The two best selling genres of popular music in the U.S. are country music and Hip-Hop. Consequently, MTV is full of videos by C&W and rap artists. Nobody seems to get very upset about the former, but the latter certainly seems to divide the record buying public. Are these videos degrading to females?
On the one hand, we have black feminist hip-hop artists such as Lauryn Hill who sing about the domination of men in their community. These are obviously intelligent commentators of their own culture in the United States. On the other hand, we have those blank-faced chicks that are treated like pieces of meat in hip-hop videos. It is this second image of black women in contemporary hip-hop culture that seems to be most prevalent.
Many of the videos in question go like this: girls lined up on a beach, squeezed into expensive cars, or packed into ......
Monika Jaworska