Traveling Music Video, Edited by Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, London-New York: Verso, 2023, pp. 272

Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles (1979) is often regarded as the beginning of the music video era, particularly in its televised form, as it was the first music video broadcast by MTV in 1981. Not by chance, in their latest curated book, Traveling Music Video, Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard start from this episode to reflect on the non-linear history and development of music video in its countless mutations and variants. They trace its transition from being primarily a promotional and commercial tool to becoming a meaningful cultural artifact and transmedia event. Not a genre, then, but a cultural form capable of addressing a vast and global audience; “an intertextual space of perpetual remediations where one medium transforms the other” (6), while “traversing various platforms, engaging with new technologies, interacting with other media, interrogating cultural identities, and exploring audiovisual aesthetics” (15).