One of the questions we’re regularly asked by Plugged In constituents is why we review a particular movie, TV show, album, song or video game when we already know that its content is beyond the pale. That’s a great question. And it’s one that I’d like to address with a case study of sorts.
Recently I was talking about our music picks for that week with Plugged In’s online editor, Steven Isaac. Every Monday, we huddle and choose one track and one album that I’ll review. That week, there was very little, track-wise, demanding our attention that we hadn’t already covered. And so we decided we should review Lil Wayne’s new song “Love Me,” which was headed toward the upper echelons of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
The title suggested that perhaps Lil Wayne, whose music has generally been filled with profanity, drug use, misogyny and graphic depictions of sex, had perhaps turned an introspective corner.
Not so much.
As soon as I began my work on the review, I discovered the song’s full title was “B‑‑ches Love Me.” And things went downhill from there. One of the song’s few barely printable lyrics—and even then, it’s borderline and very offensive—finds the rapper offering this summary of his life’s primary pursuits: “P‑‑‑y, money, weed, codeine.” As I wrote in the review, “Most of the song involves Lil Wayne’s explicit, degrading braggadocio about various nameless, faceless, identity-less women who service him sexually … and endlessly, he’d have us believe.”
Listening to a track as debauched and degraded as this one prompts the question I referenced above: Why do we even bother?
The answer is this: As much as we’d like to think most folks should be able to recognize how damaging and demeaning Lil Wayne’s message is, the numbers tell a different story.
This song peaked in the Top 10 on Billboard’s mainstream chart and nearly topped the rap singles chart. Bleeped profanities and a changed title in the radio edit notwithstanding, Wayne’s misogynistic message remains. And if you head over to YouTube—actually, don’t—you’d see that (as of this writing) the song’s equally objectifying video had garnered a whopping 38 million views. Clearly, Lil Wayne has legions of adoring fans ready to embrace something even as narcissistically carnal and demeaning as this tune is.
You may be wise enough to recognize and reject the destructive messages in a track like “B‑‑ches Love Me.” But if there’s a young rap fan among your friends or family, he may not be as discerning. To that end, we hope our willingness to wade through lyrics like these might equip you to talk with him about what this tune (and other rap songs like it) are actually saying about women. That logic holds for extreme content in other entertainment media as well. You may not be playing the M-rated video game God of War: Ascension or watching racy shows like Girls or Game of Thrones on HBO, or heading out to a film like Spring Breakers. But chances are someone in your life is engaging with these media. Maybe it’s a teen child’s best friend. Maybe it’s an “entertainment junkie” co-worker. Maybe it’s someone else close to you whom you’re surprised to find out has an appetite for something that you wouldn’t go near with a 10-foot pole.
So to the extent that our reviews of extreme material like Lil Wayne’s latest track help get some adoring fans’ attention, enable you to have an informed conversation about one of these entertainment properties, or help you (or someone you know) to avoid them altogether, we’ve done our job.
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