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Soulja Boy calls you his wifey and wants to kiss you through the phone. Jamie Foxx is glad you've "got your own" and Ne-Yo is falling hard for a "kinda woman that can do for herself."
Ladies, have musicians finally outgrown calling us "hos" and "bitches" whose sole purpose is to slide down a stripper pole? Or are we just saving the diamond-studded G-strings for wear in baller's cribs only?
A Long Road to Ho
Don't be fooled, says Thembisa S. Mshaka, a former advertising copywriter who designed campaigns for Sony Music's hip-hop and R&B artists, who now works for BET. She says that whereas the emphasis a decade ago was on "honeys wearing Sassoon," it's now about how it "ain't trickin' if you got it."
"I think the most glaring shift I've seen in hip-hop lyrics over the last five to 10 years would have to be the focus on stripping and lapdance/bar-and-bottle-service expenditure within club culture," said Mshaka, the author of "PUT YOUR DREAMS FIRST: Handle Your Entertainment Business."
And how the women look in music videos is no better, even according to some of the musicians themselves. Click here to keep reading, after the jump.
Back in 2006, LL Cool J -- the guy behind the "Doin' It" video -- made an appeal to rappers to stop demeaning women in their videos. The women featured could still be sexy and scantily clad, he said, but portraying them all as strippers and prostitutes sends a message to girls that "this is all there is for you to do in order for you to make it."
"She's dressed in something even more scantily clad and doing things in videos that are even more risqué, bordering on soft porn," Mshaka said of the "video hos." "Now, even women artists are doing things that are usually reserved for video hos, like rapper Shawnna bending over and clapping her cheeks for the camera in her 2006 video for Gettin' Some."
There's also "a lack of strong, empowered voices of women hip-hop artists in commercial rap," Mshaka added. Remember performers like Salt-n-Pepa, Queen Latifah and Da Brat, who'd sing about AIDS awareness? We haven't seen much of that as of late.
If She Wanna Be A Freak, Whose Fault Is That?
And the songs may have an effect on how everyday women act, too. If "Get Low" comes on at a club, you'll find girls listening to Lil Jon's command to "bend over to the front and touch your toes."
Maybe that's because many women view themselves as separate from the ones in the song or video. Chris Rock may have been onto something when in his 2004 HBO "Never Scared" performance he said, "If you mention to a woman that the song is disgusting and misogynistic, they all give you the same answer: 'He ain't talking 'bout me!'"
Ying Yang Twins = Lots of Teen Sex
As songs get dirtier and more degrading, they may be encouraging more teen sex and bad behavior among teens.
A few years ago, a study of 522 African-American girls aged 14 to 18 found that those who spent more time watching rap videos were more likely to binge drink, smoke weed, have sex with multiple partners and have a negative body image.
Researchers surveyed 711 Pittsburgh high school freshmen in 2006 and 2007 about their sexual activity and the songs they listened to. They found the kids who listened most to "degrading" songs -- the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)" was used as an example -- were more than twice as likely to have done the deed. And we'd bet the kind of sex 16-year-old Lil Wayne fan Billy is gunning for isn't missionary-style.
How long will this trend of tawdry topics and loose ladies last in rap and hip-hop? Until someone comes along and sings about something different, says Mshaka.
"I think these artists want to sing/rhyme about these things. But I also think that since it has no positive political or societal agenda ... it is not discouraged by labels, so it gets sung/rapped about a lot."
Tell Us: Do you know what it means to superman a ho? What do you think about the way today's popular artists sing about women?
