Hip-Hop Objectification

Music videos, not just hip-hop/rap but other genres such as rock and alternative music are guilty in the objectification of women in their videos. Above is a video that shows clips of various music videos that objectify women. 

In chapter 8 Bell Hooks talks about hip-hop and acknowledges that there are so many different types of rap music and that it covers many different topics and issues in the culture, but the music that gets to the mainstream's eye is the music that is the most controversial when it comes to portraying women in  a poor light. 

This type of rap music is advertised and openly consumes by the young white male from suburbia. With this shows the capitalism of the music and how sex sells to those who are not surrounded by this kind of "thug" enviorment if you will. Kids who grew up in a non urban setting feel they can take away from this music something they wouldnt get in their surrounding envorments:

I look the liberty to interveiw young kids from both an urban and a suburban setting and asken them what they thought about this kind of music.

Jason, 26. 

Hometown: Riverside, CA. 

Suburban

"I think its just fun I mean I listened to all this stuff in high school but I mean like I never smacked my bitch up or nothing haha.... I don't play my life by these videos at all I'm not stupid."

Maria, 22. 

Hometown: Queens, NY

Urban

"Yeah guys ont he corner were dressing like the guys in Wu Tang videos and rapping on the trains and stuff and old guys would try and talk to me like that but I never responded to it or thought anything of it. They think its their culture even though just because we live in New York doesn't mean thats our culture. Even when I lived in the projects in Brooklyn I didn't think that this was what life was like for young black men, they just wanted to be thugs like the videos. It's all a show."

  

Joe

34

Hometown: Jamaica, Queens.

"We all wanted to be like those guys, Rap in the 80's was the shit, finally we had something to look at that gave us an idea that someone out there could come from the shit we come from and make something out of it. Those guys were the shit in everyones eyes."

Me: "Did you become a rapper?"

Joe: "Hahaha well no but it was still cool to look at i mean they got the girls and the money and the cars and all they had to do was rap about their life, it seemed too easy."

It seems that people focus on the bad rap and we forget about those who made it on lyrics that raise something other then bushels of money. 

Bell hooks says in closing on this matter: 

“Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hypermasculine assertion. Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure. It has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, whether real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishization that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification.”