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Hip-hop music, always striving to be as edgy as possible, has decided to skip the middle man and interject pure porn into their videos.
Hip-hop has lately taken a turn toward the bourgeois, with prominent rappers renouncing violence, embracing philanthropy and donning pinstripe suits. But in deliberate defiance of this newfound respectability, some top acts have begun to pursue a less-than-wholesome sideline: commercial pornography. Pop music has always pushed sexual boundaries, of course, and rap has never shied away from gleefully smutty lyrics. But now, some stars are moving beyond raunchy rhetoric into actual pornographic matter, with graphic videos, explicit cable TV shows and hip-hop-themed girlie magazines.
From a strict business point of view, this probably isn't that bad of an idea for the hip-hop artists. Americans spend more money on porn than on all forms of music combined; I'm sure that there will be a few patrons of that, um, "art" that would be willing to spread some of that largess to a rapper or two. And it's not like quite a few of the rap videos that are in rotation on the music channels weren't already skating rather close to the adult industry anyway -- at least this is above board.
Posted by Casper at March 8, 2004 03:09 PMCamille Evans, a publisher and editor of Fish 'n' Grits, said: "We've been using sex to sell music for years. Now we're just flipping it to have music sell sex."