Playlist: Watching Songs

By Beth Campbell, Staff Writer

The urge is strong to act out a song. (Not a lyric to "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles, which was the first video played on the Music Television channel in 1981.)

Since the dawn of telling stories with music, singers have been dramatizing their songs for available platforms. There were operas on stage, Vaudeville, musical theater, musicals on film, sketches on television variety shows, and mini music movies. English-language acts like The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Queen, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Prince and the Revolution, and even The Monkees innovated songs visually if only to sell more records. Concept albums became feature-length movies. In many cases, the visual element superseded the music.

The standard for experimentation was already high when cable television became the preferred platform for consuming music, supplanting radio. Cable made possible whole channels dedicated to music videos, like MTV, VH1, and CMT. But it was the invention of a videocamera, shooting on videotape instead of film, that enabled singers to record their visual ideas cheaply. Almost overnight, singers had to look great and perform better - or fail.

Music videos were short like their songs, about three to five minutes. These short musical movies trained a host of auteur film directors, like Spike Jonze, David Fincher, and Michael Bay.

MTV, CMT, nor VH1 no longer show music videos. You could say, in 2005, Youtube killed the cable channel star. The internet - Youtube and many URL platforms - provides an almost infinite supply of recorded music without television censorship. Streaming has almost killed radio, television, and buying copies of music.

Much of today's music content is visual. With today's technology, shooting, editing, and sharing music videos is easy. Visual content around the world is exploding, and even instrumental songs, like minimalist paintings, can inspire narratives. But songs have lyrics. Lyrics are poems and short stories.

And lyrics can inspire feature-length movies. If a 5 minute song can be expressed as a mini movie, can the plot of a song be expanded into a full-length movie? Not as often as you might think. A three-minute plot makes a three-minute film.

But some songs just beg to be movies. At 18 minutes and 37 seconds, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" expanded well into the movie Alice's Restaurant at 1 hour and 51 minutes.

Likewise, are you alone in wanting Rami Malek to play Freddie Mercury playing a murderer who escapes capital punishment? That his character, Bismillah, identifies with both genders? That his murderous streak has everything to do with being abused and misunderstood, in addition to growing up poor? Who will rhapsodize this story as a screenplay? Is any bohemian worthy???

Well there are single songs whose lyrics were so narratively compelling someone produced a movie. Here are songs that came before the movies (not just pilfered titles, not title songs written for the movie, not just songs from a soundtrack, and not songs that became bio-pic titles for their singers). And while this list is not exhaustive, the trend to pillage songs for plots seems to have peaked in 1986.

So you content creators, you influencers, this is a Hollywood secret, like data mining for bitcoin. A formula for crafting a movie is to find a great song with vague emotions, then find a horrific true-crime story with the same emotions. There is a world of music before 1981 that has yet to be licensed visually. Break a tripod leg.