The myths that music videos disseminate
Mtv.com has clips, and more clips of videos playable on RealPlayer. The videos, incomplete thirty second samples of marginal visual quality (Jennifer Lopez, looked like she had a bare skull on top of her neck), do nothing to counter the myths that videos usually disseminate. That blonde means pretty and black means ghetto. This is no less trumpeted on mtv online than it is on mtv. Sometimes a different context assigns a different meaning to something (like watching the filming of movie scenes, which exposes the bizarre artifice of film) but the mtv website is designed so that its Internet video samples will not expose the artifice of video. Why would mtv want that kind of exposure?
Creed has a song called " What If". One day I was driving around listening to the radio. The DJ said that when she worked in Texas she knew Creed. They were a struggling local band then. Many people wondered if Creed was a Christian band, because many of their songs are about spirituality. Creed is not Christian, said the DJ, they are more like students of all religions. Then she played "What If" and it rocked. A clip from the video is available at mtv.com. It shows Creed rocking out, and a woman gyrating and getting licked by a member of Creed.
One may reasonably expect from students of religion a level of skepticism toward marketplace convention. Marketplace convention is usually steeped in the here-and-now, while religion avoids that in favor of transcendent spiritual harmony. Yet, Creed, by using fast images of women in conformity to mtv standards, favors the here-and-now.
This brings up a funny sequence of thoughts: Why would Creed, who are students of religion, which seeks harmony, exploit a situation that causes discord? It is documented that negative images of women (the type that Creed uses) cause certain numbers of real women to suffer from anorexia. Anorexia is a disease that kills many people every year. Why, if Creed searches for peace, exploit such violence?
Then again, some of our most deeply religious people hate pornography (in public at least) as much as our deeply feminist people. They hate it for different reasons. The religious hate it not because it dehumanizes women (they like to do so themselves -- by defining roles for women and establishing punishments for disobedience), but because it is immoral according to their religious code. The feminists hate it because it objectifies women. It teaches people to see women as objects. Objects are not given as many rights as human beings are.
At least TLC is fighting it. In the " Unpretty" clip we see group member Chilli with her boyfriend looking at computer images of herself with bigger breasts. The boyfriend smiles in approval, and her expression goes from "well, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this" to "well, okay, I guess". The song is about being made to feel "unpretty" by all of the images, and it also relates those images to violence, by showing Chilli getting roughed up by a group of angry-for-no-reason type men. The full-length video has a disturbingly graphic image of an implant being removed from a breast. Toward the end of it, Chilli kicks her boyfriend's ass for checking out Playboys. Then again, TLC goes all-out pretty in designing their own image in the video, so the feeling is that they have not committed themselves entirely to their message. It is, indeed, a difficult creed to live by.
By Ted Koch
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