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‪The initial responses to music videos, both academic and journalistic, were concerned with the effects of image on the purity or authenticity of music. In a later, more exclusively academic wave of writing, ‪ ‪music video became central to accounts of postmodernism, as these became popular at the end of the 1980s. The postmodern, it was argued, was characterized by fragmentary, collage-like cultural texts in which depth was sacrificed to the flow of images which operated only at the level of surface. This article argues that, rather than a simple incorporation of music within the audiovisual logics of television, music videos of the early 1980s were engaged in recentering pop music on the song (rather than the album), the transitory moment (rather than the enduring work of stable authorship) and strategies of citation (rather than the expression of authorial personality). Likewise, while postmodern texts were often seen as mixing up cultural fragments so as to challenge the boundaries of cultural forms, this article argues that early music videos accepted the boundary of the pop song and music video as frames within which pop music might find new ways of grounding itself within a history of entertainment forms.‪