If the MTV generation was the first to be exposed to the power of music videos, then the YouTube generation is the first to understand those videos in the context of social media and online discourse. That moral panic was driven by older, more conservative campaigners, but much of the current opposition to pop's excesses stems from young feminists. They pointedly replaced it on the album with a new song called Freedom of Speech. The ensuing climate of censorship reached a peak in 1992, when rapper Ice-T's rock band Body Count buckled to huge political pressure and deleted their song Cop Killer. Established in 1985 by Tipper Gore, wife of Al, after she found her daughter listening to Prince's sexually graphic Darling Nikki, the PMRC successfully campaigned to slap stickers reading Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics on offending albums. The last time pop music inspired such snowballing outrage was during the rise of the Parents' Music Resource Centre (PMRC). It's a culture of racism and sexism that we need to change."ĭemonstrators on a Slutwalk march in Chicago in September are in no doubt about Blurred Lines. Getting rid of one song won't solve the problem. They're tired of messages that depict women as highly sexualised passive sex objects. "Young women have told us that it has a real impact on their day-to-day lives. "In music videos across the board there's widespread racism and sexism, specifically the sexualisation of black and ethnic minority women," says Lia Latchford of Rewind&Reframe. And three women's organisations launched the Rewind&Reframe campaign, with a four-pronged strategy: to enable young women to air their grievances about music videos, to campaign for age ratings on videos, to encourage compulsory sex and relationship education in schools, and to pressure the music industry to get its house in order. Lily Allen launched the video to her comeback single, Hard Out Here, which takes aim at music industry sexism with specific reference to the Blurred Lines video. This week, a tipping point has been reached. How do you stop your kids being exposed to it?" "I'm all for freedom of expression," she began ominously, "but this is clearly one step beyond, and it's clearly into the realm of porn. Recently, Netmums published a survey claiming that 80% of parents had found their children copying explicit lyrics or dance movies from music videos, while Annie Lennox called for videos to be regulated in the same way as movies. Miley Cyrus's performance at the Video Music Awards in August, during which Thicke popped up like some kind of sex-pest Zelig, ignited another firestorm of indignation on several fronts. The song says: 'You know you want it.' Well, you can't know they want it unless they tell you they want it."īy that point, Thicke's hit was part of a bigger debate about the messages of pop lyrics and videos. "This is about ensuring that everyone is fully aware that you need enthusiastic consent before sex. "It promotes a very worrying attitude towards sex and consent," explained Kirsty Haigh, EUSA's vice-president of services. Also in September, Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) became the first student body to ban Blurred Lines. In September, contributors to Project Unbreakable, a photographic project dedicated to rape survivors, held up placards comparing words spoken by their attackers to lines from the song. Throughout the summer, as the song eclipsed even Daft Punk's Get Lucky as the biggest hit of 2013, debate about its sexual politics heated up. The song might have escaped censure if the video, in which the three male performers goof around with scantily clad (and, in one version, topless) models, had not generated its own separate yet overlapping controversy. In April, one blogger branded it a "rape song", and two months later Tricia Romano of the Daily Beast described it as "rapey", a word that caught fire in other media outlets. At the end of March, mid-table R&B singer Thicke, along with producer Pharrell Williams and rapper TI, released Blurred Lines, a libidinous R&B party jam about a woman in a nightclub who may or not be interested in him. It seems impossible that anyone with the faintest interest in popular culture could have missed either the song or the controversy, but here is a recap. This is the latest development in the story of how the biggest song of the year became the most controversial of the decade: an unprecedented achievement, though not one that fills Thicke with pride. It joins around 20 other UK student unions to do so. T his week, University College London student union (UCLU) took the unusual step of banning a single song, Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |