This article (pointed out to me by nyx) talks about how the women in Spelman College have gotten together to protest Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video, among others.
I haven’t seen the video but according to the article, the sequences they found offensive included “a credit card [being] swiped through a woman’s backside” and “men throwing money between women’s legs”. I’m not sure what these college girls have been watching over the past couple of years, but it seems to me that hiphop has had videos like these since before I stopped watching TV.
I’m not sure where I stand on this whole thing. It’s a lot like a chicken-or-the-egg situation:
- Record artist makes raunchy video
- Record label releases raunchy video
- TV station broadcasts raunchy video
- Millions of fans drool over raunchy video
- Record artist becomes god-like
- Everybody wants to make a raunchy video
There are so many entities involved in the whole process that it’s naive to be saying that it’s the artists alone that are to blame. In a way, the record artist is a reflection of his audience, because they are what makes him popular. And if his audience is comprised of the sexually-depraved, then that’s what his music and his videos will cater to*.
I guess the question here would be, “Where do you draw the line” and “Whose responsibility is it to draw it?”
Obviously, you can’t expect the masses to rise up as one and say, “No more tits and ass!” because that’s never going to happen. So barring a third-party authority, artists have to learn to police themselves. Of course, this assumes that the artist himself is not a member of the sub-100-IQ strata and that he has enough salt to know where and when to stop.
*This is actually why I hate pop. It’s not about the artist’s self-expression, it’s about the audience being played what they want to hear. It’s repetitive and deceitful, and I can’t imagine how anyone could keep listening to this garbage.