Video Killed the Radio Star
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"Video Killed the Radio Star" is a 1980s New Wave song (released in 1979) by the British group The Buggles that celebrates the golden days of radio. With broadcast-quality vocals and a bouncy rhythm, the song plays like a jingle. It's a fitting sound, considering the song tells of a singer whose career is cut short by television. Horn has said his lyrics were inspired by the J.G. Ballard short story "The Sound-Sweep," in which the title character, a deaf and dumb boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it, comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer. He also felt "an era was about to pass."
Appropriately, considering its subject matter, the music video for the song, directed by Russell Mulcahy, was the first to be shown on MTV, when the ground-breaking music channel debuted on August 1, 1981 (at 12:00 AM).
Written by Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley, the song reached number one in the UK charts the week of October 20, 1979, the first-ever number one for label Island Records. It would also top the Australian charts, but only barely made the Billboard Top 40 in the U.S. It appears on the album The Age of Plastic. A different version was recorded by Woolley (with Thomas Dolby) for his album Bruce Woolley And The Camera Club, which was a hit in Canada. The complicated arrangement and production of the song, which includes a chorus sung by a group of very high pitched backup singers, foreshadows Horn's later career as a producer.
Audio sample
- [The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star excerpt] ([file info])
- *
- * Problems listening to the file? See [Media helpmedia help].
Notable cover versions
| Year | Artist | Album |
|---|---|---|
| 1998 | The Presidents of the United States of America | The Wedding Singer soundtrack |
| 1999 | Lolita No.18 | YALITAMIN |
| 2003 | Erasure | Other People's Songs |
| 2005 | Ben Folds Five | Whatever and Ever Amen (Digitally Remastered) |
Trivia
- The album version of the song has an additional coda not present on the more famous single version.
- The lyric "Put the blame on VTR" in original lyrics was in later years frequently misheard or misinterpreted as "Put the blame on VCR." But videocassette recorders were not yet in widespread use in 1979. "VTR," for video tape recorder was widely used in television production then. However, in the Presidents of the United States of America version there is clearly "VCR".
- The lyric "And now we meet in an abandoned studio" is alluded to in the title of the "Abandoned Studio" album by the Columbia University Clefhangers co-ed a capella group. Track 1 of the album is an a capella cover with Hector Rivera as lead vocalist.
- Horn's accent has also resulted in the words "can't rewind" being misheard as "country wine" by many listeners.
- The 2nd song to ever be played on MTV was "You Better Run" by Pat Benatar.
- There is a 2000 parody of Video Killed the Radio Star, known as Internet Killed the Video Star.
- A cover version was used in Spain for a TV advertisement of Sanyo.
- A Flash movie was created featuring clips of various noteworthy media excerpts which were animated together and played in sequence to the cover version of Video Killed the Radio Star by the Presidents of the United States of America. [link]
- The song appears in the [[Grand Theft Auto: Vice City]] soundtrack on the Flash FM radio station. A snippet of the song also plays over the initial game loading screen.
- Radiohead has also recorded a version of this song.
See also
- The Jazz Singer is a 1927 U.S. movie notable for being the first "talking motion picture" to be widely commercially distributed.
- Singing in the Rain is a musical film that explores the transition from silent film to sound film
- Radio stars are also a concept of astronomy.
- "Radio Ga Ga," a single by Queen that also laments the demise of radio as the primary mass medium.
External links
- [Video Killed The Radio Star Music Video] (Requires RealPlayer)
- [Video Killed the Radio Star lyrics]
- [Internet Killed The Video Star]
- [Video Killed The YTMND Star]
- [Killed The Radio Star Music Video on YouTube]''
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