Snoop: “Persian
taste?! That’s cool”
Artemis, an Iranian singer, has just released a track with Snoop
Dogg, an American rapper well known for his sexist,
violent, Gangsta rap. The song got a huge amount of dislikes from the Zoroastrian
communities around the world for they believe that the music video mocks their
religion and disrespects their almighty sign of Faravahar.
As a hip-hop researcher being in the field for more than five years,
I believe the song and also the music video does have more to it rather than
being produced merely to mock Persians and their myths and history.
Talking about myths and also embodying old myths and legends have
always been significant parts of rap songs’ plots. This is to say that one of
the features of the black heritage was the storytelling nature of rap songs
that revived the culture of the historical African storytellers known as the griots. Although the contents of the
stories being told are not only the history and background of black people
anymore, but rappers like Slick Rick,
Nas, Schoolly D, and other tried to tell the stories of their lives in the
lyrics of rap songs. In October 1991 Ice-cube released the album death certificate. The
songs in the album are good examples of the storytelling narration of rapping
style, while embedded in the historical events of California in 1991 and 1992.
Ice Cube’s narration with profane language, ultimate violence and also
celebrating drugs is the common element of the rap rhetoric emerged everywhere
in the US. Yet, the mentioned narrative was extremely manifested in the Gangsta
rap style initiated in California.
This Gangsta rap has been the target of academic and journalistic critiques
for long. They deal with the work
of Gangsta artists such as NWA, Dr Dre, and Snoop Dogg. They mostly characterise the apolitical, narcissistic and sexist themes in songs of Snoop, Shakur, NWA
and others.
However this very type of rap has been a
lucrative synthesis that has brought fans of both media together as consumers,
while lining the pockets of music and adult industry businesspeople. Now as I
mentioned earlier, the stories do not deal with reviving the African history
and urging black identity anymore, they rather tell the fancy stories for a
consumer audience. As Riley comments on it, “they have observed the coming
together of genres, as well as the broader "pornification" of hip-hop
and the mainstreaming and "diversification" of pornography, with the
glee of robber barons. As one adult industry critic observed: "Hip Hop and
porn are a natural marriage; from underground traditions and celebrating outlaw
lifestyles, they have both become the source of eye-popping profits for savvy
investors".
This sense of pornography has become essential
to hip-hop music videos and the advertisements for hip-hop artists or
entertainers, so these videos have been the principal location for a growing
pornographic sensibility that functions to market black bodies, aesthetics, and
culture to a global consumer audience. This role of music videos and the
commercial hip hop that has been emerged has brought about financial success to
corporate television media, including “Viacom's MTV, VHi, and BET,
"bling" lifestyle products and brands (De Beers, General Motors,
Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy- LVMH), and for quite a few rappers as well as
others in the industry such as music video directors, producers, agents,
designers, stylists, and film crews”.
Bearing this fact in mind, one can expect the
producers, directors of hip hop music videos and also the rappers and
songwriters, to go beyond the African American and urban American contexts and
adopt some mythical global (and sometimes exotic) concepts to merely add up to
the already existing audience.
In this sense the “king” music video is totally understandable for it is merely
following the mythic and story telling characteristic of a rap song for a
global consumer audience, rather than targeting and disrespecting a pre
historic religion, here Zoroastrianism.
