httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhy-RXkNo0
For those who can't or won't watch the above, it's the music video for Rhianna. In the video's narrative, Rhianna portrays a happy, about-town type of girl in an area likely reminiscent of her native Barbados. She seems to love her life and over the course of a single day, culminating in a late night street party, she fends off an overly-aggressive dancer. He later finds her and attempts to rape her (or succeeds in raping her, the video is unclear on that point). She runs back to her home, finds a hidden gun, and then stalks her attacker the following day, gunning him down in cold blood.
So, who is pissed? Well, the Parent Television Council, for starters:
“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime. Viacom’s standards and practices department has reached another new low,” said Paul Porter, co-founder of Industry Ears and a former voice of BET. (as reported by PTC)
This reaction seems puzzling to me. Music has a long history of people expressing the most violent or horrific events found in human nature and, in Rhianna's case, a cathartic way of expressing personal pain. Rhianna's personal history with domestic abuse doesn't give her a pass to show gratuitous and wanton violence, but I personally see no difference between her song (which I actually liked) and that of songs performed by Johnny Cash or Nick Cave:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeOPhh_DgPA
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chF244LWWqg
What is the difference between the above songs/videos and Rhianna's? Males killing females? White people killing white people? I'm not sure what the PTC have against Rhianna's song and video that they couldn't have against decades old music.
It's a song, and an accompanying video for the song. It's a form of artistic expression and as such, it's not subject to some kind of puritanical nonsense which sterilizes the emotion, horror, and violence which is sometimes inherent in expression.
*UPDATE*
After speaking to my wife about this, she reminded me of a similar "controversy" which erupted around a tongue-in-cheek song by the Dixie Chicks:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw7gNf_9njs
The message the PTC appears to be sending is that because they apparently cannot control what their children view on television, nor can they adequately explain the difference between fantasy and reality to their own children, the rest of us are equally inept. Further still, their selective outrage over songs depicting violence perpetrated by women against men while ignoring long traditions of male-originated violence in songs, videos, and even poetry suggests their "outrage" isn't genuine but rather confused about the empowerment of women.
The PTC would do better to stop telling the rest of the world what to watch on television and maybe get off their lazy asses and turn their own televisions off.
