Music Videos And The Messages They Carry

Music videos are a pivotal aspect in rap music that transforms the song’s lyrics into a visual representation of its content. 

Even the most vulgar of lyrics will get its visual representation regardless of its misogynous and obscene content.

This uncensored, publically accessible material raised question to whether or not music videos subconsciously subjected its youthful viewers towards experiencing sexual activity, drug use, and violence.

A team of researchers from the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory Center for AIDS Research, School of Medicine at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and the University of Alabama, Birmingham, set out to answer the question.

Research of rap music videos discovered the constant reoccurring roles of sexually-exaggerated personas of African American women.

Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women’s Health and executive director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Women’s Health, Susan Kornstein related African-American girls’ acceptance of the stereotypical role in rap music later leads to harmful health issues.

Much of rap music and videos specifically transmit, promote, and perpetuate negative images of black women. Rap music’s demeaning message affects all women, but mostly black or latino women in particular are seen in popular hip-hop culture as sex objects.

Majority of hip-hop videos that are regularly run today show women, surrounding at least one man, seductively gyrating wearing little to nothing, with the cameras focused on their body parts.

These images are shown to coincide with the explicit lyrics that typically insult women suggesting they’re worth nothing more than money.

The women are seen as sexual objects by rappers whose lifestyle mimics that of a pimp. In numerous rap songs, men refer to all women as they think a pimp would to a prostitute, and promote violence against women for breaking that image.

Joan Morgan, a hip-hop feminist, revealed the hard truth of women desiring equality from their male counterparts in her book When Chicken Heads Come Home To Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist.

“Yeah, sistas are hurt…But the real crime isn't the name-calling, it's their failure to love us---to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas."