Music videos and women

I had a difficult time picking a video for this assignment. Whenever I listen to music, it is always in the background while I am working on something else. With this being the case I rarely watch, or really pay attention to music videos. I decided to go with Iyaz’s video for “Pretty Girls” (featuring Travie McCoy.)

The video we watched in class focused on women in the “dream world” that is music videos. There were several points made on how women are portrayed in this dream world. Several of the point included:

1)    Women are the subject of the song.

  This is true for this song, it is after all called, “Pretty Girls.” The lyrics to the chorus of this song are:

            “There are a lot of pretty girls in this city,

              There are a lot of pretty girls in this town,

              I’m trying to pick the right one,

               I’m trying to pick the right one,

               Trying to find a shorty to hold me down.”

So basically, according to the song, Iyaz and Travie are trying to find the right woman.

2)      If there are no men in the video, then there is nothing for women.

For this video, it is not true. While there are multiple scenes of the women crowding around the men in this video, there are scenes where women are on their own. These women are engaging in everyday activities such as walking a dog and going to the park.

3)      Women have no individuality

This is also not true for this video.  There is a wide variety of women in this video.  The majority of the diversity in this video is based on ethnicity.

4)      Females are the images in a sexual dreamland

This is true in this video. The opening shot of this video is a woman walking by. Her legs are the focus and it gradually draws the attention to her butt. We never get to see her face as she walks by. There are a variety of shots in this video where Iyaz is drawing the attention to the women by photographing them. However, the women are not more scantily clad than what we would see on a college campus. Other ways women were turned into sexual images is by them laying on a merry go round looking up at the camera as the spun around. Lastly, many of the shots of women were focused on the women dancing, although the dancing was not overly sexualized.

Overall, I still think there is hope for the music video industry in their portrayals of women. There is still work that needs to be done.