Dancehall videos too raunchy? - Artistes, producers disagree

With music videos that are seemingly raunchy with girls gyrating excessively, splitting and dancing on their head, artistes and directors disagree that their productions are pushing the boundaries.

In recent months, there has been a spate of music videos that seem to push the envelope with their content. Some of the more popular videos of this nature include RDX's Jump, Cham's Back Way and Wine, Konshens' Gal A Bubble and Mr Vegas's Bruck It Down.

But RDX's Renigade does not believe videos have got raunchier. Instead, he believes dancehall is going through a phase and 'girl' songs are now at the forefront.

"It is not by design where every man a try do a raunchy video. Mi see hip-hop videos that look like ours too, but Jamaica censor our music more than anybody else," he told THE STAR.

"If you sing a song say girl fi wine, you can't put a man doing mason work. It is not designed to be raunchy, but they are wining songs. Those videos are also instruction videos for persons outside of Jamaica."

Hypocrites

But Renigade says some persons in society are hypocrites because they have no problem with hip-hop or soca videos that have similar content, yet they sometimes dislike the Jamaican ones.

Video director Dameon Gayle, who directed Gal A Bubble, says he does not believe the nature of these videos is anything new.

"In Dancehall Queen Carlene days it was the same thing. It just did come out of style and everybody was trying to make their videos look R&B. It's a cycle. This ago come out of style and something else ago come in," said Gayle, who has directed Busy Signal's Come Over, Romain Virgo's I Know Better and Delus' What Tomorrow May Bring, which he also produced.

Meanwhile, Konshens, who got a lot of backlash for his Clap Dat music video that had strippers dancing in the nude, says he does not believe the recent set of music videos are raunchy at all.

"I don't agree, I don't think the videos are raunchy. I think it is more what the artistes are singing about. It is just being descriptive," he said.

Supporting his point that music videos are merely being descriptive, Konshens added that the case was the same for videos like Gully Creeper and Tek Weh Yuhself.

(from Jamaica Star)