Sex, Lies and Music Videos

I am not too sure what the BBC was trying to achieve last night with ‘Music, Money and Hip Hop Honeys’, was it a PR stunt to tap into the urgh-ban youth generation or an ill attempt to investigate misogyny in UK Hip-Hop and Grime music videos? Either way they lost out on both.

After wasting an hour of life, that I will never get back, I was left thinking so what was the point?  What did BBC 3, really investigate that we don’t already read in the Daily Mail?  The narrator, Nel Hedayat tried her best to employ a devil’s advocate approach but her naivety failed her too many times; was she the authoritative independent woman or the flirtatious sweet heart? Her constant giggling meant I could not take her seriously, she was patronising to the black interviewees and kept making disparaging comments on the size of their derrières, surely this was the misogyny she was meant to be tackling in this piece? I could not help but notice her bias towards the white video model and how she justified her behaviour as ambitious whilst the Black models where some how deluded.  She nicely skipped over the racism or skin prejudice, perhaps the reason why this White model was more successful because, wait for it, she is White. Yes, the White female body too is sexualised as a commodity but it exists as the ultimate feminine ideal. So, Black models of darker skin tones are relegated to the sidelines or at the back of the shot where nobody will really notice them.

This piece really did not explore how the Black bodies are viewed in a White male patriarchy, with its roots from slavery.  Or even women of colour, like Asian, Chinese, Arabic etc whose exotic otherness exists outside the paradigms of the dominant Western culture. Perhaps, that is too much history for the BBC who too championed British Colonialism and the urgh-ban generation would not understand this.

The complexities of female identity influenced by the social construct of femininity does not solely exists in music videos; we are barraged in magazines, internet, television all forms of mass media that conspire to tell us we are ugly.  The young black video model that was considering deforming her body in the name of vanity and more importantly male desirability is a product of massacring of the female self-esteem.  Yet this was barely touched upon as the “bum-budget.”

Lastly, I should mention that I love Hip-Hop music and not all artists prescribe to such misogyny and it would be more objective to hear their views. More importantly, how do female rappers feel and how do they subvert their roles as women in Hip-Hop? We have to bear in mind Hip-hop is a counter-culture that exists in a matrix of White Male Capitalism, so values like sexism, free-market economics and colour prejudice will be absorbed and recycled in a new name.

It is just a shame that the BBC did not go into more detail here. They could have discovered a lot more than the age-old argument of exploitation versus empowerment.