Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Did I hear that correctly?





As an avid music lover, I will admit that I like to dance around to a catchy song with a good beat at a club. Although there might be some guilty pleasure which I may not be proud of regarding the music created by the singer Pitbull, I came across the song “Blanco” for the first time the other day. The chorus repeatedly sings “Acercame tu pantalon, Regalame tus Panties” which literally translates to “get close to your pants, give me your panties”. Although, I will admit that Pitbull’s lyrics are never really much on the romantic side. I was more intrigued in the content the viewer was watching while the song played. Of course we see Pitbull singing the obscured song, but we see him going around the city having careless sexual encounters with girls who literally seem to throw themselves at him. We see that his behavior although not quite romantic, he still nonetheless still manages to get the attention of countless of women this music allows him and his collaborating team of musicians to live this lifestyle of women, fame, and money. While the video plays there are segments that show the song along the collaboration movie clips from The fast and the furious in which we can clearly see that the same concepts of women as sex objects and money come into place, and which then seems like a natural state of how things work. The music of Pitbull may be degrading towards women and not much of thought goes into the writing of the lyrics; however, the fact that we hear it with a catchy beat and it seems to become a natural thing in the “party scene”. The artist then doesn’t need to show any respect to women nor come with lyrics that speak more than “let me see your panties” because there is a huge fan base under it supporting this. The music is still getting heard and followed by women who ignore the lyrics, but just choose to dance to the same music degrading them. The artist and music production company will still get profits no matter the consent of the music it self, it seems that in Pitbulls situation as long as you put a catchy beat+catchy chorus+ auto tune= massive success.

2 comments:

  1. I think music is another outlet for the sexual influence we are exposed to within media. In class we talk about the male gaze and how we see what a man is attracted to and how he looks to the world. I think music is a way to understand, and get into the minds of men and women depending on the artist. This song shows how Pitbull, and men alike look at women and think sex. The line you noted shows that when these guys are out dancing women are nothing but sex objects and if you're dancing with these men they're expecting some sort of a sexual act. -AS

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  2. The funny thing is that Pitbull perpetuates these stereotypes and negative views of women simply because he can. It is essentially the norm now to see this type of behavior in videos. For example, the video for Mike Posner and Big Sean's song "Ambiguous" which has the lyrics, "are we gonna [have sex] or not?" It is as if we have grown accustomed to this type of behavior because whenever I see a video, mainly in the rap genre, that doesn't provoke these same issues, it is extremely noticeable. It seems that if people continue to enjoy these nonsensical songs that contain promiscuous lyrics that almost need to be accompanied by a scandalous video, we will be seeing these for quite some time. -CS

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