Visualising 1950s hits on Your Hit Parade

Abstract

Although many TV shows from the 1950s seem very odd when viewed today, one of the most peculiar relics of all is Your Hit Parade. This is especially true in light of our current understanding of what it means to visualise a song on television. Although music video looked strange when first seen in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is now highly conventionalised and part of the cultural backdrop. By contrast, Your Hit Parade gropes uneasily to connect the radio past with the burgeoning and increasingly estranged record and television industries of the 1950s. As an aesthetic document, Your Hit Parade is instructive in its display of unproductive tensions: narrative and dramatic visualisations clashing with a simpler, non-representational variety style; pop domesticating an inchoate rock and roll; and a lackadaisical parade struggling to become a quasi-eventful countdown.

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