Tuesday, 15 September 2015

Subverting genres in music videos

The music video for The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" subverts its rap genre and the clichés that go with it. The video is a long POV shot of a character who goes out to a club, gets drunk, and starts treating women abusively and inappropriately touching them, and then takes a stripper home for an intimate night. The video ends with a shot facing a mirror where it is revealed in a plot twist that this character is a woman. This plays on the audience's preconception that someone who is rowdy and treats women disrespectfully must be a man, and also subverts one of the most prominent and controversial themes of rap music which is violence against women.



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