Under Review:

“This jam blew up last spring. Not so sure about that video though—seems a little exploitative.” That was my friend Thad’s response to Major Lazer’s video for “Pon De Floor,” the group’s Kingston dancehall-inspired first single. And he’s not alone. The video, three minutes and 40 seconds of explicit sexualization and animalization of Jamaican women (and men), has provoked similar hesitation (and nausea) amongst many people I’ve spoken with, as well as myself.

Diplo and Switch, both white Westerners, have a history of sampling music from foreign countries, and they’re credited as being the latest major artists to put dancehall music into the “mainstream.” But instead of producing a video that, like their music, gives a voice to an otherwise silenced culture, it feels like two white guys flew to Jamaica, appropriated and exploited a culture, and then planted it on the Internet for anyone to see and interpret with phrases like, “So, that’s Jamaica!”

After watching the video several times, I began to notice the subtleties that gave me that queasy feeling I was experiencing. Largely, it’s the women in the video, who are objectified over and over again. In one scene, one of the males is actually DJing on the butt cheeks of a female. In another, a male steers a contorted woman like a plane (in this particular scene, as in several others, the man is visible, but only body parts of the woman are).

Beyond being exploitative of women, the whole video, which might be the only example of dancehall that your average American is exposed to, reduces the entire dancehall culture into one of casual, loveless sex. More often than not, the women in the video are bent over while the men rotate them and gyrate on them. Several males even simulate orgasms.

I don’t doubt that Major Lazer is appreciative of and inspired by dancehall music and Jamaican culture, but the idea that three white guys went to that poverty-stricken island and condensed a rich culture into nothing more than a softcore porno film is irksome, to say the least.

3 out of 10 Neon colors that won’t distract you from an otherwise offensive video.

-Becca Russell-Einhorn

In early October, Anthony “Geezy” Gonzalez, former manager for the rap group Clipse, pleaded guilty to a litany of federal drug offenses, including trafficking nearly five tons of marijuana and a half ton of cocaine throughout the southern United States. Gonzalez told authorities he ran his six-year, $10 million drug operation in “a very careful and deliberative manner,” with multiple front businesses—the Encore Lounge nightclub for example, which boasted 24 incidents of fighting and gun violence in 2008—to launder all the money.

Gonzalez has yet to be sentenced, but it’s safe to assume he’ll be going to prison for a long time, as people tend to do when they poison whole neighborhoods with thousands of pounds of crack and cleanse blood money with equally bloody nightclubs. That in mind, most of us would be hard-pressed to find anything about Geezy worth celebrating. The Clipse, however, are not most people.

Look no further than the video for the duo’s newest single, “Doorman,” from their forthcoming Til the Casket Drops. Beginning with a Star Wars-style text crawl that somberly calls Gonzalez’s conviction the “end of an era,” one expects to next see a series of muted clips of the troubled Geezy accompanied by a somber tune—a dirge, if you will. Shockingly, what we get is a hymn.

“Hey, doorman,” the song starts, “tell ‘em line up the Cris/I put my money on the roof and crush this bitch.” Women in scant dresses surround the rappers, who proudly hoist diamond necklaces toward the camera before shouting, “I just taught my young boys how to mix”—a reference, of course, to the process of mixing cocaine with baking soda to make crack. Elsewhere in the video, still photos of coke kilos flash on the screen, warning shots for the grand finale: slow-mo footage of young black men, one with a baby in his care, cooking up crack in a rundown kitchen.

This is how the Clipse mourn their lost “comrades,” by celebrating the garbage that precipitated their downfall. I wonder how glamorous Geezy’s decades in prison will be? As glamorous, one assumes, as a baby in a crack house.

0 out of 10 ridiculous stereotypes.

-Cord Jefferson

Cord Jefferson is an associate editor at Campus Progress. Kay Steiger is the editor of Campus Progress. Becca Russell-Einhorn is a regular contributor to Campus Progress and a senior at Pomona College.

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