Music Genre: Hip Hop

It originated from African-American Music and by 1979 it had become a commercially recorded music genre and began to spread across the world in the 80’s. It began to grow with DJs taking portions of other songs and altering them using a synthesizer accompanied with a call and response to entertain the audience. It became popular towards the year 2000 and frequently found itself in the music charts. It tends to consist of fast tempo backing beats accompanied with rap, a rhythmic vocal style.

The genre hip hop tends to be blamed for negative images of women in music videos as they are seen as taking a misogynistic view. Instead of Hip Hop artists representing their cultural reality they have fallen back onto selling sex. In these videos women are often portrayed as sexual objects and subjected to violence whereas the males are often referred to as pimps, yet rather than being depicted as they are in reality they have been glamorised and made stylish. In reality pimps are criminals, abusive and controlling as they subordinate women and exploit them as a sexual commodity to be bought and sold.

50 Cent - P.I.M.P

Representation of gender

- The females are all scantily clad either in lingerie, bikinis or revealing items of clothing. They are wearing white which is ironic as the colour symbolises purity yet they resemble promiscuous women. 50 cent is also wearing white however this is to create the idea of him being god.

- The females are all crowded around 50 Cent paying him masses of attention whilst he casually ignores them to show he views them as being of no significance.

- The females walk behind him which shows he holds the power and authority furthermore they are wearing collars which could be in correlation with the idea of females being a pimps ‘bitches’.

- Low and high angle shots sexually objectify the women as they are in a position which either emphasises their legs and allows the audience to see almost up their skirts or makes them appear inferior whilst being in a position that looks down their tops.

- Close ups of specific body parts objectify the females assets rather than focusing on her facial features and therefore her emotions. This reinforces the idea that the women are vacuous and puts them in the same league as 50 Cents property.

- There is a voyeuristic relationship as the female’s eyes are averted from the camera making it ‘acceptable’ to view them.

http://www.deal.org/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=661&Ite