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NATIONAL
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‘Uncut’ is Cut from BET’s Lineup
by Lorinda Bullock
NNPA National Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – For the past five years, Black Entertainment Television’s Uncut provided sexually explicit videos by mainstream rap artists such as Nelly and Ludacris as well as unknowns looking for national exposure.
Now, Uncut has been cut. The show that grabbed headlines after airing Nelly’s notorious “Tip Drill”– a video that showed Nelly swiping a credit card down the crack of a woman’s rear– ended its raunchy and controversial run earlier this month.
Michael Lewellen, a spokesman for BET, said, “It was finally time to take a look at that and in looking at how other shows that were on in that time slot during the week on nights when Uncut was not on we just simply decided to try something different with that time slot.”
Even so, Lewellen acknowledges that the program “was a lightning rod of opposition.”
The controversial Uncut aired during the wee hours of the morning, and played not just videos straight from the strip club, but videos from independent artists seeking a broader audience and videos that were often too violent to be put into regular rotation such as 50 Cent’s “Many Men.”
For critics, it was Nelly’s ‘Tip Drill’ that tipped the scales.
Students of the all-female, historically Black, Spelman College in Atlanta protested when Nelly was scheduled to come to the campus to promote a bone marrow drive for his now deceased sister, Jacqueline Donahue.
The students argued if the rapper visited the school, he should make himself available to answer questions about the video. Nelly declined.
Cori Murray, entertainment editor at Essence magazine, said Spelman students energized a movement to dump Uncut.
“It was on but no one was talking about it. But here it is the Spelman girls were like ‘No, we want to talk about it’ and it was finally like somebody was saying something. For us, when we (Essence) looked at those women and what they did, we even got encouraged to support them by taking on our own campaign,” Murray said.
In 2005, Essence launched its “Take Back the Music Campaign,” featuring educational panels and a songwriting contest promoting positive messages. At the Essence Music Festival over the July 4 weekend in Houston, singer/songwriter Jill Scott said on one panel that some videos and music are “dirty, inappropriate, inadequate, unhealthy, and polluted.”
She added, “We can demand more.”
Media watchdogs such as Lisa Fager, co-founder of Industry Ears, a Washington, D.C.-based media think tank, are happy to see Uncut off the air, but said the problem does not end there.
“Here we’ve got HIV/AIDS growing at an epidemic rate for our 15 to 24-year-old girls and their ideas of sex and sexuality are coming from TV, the music and the culture. And (they’re) thinking it’s okay to be mistreated and have violent sex and they’re not understanding their sexuality. So you get HIV and AIDS at 15, you’re getting pregnant at 15, all these things are happening and we’re not correlating it with what we’re presenting to our children,” Fager said.
Rap artist Kamikaze expressed mixed feelings about the demise of Uncut because there are always new forms of media emerging for artists to use, such as myspace.com. But Kamikaze admitted to reaping some benefits of having his 2003 video “You Ain’t Hard” featured on the late night show.
“With me being an independent artist, my video wasn’t going to make it to 106 and Park at that stage, but it allowed me a platform to be seen and it got me more listeners and it got me more fans more so than I would have just going the regular route and just pounding the pavement.”
Kamikaze, who makes up the other half of the group Crooked Lettaz with rapper David Banner, who has enjoyed major solo success with songs like “Play” and “Like a Pimp,” said his video did not have sexual themes, but was a “crunk record.”
“It was one of those riot starting, fight starting songs. It wasn’t one of those songs that had a lot of skin in it…I personally don’t feel like I need that,” Kamikaze said.
Some researchers such as Gina Wingood and Carla Stokes have already made the dangerous connections between Black girls, sexuality and Hip-Hop music.
Wingood published a study in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 that examined 522 unmarried Black females aged 14-18, who came from non-urban, lower socioeconomic neighborhoods. All of the participants had to have been sexually active in the previous six months.
Her research showed that the girls who were exposed to rap music for 14 hours or more per week were three times as more likely to hit a teacher and 2.5 more times as likely to have been arrested, compared with the girls who had less exposure to rap music. The study also showed girls who frequently watched rap videos were also twice as likely to have multiple sexual partners and more than 1.5 times as likely to acquire an STD, use drugs and use alcohol during the 12-month study.
Stokes has also looked at how the music and images affect girls’ views on sexuality.
For her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, she studied more than 200 Web pages of young Black girls from the south, where the highest rates of HIV and AIDS are for young Black girls, she said.
A number of the Internet pages, Stokes said, included sexually suggestive photos and personal profiles where they described themselves as a “freak.”
Stokes said, “Many of the girls in my research study played sexually explicit songs and music videos on their Internet home pages in addition to the few who uploaded pornographic images and video clips.”
Stokes launched the Atlanta-based organization, HOTGIRLS (Helping Out Teen Girls in Real Life Situations) in 2001. The organization is geared towards Black girls ages 13-19. They discuss sexuality as well as other health and women’s issues. The girls also engage in producing their own media, including as literature for their Web site, Stokes said.
“The issue is much bigger than Uncut. The videos that continue to be played continue to portray unhealthy images,” she said. “These videos are a reflection of bigger issues in American society as well as the African-American community.”
Although it was cut, Uncut has an after life.
A Web site www.betuncut.net has surfaced on the Internet playing the videos from the show. Lewellen said BET is not affiliated and is seeking legal action against the site for possibly breaking copyright infringement laws.
Lewellen says that Uncut wasn’t for everyone.
“Uncut was a mature audience program that came on in an ultra-late timeslot when programming for adults can be seen. That is as far as BET can exert its control over what people watch. It carried all the appropriate labeling and advisories and warnings. We certainly can understand some of the reaction that people perhaps had to the content, but again you cannot watch something that is a mature audience program then expect to see G-rated material.”
Kamikaze said the cancellation of television shows is inevitable, but he is especially irritated with the critics of Hip Hop music and the videos.
“If consumers stop buying the music, then the rappers will stop doing it. Clive Davis, Lyor Cohen, Kevin Liles, L.A. Reid—all the people that run these big labels—if they start looking at their bottom line and they start seeing the Young Jeezys and the Ice Cubes and the Lil Jons and all the people that everybody has so much problems with… then they’ll go to something that’s selling. As soon as we go out and start supporting the Commons and the Talib Kwelis and the Mos Defs…and the people who are positive and trying to do positive music and do other things, as soon as we start supporting those people and buying their records and making them double platinum and triple platinum like we do with the other people, then the climate of the industry will change.”
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