Popular Music- Any Boundaries? (Part 1)

Occasionally, just occasionally, I feel the need to write something. It doesn't happen very often. I'm on a very vocational course and as such written work doesn't take such a lead role. Which is sad in a way, because it's a skill I don't want to lose.

So, I'm going to temporarily rectify this with today's rant...I mean, err...topic

This particular spurt of written expression was triggered by a video I saw on the BBC News website. I'd love to say that an important, complex current affairs story has drawn me in and compelled me to write about it. But...no, I'm ashamed to admit I often skim over the main headlines and head straight to the 'Entertainment and Arts' section. I guess I do have some excuse, I am on a media-based course.

The video that sparked this blog was an interview with the singer Rihanna, which is the sort of thing I normally avoid like the plague, but the title of this particular video drew my attention. 'Rihanna: It's ok to offend people'. 'Now', I thought, 'there's an interesting point'. It probably is necessary to sometimes make content that not everyone will be comfortable with. How do we tackle sensitive issues, or discuss controversial events and policies if we never show anything that some people will find offensive? We can't just broadcast cute bunnies and green fields all day long. TV would be bland, boring, and worse of all, complacent. No-one would ever stick up for what they believe to be right. Things that are wrong with our society would never be challenged.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the point being made. In hindsight, I don't know why I was surprised. To quote an earlier sentence, this video was 'an interview with the singer Rihanna'. However, this fact didn't really make her answers any easier to swallow. The gist of her argument seems to be 'offending people is fine because it's art, because the videos look good and because it works for me'. (This may be a little harsh, so here's the link to the video so you can make up your own mind). All the same, of the many reasons to offend people, these seem like some of the most irresponsible. I accept that sometimes the things you say or the content you create will upset people. But when you know that this will be case, there must be some proper justification for it. Her videos are seen by a lot of people. She is responsible for how she presents herself. She seemed to brush that idea off, but when you have the privilege of being seen and looked up to by millions of people, many of them very young, you have a responsibility to them.

At two o'clock in the afternoon, a young child could grab the remote, and see various artists doing...well actually, see for yourself:

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that they do show edited versions of these videos pre-watershed. This is a fair point, however, it's all very well for the most explicit bits to be edited out, but the general tone and message of those videos do remain. I have, for example, seen the edited version of 'Telephone'. The story of murder is still pretty clear throughout, and as a good friend pointed out...Photoshopping people into more appropriate costumes would take an age.
PLUS there's the fact that once a child has seen even an edited version, it's very easy for them to Google the song, and find the explicit versions at the top of a search. Children are not stupid.

I think one of the things that a lot of people would talk about right now is sexism. And don't get me wrong, it does exist. Women clearly are expected to wear certain clothes and dance in certain ways in order to sell their music, and male rappers do think that their already shallow and egotistic videos are enhanced by the objectification of women. However, this is equally damaging to men - as much as it makes me ashamed to be a woman after seeing what other females are prepared to do for fame and money, it doesn't do men a great favour either. It makes them look as if they're all stupid, shallow and can't see anything beyond a woman's chest. Which, needless to say, isn't true.
There's also a worrying trend of trying to 'even things up'. By this I mean, instead of the girls putting some clothes on, more guys are being expected to take them off. This isn't helpful. Just as women are more than a pair of breasts, men are more than a six-pack.

And you know something else. All this, it's getting boring. All these videos are effectively the same thing. Put it this way. You could change the colours on your computer, muck around with the desktop background, put stickers all over it, and it'll still be the same thing. It'll still function in the same way, and it's the same with music videos. Making costumes, dances, colours, so-called 'plots' slightly different, doesn't change any fundamental idea of 'let's have lot's of fake looking people dance around in practically nothing'. It's boring, tasteless and unoriginal. Pretty much the content I described in a world where no-one pushed boundaries.

The problem is, that this industry makes a lot of money by acting the way it does, so it's not going to take responsibility of its own accord. Values often becomes thin on the ground when large sums of cash start to get involved. So someone, somewhere needs to give them some sort of incentive to clean up their act. My solution would be a much tighter watershed on videos. Of course, people will always want to push the boundaries. And we shouldn't stop them, because then you're treading in the murky waters of preventing people's freedom of expression. However, certain boundaries should not be pushed in front of a mainstream audience. Artists like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are quick to say how they have the right to express themselves however they like. But a large sum of their audience are still children. It's a classic case of 'having your cake and eating it'. How much would they care about pushing boundaries if they didn't gain so much money and fame from it? It's about time the creators of music and music videos were forced to accept the same reality as the makers of film and television. You can make raunchy and violent content, but by doing so, you accept that you are isolating a huge chunk of audience. I know that in this day and age it's more difficult to restrict content - we live in the age of the Internet and children are often more web savvy then their parents. But that's no excuse for the bigger players in distributing content not to try. Tighter pre-watershed regulations for music channels, and parental locks on the bigger music and video sites wouldn't solve everything - but it would be a start.

So, what about the question at the top of this post - are there any boundaries left in popular music? Well, yes. Not in terms of adult content or taste, but boundaries do exist, and not necessarily good ones. I shall endeavour to discuss these in part two.