Music video is a significant and interesting form of contemporary popular culture, one which is widely circulated, complex and important. This claim is, however, a potentially controversial one. For it is easy, as many critics have done, to either dismiss music video as a worthless by-product of capitalist business practice or, worse, to ignore it all together. Graham Fuller spells out this situation in ‘A Good Music Video is Hard to Find’ in claiming that ‘the search for the art and artistry of the music video goes on but the consensus is that El Dorado or Santa Claus will turn up first’. He goes on to say that, since the inception of MTV in 1981, ‘what critical evaluation of music video there is relegates it to the trash can of popular culture’. This kind of reaction to such a fascinating subject is, however, both predictable and perplexing. It is predictable in that the instrumental logic of music videos serves to direct attention towards a range of secondary commercial products and away from their own formal and aesthetic qualities, yet also perplexing in so far as the recent resurgence of academic interest in popular culture might have been expected to embrace the vibrancy of such a ubiquitous cultural product. These responses, to either dismiss or ignore, are, of course, the recto and verso of long-standing discourses concerning value and distinction, two sides of the same coin which continue to define music video as a kind of ‘throwaway art … the Kleenexes of popular culture’.