Music Video Analysis Paper

Decades ago Michael Jackson’s iconic “Thriller” music video was released. A music video was something that had never been done before in the music industry. His popular song combined with the memorable video, ended up making him a pop sensation. Today, an artist creating a video to go with their newest song has now become commonplace in the music industry across all genres. For my project, I chose to focus on the Hip-Hop and Rap industry, as this particular style of music is especially popular with my generation. I carefully collected quantitative data on the appearances of each gender in four different music videos in the Hip-Hop/Rap genre. My process for this assignment was to carefully mark each gender. I selected my videos randomly, by

viewing the top four ranking videos on Itunes. Ranking at number one was Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble”, followed by Iggy Azalea's “Mo Bounce”, then Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” and finally WizKid’s “Come Closer”. I noted the appearance of every male and female featured in the video.

My assignment was different from any of our quantitative measurements in class because the medium I chose to focus on was music videos. While we saw a variety of advertisements and T.V. or movie clips, glimpsing this unique style of media was something we didn’t get to experience in class. Another difference between my study and the in class media examples we analyzed was how the examples studied were chosen. The media shown in this unit, was specifically chosen for us to sample by our teacher. In some ways, this means that the data we collected and conclusions we came to were selectively guided by the media already selected for the class. The videos I selected, were picked solely based on their popularity by consumers on Itunes. This assured that there was not any sort of cherry picking to skew the results of my study. My quantitative research was unexpected to say the least. I found that the ratio of male to females in each videos failed to form any particular pattern, given the small scale of my sample size. The ratios of men to women also varied tremendously. In Kendrick Lamar’s video there was an astounding 234 men who appeared, compared to 11

women. On the flip side, Iggy Azalea’s video featured 5 men and 18 women. Migos’ video had 27 men and 9 women. Wizkid’s video had 1 man and 13 women. As stated previously, there is not a large enough sample size of music videos in this genre to go on. If I had to hypothesize the reason for this tremendous variation amongst videos, I would say it is the song’s style and content is the main determinant of the ratio of males to females featured in the accompanying video. The Hip-Hop and Rap industry is known to emphasize a variety of different topics including wealth, status, race, drugs, gang affiliation, and sex. Given the wide scope of topics that any given song can focus on, it would make sense that gender ratio would vary from video to video. Another important detail to note, is that many of the women featured in the videos were highly sexualized, and were more so objectified than actual contributing members of the video’s plot. Overall, it’s clear that music videos can vary tremendously in the males and females in the Hip-Hop and Rap industry.