I’ll be honest with you. I RARELY watch music videos and I hate 106th and Park. Yea, I said it, hate. Why, you ask? Maybe it’s because when I did watch it, it was co-hosted by Free, one of the most down-to-earth media personalities you ever did see. Sorry AJ. You gets no love. I just couldn’t get past the predator braids, but I digress… Music videos are all the same nowadays. All you need is a half-naked, exotic-looking chick as the “star”, some smoke and fog, a few dudes with tattoos, wife-beaters and skinny jeans (insert vomit sound), a club scene, a shower scene, a bunch of almost naked women, and a slow motion effect. I can’t even watch a Beyonce (I refuse to call her “Bey”) video without seeing a butt cheek or two or six. As you can imagine, when I found out that Lil Wayne made a video for his debut love song, “How to Love” I didn’t think it was anything special. To be honest, I wouldn’t have known about the video if I didn’t read an article about it. But I have to admit, Lil Wayne surprised me with this one. The video was actually…. good….. actually really good. (there I go using those SAT words again. )
To be fair, the song isn’t exactly terrible. I thought it was catchy when I first heard it. But when I heard it a second time, and specifically listened to the lyrics, (this was particularly difficult because Lil Wayne sounds like drunk Uncle Pete, that crazy uncle who always tells stories about the good ole’ days when he used to play spades with his buddies and squeeze ladies booties and run) I was surprised by its message.
Lil Wayne actually addressed a huge problem in the African American community – the cycle of sexual promiscuity and abuse that plagues African American women in poverty. How to love is just a title. To some degree, the issues brought about in the song and video have a huge impact on a woman’s ability to love, but it goes deeper than that. Our ability to make choices, ones that affect the lives of people around us, is was determines whether we end up unmarried, pregnant, broke, and uneducated – or intelligent, successful, married (or in a stable relationship) and overall happy. Wayne caught a lot of flack when this song debuted, mostly from his fans wanting that old thing back -songs about weed, liquor, money, cars, clothes, hoes, blah, blah, blah, – it’s been done before. I’m glad he made this song. While I don’t appreciate the technical details of the song (*cough, auto-tune, cough*), the lyrics and the message make up for it. And this video puts a little something extra on it. So what do you think? Should Lil Wayne stick to rapping? Does this song and video do justice to the social epidemic of single women looking for love in all the wrong places? Should Rihanna sue the woman in the video for stealing her forehead and lips? (Okay, I threw that one in there for fun) But seriously, what do you think of the video?
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