some hip hop/rap is amazing... im not saying it is bad. it is mainly the mainstream stuff that has gotten me pissed. Mainly, Ludacris' "Red Light District" glorifies what it is to use prostitutes, and what it is to use women as objects. not only is using prostitutes cool, but so is beating them, as he does in one of his videos which is played regularly on muchmusic, mtv, and what ever else. the message is that women are to be used as objects, and they are only valued for their looks, and sex.
http://www.essence.com/essence/takebackthemusic/dirtydancing.html In part two of our Take Back the Music series, we go behind the scenes with video girls. As pimp culture goes mainstream, are we getting paid or played?
By Jeannine Amber Photographs by Butch Belair
*missing a large chunks all over, visit the website if you want to read it*
Back in the day, rappers used to rhyme just about anything: partying, Black pride, the Daisy Age, hustling, pimping, the irritating way parents just don’t understand. From the sublime to the criminal to the mundane, it was all part of hip-hop and everyone had a place: gangsters, jokers, fast girls, tomboys and African queens. The art was as diverse as the people who produced it. But as hip-hop enters into its third decade, one icon has captured the imagination of the current crop of rappers as nothing has before. These days the pimp reigns supreme.
Pimp, pimping, pimp juice, pimp paraphernalia like goblets and canes, the pimp lifestyle, ethos and "code of honor" have permeated hip-hop culture and beyond. MTV airs a weekly show called Pimp My Ride, hosted by rapper Xzibit; Sony Pictures produced a feature-length animated flick, Lil’ Pimp, with the voices of Ludacris and Lil’ Kim, about a 9-year-old White boy who takes up pimping; 50 Cent calls himself a muthaf---in’ P.I.M.P. and shoots up the charts to number one. And Nelly hits the shelves of convenience stores with his energy drink Pimp Juice.
In hip-hop, pimp is a signifier of charisma, power and wealth. Pimp is masculine flamboyance, tricked-out cars, one-of-a-kind ’gators, bejeweled goblets full of Cristal. Pimp is domination in the bedroom, respect on the streets, a romantic illusion of alpha-male greatness. Gangster, the archetype of choice a decade ago, is played out; now it’s all about the pimp. But if rappers are re-creating themselves in the image of a Mack, then what role are women left to fill?
Any fan can answer that. "Mostly in videos, the women are there to serve the men," says Morgan Crooks, 16, a high-school student from South Orange, New Jersey.
By logging as much time in front of the TV as some spend in a full-time job, Morgan has become an expert on hip-hop videos. "You have New York—style videos," she says, "with the high-class, skinny girls who look like models. They just stand there looking good. And there’s this one 50 Cent video with women on leashes. Then you have videos from Down South, with half-naked rump shakers, and others where the guys sit in barber chairs, and the girls show up in tight pants and bend over, and their booties start jiggling. A lot of videos have girls just backing it up, like little hos."
At three o’clock in the morning, BET, the premier cable channel for airing hip-hop videos, broadcasts BET UnCut. The program features music videos in which many of the girls are wearing lingerie and doing the sorts of acrobatics usually reserved for bachelor parties. There’s a bikini-clad woman shaking her booty and grinning wildly while holding one leg high in the air in Nelly’s Tip Drill. Another woman, standing on her head, provides the backdrop to Ludacris’s rhyming, with his head between her naked, open thighs while she flexes her buttocks in Pussy Poppin’. There are women on all fours, women writhing on the ground, women grabbing their ankles, all poppin’ to the beat. These aren’t run-of-the-mill sexy and suggestive dancers. These women are clearly professionals with masterful control of the muscles of their hips and thighs and buttocks. When they lift one leg in the air and pop, pop, pop their thang, it’s enough to leave an average woman speechless.
Before BET UnCut, a seminaked Black woman lying on her back with her legs hoisted over her shoulders was something only paying customers in a strip club might see. Now it’s mainstream. Teenage girls are perfecting hypersexual stripper moves like booty clapping, dropping and poppin’ and showing them off at middle-school dances. "These are dances young girls didn’t used to know about," says Pamela Weddington, vice-president of communications at Motivational Educational Entertainment Productions (MEE), a communications company that specializes in urban markets. "Now it’s something that they aspire to. Even if they are not staying up until three in the morning to watch BET UnCut, everyone can set up a VCR."
While BET reps insist the show is for adult viewers only, the fact is many teenagers are indeed tuning in. "BET Uncut? Everyone’s seen it," says Morgan. "I remember some of the boys in class were like, ‘Did you see the uncut Ludacris video? Or the uncut Chingy?’ This was when we were like 14. Now it’s the younger kids who are watching it, the boys who are 12 and 13."
While exposing young boys to images of near-naked strippers will likely encourage them to sexually objectify women, for girls the effects are more subtle. "My sense is that over time young Black girls are beginning to internalize what they see in the media," says Weddington. "And we see it in their behavior."
"It’s clear that when you look at rap music videos, you see a certain scenario: one male artist surrounded by scantily clad females, and their job is to please him," adds DiClemente. "There are many theories that suggest that if a person looks at a lot of videos and doesn’t have information to the contrary, she begins to believe that this is reality, that this is the way the world works." According to DiClemente, teenagers seem to be influenced by the images in videos because they don’t have the life experience to counter what they are seeing. "They can’t say what they’re watching isn’t true because they don’t know. They’re just kids."
That may already be happening. In a trend that has gone virtually uncommented upon by activists, some rap stars have decided to lend their name and talents to productions even more explicit than their uncut videos. Rappers are now appearing in hard-core porn. In 2001 and 2003 the best-selling adult videos of the year were Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp, respectively; both were hosted by the Billboard-topping rapper. Snoop, recently applauded for his work with the Rowland Heights Raiders, a junior all-American football team of 8-to-10-year-old boys, acts as tour guide in the graphic DVDs, featuring naked adult-film stars engaging in among other things, anal and group sex. According to Sean Carney, the research director at Hustler Video, the company that distributes Snoop’s films, Doggy Style sold 45,000 units and Diary of a Pimp, 50,000—more than four times what’s considered a top seller in the porn world. Snoop, who endorses T-Mobile and AOL, and was once asked to appear on Jim Henson’s It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas, has been hailed as "totally embodying the hustler lifestyle" by Carney. "This has been a fantastic partnership," enthuses Carney, noting that "Snoop has brought some hip-hop fans to adult videos for the first time."
Over the past several years, other top-selling rappers like 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, Lil’ John and even old-schooler Ice-T, who currently stars on NBC’s Law & Order: SVU, have hosted adult videos. Ice-T’s top-selling project, Pimpin’ 101, shows the rapper "schooling viewers on the different types of girls who work the streets," says Dan Miller, features editor for Adult Video News, a porn-industry publication. Porn actresses play the hos, and a fully clothed Ice-T narrates the film and introduces the sex scenes. "Making porn is a sign you’ve made it," says Carney. "If you are a hip-hop star and you come out with your own triple-X video, it’s a sign you’ve arrived." And so it continues—the exaltation of women as sexual acrobats by the very artists so many of us support.
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