Friday 30 September 2011


Rebelling against Laura Mulvey’s and the future of music.
‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly.’
As analysed in a previous blog Laura Mulvey sums up the concept of music videos in terms of gender in the one quote listed above, however this has been brutally flipped around in the recent uproar of female UK artist OG Niki (satirically referenced as Hoe G Niki) where she raps in explicit lyrics far beyond the likes of a 17 year old female should, giving graphic detail on her personal sex life and just indirectly disrespecting her family as many UK based music websites have quoted her father saying that he is “ashamed and embarrassed” in which a video response had been put up by OG Niki responding to his reaction with disregard and a lack of care. It can be argued that perhaps she does not do as she speaks and merely used it as a plot to go semi-viral as her music freestyle reached the likes of www.Worldstarhiphop.com – the number one hip hop website on the net and received a barrage of expected negative reviews from the American public generally stating that she is too young. She has received countless video responses with the Youtube community posting their views more notably ‘Don’t Jealous Me’ giving a humorous review of her life. None the less if it was a ploy for publicity it has worked like a charm however the reason for fame and the constant insults she receives will affect her regardless of her “I don’t care attitude”.

Following the publicity OG Niki received, UK artist Skepta received similar notoriety with his highly explicit music video to the song All Over The House where we basically see a couple have sexual intercourse throughout the music video. It, like OG Niki’s freestyle got picked up on www.worldstarhiphop.com and received a lot of mixed opinions regarding it as well as the UK some demonstrating disgust, disbelief and entertainment. The music video really fits Laura Mulvey’s theory stretching far beyond the bar she would have ever expected. This somewhat clouds the UK music scene giving the impression that our artists both male and female are really sexually orientated leading me to ask the question where is the future of music heading to? When are people going to intervene and note what right is from wrong because  roughly 90% of people that have watched it agreed that if they wanted to see that they would watch porn and came to the conclusion that it went overboard, far beyond any ‘R’ rated legitimate music video ever created...

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