Representations Within Our Chosen Genre

To reiterate, our chosen genre is alternative rap hip hop. A video that we found within this genre is Rainbow in the Dark by Das Racist.

Who or what is being represented?
From watching the whole video we can clearly see that gender/gender differences is represented through the video. It shows the divide between males and females, the females being actors, and the males being the artists.

Is this a stereotypical representation?
Well to answer this we first looked at how each gender is being represented, to then find that the males seem to have the power/the attraction from everyone in the music video. This shows them to be dominant, and prehaps ruling over the women. We then realised that the women act as something for the men to look at, like and ornament. The women in this video look like they are easy to take advantage of and are being dragged into negative things by the 'leading' men/artists. From research we can conclude that in a lot of alternative rap hip hop songs, womeen are 'below' men and dont have as much power compared to the males featured in a majority of videos, so yes, this representation is stereotypical.

Is it a positive or negative representation?
Although the song's lyrics aren't downgrading women at all, the representation is still negative as the women are shown as lacking in power, and an object for the men to treat how they want.

What representation are you planning to conform or challenge in your music video?
Through story boarding and pitching our ideas to the rest of our media class, we have decided not to onform to this stereotypical gender representation. The one reason being that we plan on using only one gender (females) to take part in our video, often with masks on. So it would extremely difficult to represent a gender in a certain way, without using both genders in our music video. This also means our video would challenge the idea of using gender representation in an alternative rap hip hop music video.