By shelz.

So Drake has been branded as Hip-Hop’s next “It” guy and the spotlight on the actor/rapper/crooner is equator-in-the-summer hot. Everything he does is scrutinized under the rap microscope and everyone has a good idea of what path they would take if they were him. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that the path most people have imagined would not have lead them anywhere near the video he released a few days ago.

“The Best I Ever Had” video presented Hip-Hop fans with something they had never seen before, or so you would think. There was an odd, non-sensical plot and half naked, ethnically ambiguous young women with huge breasts bouncing all over the place. What?!? In a rap video?!? Stop.

I’m so very curious as to why this video has engendered the uproar that it has. I was completely unaware that rap videos were going to take an artistic turn to high tier Shakespearian narrative, with intelligent looking women dressed like librarians or kindergarten teachers or something. That memo must have slid off my desk and found itself co-habitating with the dust bunnies.

Of course the average video director would have had those same young ladies in a club, or on a yacht or on the beach. There would have been champagne showers, caviar dreams, expensive cars and a rented mansion. But Kanye put them on a basketball court. Did it make sense? Not to me. Was it yet another attempt at twisting misogyny into something amusing? Probably. Is it something new? No.

I’m not saying that the general presentation of women in Hip Hop doesn’t need to be revamped. It does. As the concept of the true femcee dissolves into nothing more than a woman dressed like a hooker holding a mic and videos revolve around ass instead of lyrics, it’s obvious that women in this industry aren’t received as talent equals. The lyrics from their male counterparts ignore chicks at best; reduce women to body parts ripe for the banging at worst.

Outside of a small rumbling here and there, females in the Hip-Hop nation have accepted their second class status. Ladies line up in droves at castings in order to be the T&A their favorite rapper lyrically spins into nothing more than an animal. Those who aren’t lucky enough to make those few pennies they shell out to the working girls on the set stand on line at the club and pay to shake it like the brainless lump of flesh that emcee so-and-so is talking about. But in this culture of female irrelevance, everyone is shaken to their finger-wagging core about some chicks in tight shirts dribbling it like it’s hot.

Now if this is some new found movement against the disrespectful appearance of women in Hip-Hop, I’m all for it. If this particular video raised eyebrows that have been dormant or turned on some over-head light bulbs that have been lost in darkness since the music took this tragic turn, that’s great. But if you have a legitimate issue with this video, you probably should have a problem with 90% of the other videos you watched this week. So unless you are ready to attack this problem at its core as opposed to whining about one particular symptom, all your fussing is for naught.

Instead of folks throwing down the gauntlet at female representation in Hip-Hop, maybe this outcry is another way to pull out the claws and chop up Mr. Drake a bit. As his star climbs, I’m sure there are plenty of people looking for reasons to stop the sun rise. I just think all this high level critical analysis of some basketball babes is a smoke screen to give Drake hell. It’s not like we have video of him punching a chick in the face or him singing about killing his baby momma. Then again, it’s obvious those kinds of antics pale in comparison to Kanye’s nonsense celluloid concoction.