So everyone is chatting about this new Drake video “The Best I Ever Had.” At first I didn’t care because I stopped watching music videos a while ago. But because I really enjoy this song and expected a bit more, I’m going to throw my two cents in.
“The Best I Ever Had” was hyped up heavily by Drake himself. Kanye West added yet another work to his directing credits by helping him out with the video—I wasn’t shocked to see mascots running around after I learned about his involvement.
These are my observations before reading Drake’s explanation:
Scantily clad women are part of a basketball team where Drake is the coach. He uses encouraging words that are laced with sexual innuendos, which bridges it back to the song—Drake is in fact talking about a specific woman being the “best” in bed. He buys them new uniforms that are even skimpier than the original gear, both show ta-ta’s jumping everywhere. Chicks are stretching with their legs wide open. Two pointless skits and a cameo by Trey Songz (yum!) and Fabulous. The team plays against a group of ferocious giants and they lose.
This is what Drake said to Complex magazine when explaining his video:
“The concept of the video is, I’m a coach at a high school and the girls of my life are all on my high school basketball team. Throughout the video you see us prepping for this big championship game, and my team ends up losing. You see the looks on their faces at the end of the video, but the moral of the story, I guess, is win or lose, you can still be the best to somebody. When women see the video and see all the breast and ass, hopefully they don’t take offense. Hopefully they see the real meaning.”
I’m sorry, but that reads like total BS to me. You wanted to have tits and a** in your video. PERIOD. Own up to it man. There were several other expressions that could have been at play here. I’m mentally developing alternate videos to this song as I write.
Clearly misogyny is not a foreign practice in the Hip-Hop and urban worlds. But it seems that the pervasive sexism is now a cliché in music videos, which is why I was SO disappointed in Drake’s video. For the past couple of months he’s been taking the music world by storm, establishing himself as a potential trend setter of the future—or at least a pretty decent swagger jacker of Lil Wayne and Kanye, which is what many are saying about him. However, his past run on Nickelodeon and affiliation with Lil’ Wayne as well as Kanye is making me speculate whether he is merely being thrown into the industry fire. Perhaps Drake is just getting in where he fits in.
Right now, the dude has two strikes. One for the tasteless performance at the BET Awards, i.e. Lil Wayne’s daughter and friends dancing to his very adult lyrics on stage. This video is number two. Step it up homie, good tunes are not enough!
Sidenote: Where the hell are the black girls?! The appreciation for our aesthetic images (outside of fat butts) is dwindling :-(
Posted by: Lande
No comments:
Post a Comment