This reconfiguration, often described as rock ‘moving into the mainstream of contemporary culture’ has been enabled and even engendered by technological, social and economic conditions. But it is the speed with which this is being accomplished, the particular ways it is inserted into broader contexts, and the effects it is having that interest me. The topography of popular culture is obviously changing; how rock and roll has come to define the dominant forms of cultural enjoyment and even legitimacy, offers us an opportunity to map out some of the cultural changes of contemporary life, and their relations to ideological and political struggles.