Tuesday, February 8, 2011

2nd assignment... hip hop sees no color. lesile grinner

Hip hop see's no color was an interesting read. It brought up the idealogy of SCWAMP and uses Save The Last Dance for various examples. The media as a whole has been at a point where you can pick out several different examples of scwamp and be able to see where and why it was done. MTV had started out intergrading black entertainment videos with Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. Even though since that video has aired, many others have made their way to the mainstream and opened up many new doors to music and culture.
One sentence that stuck out to me was " We learn about Black women's sexuality or Black men's materialism through the representations presented to us in music videos. In, short this is a space where Blackness is preformed before and consumed by the world. "(page 180) I was not too fond of this sentence because it makes me feel as if being "Black" is a new world craze. There are a lot of people, my friends included that talk about wanting to act, be, and or talk Black. But calling it that does not make sense to me. I understand that there are codes used and slang talk that is common to our youth and neighbood "street talk" but saying that "blackness is preformed" sounds like Blacks are puppets.
All of the other outlooks on the movie Save The Last Dance and SCWAMP are also great examples. The few that stood out were also all of the steryotypes that I had noticed in this movie myself. They bring up how Black males are seen as intimidating, mean, ignorant, always seeking out trouble, lazy, deadbeat fathers, having dysfunctional relationships, etc. How Derrick (the main male character in the film) is one of the lucky few to "not be like the others" and "found a way out" of their troubled neighborhood due to his intellectual abilities.

1 comment:

  1. i understand your point when you debate with grinner over her line, "We learn about Black women's sexuality or Black men's materialism through the representations presented to us in music videos. In, short this is a space where Blackness is preformed before and consumed by the world." I think what she is trying to say is that music videos and other form of media present, create, and perpetuate stereotypical ideas of black culture, which are then internalized by the audience as the only way to represent their individuality in black culture.

    ReplyDelete