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Lily hits back at claims her pop-parody video is racist
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 14 November 2013
Poor Lily Allen. There she was thinking that she was lampooning derogative stereotyping in pop music through the video to her new single ‘Hard Out Here’, and then it turns out that she herself is a closet racist who subconsciously stereotypes black females at every possible opportunity.
Which is to say that an American blogger has hit out at Allen for what he sees as racial stereotyping in her new video. Even though, as previously reported, the whole point of the singer’s new pop promo is to mock and criticise stereotyping and prejudice in pop music, in particular honing in on the recent debate about the pop industry’s tendency to present men and women in very different ways.
The video starts out with Allen being surgically altered at the insistence of a suited music chief in order to fit the misogynistic view of what a pop female should look like. The video then sees Allen cavorting with an all-female dance troupe sending up the stylings of many modern pop, R&B and hip hop vids.
But, says blogger BlackinAsia, the majority of those dancers are black and it’s the black women who are dressed in the most revealing outfits and perform the most sexually suggestive moves. And that is “sickening”. He adds: “[This video] is meant to be a critique of popular culture and consumerism but employs and denigrates black female bodies to do so and [to] elevate [Allen’s] status as a white woman”.
Given the whole point of this video is to mock derogatory norms in pop performances, presumably if the black women are being degraded more than the white dancers, then that is another crime the pop industry is being accused of and therefore another crime being parodied.
Then again, the problem for Allen is that if she defends her video by simply saying it’s “being ironic”, well that’s how Robin Thicke defends the ‘Blurred Lines’ pop promo. And even though Thicke probably wouldn’t know irony if it shoved its arse in his face and asked to be slapped, it does pose a problem for any pop star genuinely making a political point in an ironic way.
Allen, for her part, says that the BlackinAsia blogger is simply overanalysing her video. In a message posted yesterday the singer wrote: “If anyone thinks for a second that I requested specific ethnicities for the video, they’re wrong. If anyone thinks that after asking the girls to audition, I was going to send any of them away because of the colour of their skin, they’re wrong”.
Conceding that she herself isn’t showing much flesh in the video, compared to her predominantly black dancers, she goes on: “If I was a little braver, I would have been wearing a bikini too, but … I have chronic cellulite, which nobody wants to see. What I’m trying to say is that me being covered up has nothing to do with me wanting to disassociate myself from the girls, it has more to do with my own insecurities and I just wanted to feel as comfortable as possible on the shoot day”.
She went on: “The message is clear. Whilst I don’t want to offend anyone. I do strive to provoke thought and conversation. The video is meant to be a light-hearted satirical video that deals with objectification of women within modern pop culture. It has nothing to do with race, at all”.
Of course, while Allen may have responded angrily to the viewpoints expressed on the BlackinAsia blog, his commentary has ensured that the video is provoking plenty of thought and conversation. Though if Lily is tiring of controversy, perhaps for her next video she should sing along to another shit cartoon about a bear.
