In her rad book Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference Lisa A. Lewis (drawing from Angela McRobbie’s seminal essay “Settling Accounts With Subcultures: A Feminist Critique”) recognizes that the street as a cultural space traditionally off limits for women and girls, both in subcultural practices and music video representations, as rape, harassment, and objectification could befall them. McRobbie argues that these gendered standards of space are formed out of a broader system of social inequality, which Lewis believes is resisted through “female-address” music videos, or music videos that feature female artists in a subject position, which can reconfigure the normativity of male privilege through appropriation of the street with female subjects interacting with it.
So, tonight I’m going to post two new(ish) music videos that show ladies and girls engaging with the street. Enjoy!
Yo! Majesty
“Don’t Let Go”
Futuristically Speaking . . . Never Be Afraid
Note: NSFW, but worth watching at your desk if you’re chained to a cubicle.
Wye Oak
“Please Concrete”
If Children
Directed by Caleb Stine and Eric Diga
Yo! Majesty – LOVE IT.
Great videos — thanks for posting. I’ve been reading about the street as a space of anxiety in early cinema, and how contemporary scholars frequently assume any woman alone in the background is automatically a prostitute. Navigating the street AND owning sexuality without presenting that assumption is something that continues to be difficult to demonstrate and visualize, which is one reason I absolutely LOVE the Yo! Majesty video. That might be the best thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.
ZOMG! I couldn’t agree more with the previous comments — that Yo! Majesty video is fucking fabulous!