By Melissa Moody
The beginning of the New Year is rife with “Best of 2005” music, book, movie and DVD lists. Media outlets the world over completed their own lists while the champagne flowed and the ball dropped. The two networks that claim music as their medium, MTV and VH1 have compiled their own “Best of 2005” lists. You probably won’t be able to see them on television, however, because even watching 24 hours of MTV does not guarantee any significant chunk of music videos.
With so-called music television featuring more and more reality shows and less and less music, the nature of the music video business is changing. Forced to adapt or become extinct, the music video genre, which MTV inaugurated in the ’80s, is going to have to come up with something new to force viewers as well as record and television executives to pay attention. The days of hip-hop videos featuring nearly naked women shaking it poolside are drawing to a close, with the torch being passed to stars like Kanye West, whose video “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” is much closer to a documentary film than it is to the typical X-rated Rappers Gone Wild.
The five best hip-hop videos of ’05, according to MTV.com, are Ludacris’ “Number One Spot (Winner),” Eminem’s “Mockingbird,” Kanye West’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” Missy Elliot’s “Lose Control” and 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.” Ludacris pays homage to Austin Powers, with the requisite share of ’70s-style video girls, Missy Elliot is her own video girl, and Eminem’s video is a montage of home movies dedicated to his two children. West and 50 are the two extremes, with West opting for something more artistic and less commercial than 50 Cent’s video serves up.
West’s style, musically, lyrically and visually, is a far cry from 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop,” an explicitly sexual song that features a hot and bothered 50 grinding with one of his video girls. Kanye West and 50 Cent are battling from opposite poles, one with loot and ladies, and the other with socially conscious lyrics and a style of video production unusual in the world of hip-hop.
50 Cent’s own biography at least partially earned him the credibility needed to regale listeners with tales of drugs and guns. In case you weren’t aware, he was shot nine times in 2000 while sitting on his grandmother’s front porch in Queens, shortly before the release of his first album. Today, still embroiled in rap wars, 50 dons a bulletproof vest everywhere he goes. His music, drawing from the reality that inspired him, seems to fittingly reproduce the world he inhabited before his rise to fame.
But you have to wonder how long after moving into his mansion a rapper can rely on relating tales of the inner city. And how many girls in bikinis, pouting red lips into the camera, do you need to see before you just don’t care anymore. The coveted network demographic of males aged 18-35 would probably tell me no number of hot girls is too many.
The lyrically conscious West, however, does not need to rely on video girls to sell albums. The commercial success he has achieved resembles that of the Roots, who mastered the art of having fun while enlightening listeners. West’s blend of references to the hip-hop world and the world at large aid him in his climb up the celebrity ladder, which, for a man who is his own biggest fan, appears to be only a step ladder anyway.
