XXX That Dirty Dawg Snoop Dog!! XXX

Hi everyone

Nabeel's talk on Hip-Hop and its pervading influence within popular culture together with the kinds of conspicuos consumption Hip Hop often portrays got me to thinking about how Hip Hop has tipped the scale of influence on your averge bootylicious rapper video, and can now be consumed as an accompaniment to graphic portryals of erotica. Hip-Hop has entered into the lucrative porn industry which is perhaps also an example of a genre morphing across to another platform to sell its wares.
"Camille Evans, a publisher and editor of Fish 'n' Grits, said: We've been using sex to sell music for years. Now we're just flipping it to have music sell sex." (Martin Edlund March 7, 2004 New York Times) Its not too hard to see how this fence was jumped when you view the following Akon and Snoop Dog track "I Wanna Love You"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjlqzO52-X8 (sorry having trouble with embedding function)

Martin Edlund (ibid) records that " The first mainstream rapper to do a feature-length commercial porn video was Snoop Dogg, whose "Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle" was distributed through Hustler Video in 2001". He goes on to say that it was a huge success boosting average sales of "4,000 video copies" to a whopping sales figure in the "hundreds of thousands".

I found a copy of it in my local VideoEZY and you'd have to say Snoop isn't actually involved in any "doggy style", just a whole lotta snooping at everyone around him at his "pad" who seem to be going for it in a soft porn kind of a way. An interesting distinction between the hoes and the bois was that the bois never took their clothes off fully only the women...but that's another post!! As a viewer its interesting to see how the production values of a mainstream artist impact on the idea of porn, almost blurring the distinction between "booty" hip-hop in your regular MV and hip-hop for porn. There ain't much difference except perhaps the words. The musical diversity in the soundtrack also seems to elevate your classic tacky porn production sensibilities into something more acceptable for a wider audience.

As for the porn , all the cliche's are there whether you like them or not.. I've yet to check out the sequel, "Snoop Dogg's Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp" (2003)

Peace

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