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What Cameron’s Ratings Campaign Could Mean For Music Videos

Would it prompt artists to tone things down, or encourage people to chase after controversy?

Posted 6th January 2012, 7:20pm in Blogs by Jamie Milton
Jamie Milton

Jamie Milton

Writer

What Cameron’s Ratings Campaign Could Mean For Music Videos When is a glimpse of bare flesh too much? When does a religious reference cross the line? Well, soon we’ll be finding out, if David Cameron’s anti-sexualisation campaign is anything to go by. According to the Daily Telegraph, Cameron is intent on giving music videos age ratings, allowing some songs to only be shown during post-watershed times.

This might ring a bell: Robbie Williams’ ‘Rock DJ’ was once toned down for certain age ratings. The young amongst us would see Robbie skate around a rink, jovially strutting dance moves and, shock horror, removing one item of clothing after another. What many of us didn’t see was a subsequent removal of skin, which - and this is a pretty fair assessment - might have freaked out the toddlers. Contrary to Robbie and Kylie’s declarations, the kids would not be “alright”; they would be sketching a bloodied, muscle-only version of their favourite singer onto their Maths homework the very next morning.

And we’ve seen certain similar moves with the sales of CDs, namely Tesco’s decision to censor the artwork for Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’, because the painting on display seemed to show some speckles of blood on its canvas. Such decisions tend to rile the music industry, although a sense of outrage towards any of Rihanna or Lady Gaga’s videos has become something of an accepted norm these days.

Which leads us to considering what would actually happen, if Cameron and his chums were to slap an 18 rating on top of every other visual offering. Would it indeed prompt the artists and directors involved to tone things down, or to the contrary would it in fact encourage these people to chase after a reputation of controversy? Up to now, we’ve seen several crass - and ultimately successful - attempts to spark outrage and thus raise publicity. Think about The Horrors’ very first video for ‘Sheena Is a Parasite’:



By putting ratings on music videos, there’s a chance that the ‘controversial’ tag will become even more sought after. If you have an 18 rating, your video’s bound to be interesting. People might go far and wide to search for said video on the internet, just out of curiosity. Particularly for emerging artists, gaining the “explicit” label could turn out to be a smart move. With many smaller artists today, a ‘NSFW’ tag goes a long way towards gaining hits. Consider M.I.A’s ‘Born Free’ and Justice’s ‘Stress’; unarguably both respective artists’ most watched music videos.

We could also speculate on where the line would be drawn on how much domestic violence, sexual references, drug use needs to occur (and of course, Rihanna was sure to include all three of these in her latest video for ‘We Found Love’), before the rating hounds are sent out to play. Regardless of what defines an ‘18’, you can rest assured that the likes of Gaga and Rhi Rhi will cement their reputations as purveyors of music videos that offend the average Daily Mail reader.

Whichever department is in charge of handling these censorships will also need to be vigilant with how they end up performing their role. What happens if a video contains a gay kiss (see: Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’) and a select minority of viewers are deeply offended and call for a rating to be enforced? There is a danger that political correctness or even, political bias might infringe heavily with how certain videos are interpreted. Could this government action, which calls itself a move against the sexualisation of young people, actually be disguised as the first step towards having an unnecessary say over what we see on our screens? It’s food for thought.

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