Sunday, April 30, 2006
yo mamma
in addition to being 20 years, late, not funny, and sporting a "culturally inapropriate" host, Yo Mamma on MTV is a vehicle for the safe delivery of white boy racism. How is a black boy to battle a white boy armed with "you're so black" jokes? there is no equivalent "you're so white." The show ended up lookinging like a scene straight out of bamboozled.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
F'ck Amp'd Mobile
Amp'd Mobile has these ridiculous comercials that suggest people are entertained by watching people fight, hurt themselves and engage other humiliating antics at anothers discretion. In one of these comercials a black woman is instructed to shake her junk for a white man.
And the phenomenon shows signs of crossing over into the mainstream. Witness a recent Amp'd Mobile commercial. In it, a guy standing on a bus is playing with some device, when he commands two guys in the back to start fighting; they comply. He then tells some guy with a boombox to crank up some old funk tune; up comes the beat. Then he turns to a black woman and commands, "You, shake your junk". She gets up, grabs the pole that's conveniently right there, and turns the bus into a stripper's workout room, shaking her prodigious junk for all it's worth (and I'll argue that only until pornified rap videos became commonplace did a whole lot of people know this colloquial meaning of "junk").
It's hard to isolate the more troubling part of this brief scene: is it that a white man can command a black woman to "shake your junk" as though neither of them had ever left the strip club (or worse, the plantation), or that she does it without complaint? At least she keeps her clothes on. Then again, this is a 30-second ad for a mass-market product, not an offering from Lil' Jon and the Ying Yang Twins or some other strip club-influenced rap act, and I don't think the spot would have passed prime time muster had our girl been wearing a thong.
- Mark Reynolds @ Pop Matters
pr@ampdmobile.com and inquiries@ampdmobile.com
And the phenomenon shows signs of crossing over into the mainstream. Witness a recent Amp'd Mobile commercial. In it, a guy standing on a bus is playing with some device, when he commands two guys in the back to start fighting; they comply. He then tells some guy with a boombox to crank up some old funk tune; up comes the beat. Then he turns to a black woman and commands, "You, shake your junk". She gets up, grabs the pole that's conveniently right there, and turns the bus into a stripper's workout room, shaking her prodigious junk for all it's worth (and I'll argue that only until pornified rap videos became commonplace did a whole lot of people know this colloquial meaning of "junk").
It's hard to isolate the more troubling part of this brief scene: is it that a white man can command a black woman to "shake your junk" as though neither of them had ever left the strip club (or worse, the plantation), or that she does it without complaint? At least she keeps her clothes on. Then again, this is a 30-second ad for a mass-market product, not an offering from Lil' Jon and the Ying Yang Twins or some other strip club-influenced rap act, and I don't think the spot would have passed prime time muster had our girl been wearing a thong.
- Mark Reynolds @ Pop Matters
pr@ampdmobile.com and inquiries@ampdmobile.com
