Five rap music videos that were banned from TV
Music videos, in usually three or four minutes, have a lot of work to do. They need to capture the viewer’s attention, tell a story or convey some sort of message, and, fundamentally, leave people feeling entertained—a tough ask for what amounts to an ultra-short film. But, in their efforts to leave an impression, some promos overstep the mark of what is deemed acceptable.
Music videos nowadays are primarily consumed online, usually on YouTube. But back in the day they were broadcast on TV, mainly on music channels like MTV. That meant that they were forced to abide by certain network rules that, from time to time, became a problem. The more controversial promos could, from time to time, end up being censored or banned outright.
Censorship is a tricky business. It’s probably fair enough to ban certain extreme ideas or depictions from being broadcast, but some people will always cry foul and claim that free speech is being impinged on. In many cases, that may actually be a fair point. The line between acceptable and unacceptable content is extremely hazy, and everyone has their differing opinions on it. It’s a debate that gets messy.
But television networks have waded into the grey area plenty of times, taking the decision to ban certain music videos that they deem to be inappropriate—and hip-hop, as a notoriously controversial genre of music, has naturally fallen foul of the TV networks’ ire plenty of times. Some famous promos for rap songs have been banned over the years, and here are five of the most notorious.
Five rap music videos that were banned from TV
5. Nicki Minaj – ‘Stupid Hoe’
What’s odd about the fact that Nicki Minaj’s video for ‘Stupid Hoe’ was banned is that, really, it’s not all that different to her other promos. Minaj wearing bright colours and showing some skin, dancing in suggestive ways and rapping with explicit lyrics, it seems par for the course, really. But this promo proved too much for the Black Entertainment Television (BET) channel, which took the decision not to show it. No official reason was ever divulged, but people have their theories about it.
One feature of the video that is a bit different to Minaj’s usual fare is its depiction of a naked doll. It’s believed that this admittedly suggestive toy may have been behind the video’s BET ban, but, in any case, it didn’t matter very much to Minaj. The clip was uploaded to Vevo and it quickly set records, attracting 4.8 million views in a single day. No other video at the time had ever achieved that. It was a hit.
4. MC Hammer – ‘Pumps and a Bump’
MC Hammer, having become something of a popular phenomenon following the release of ‘U Can’t Touch This’ in 1990, had decided, by 1994, that he wanted to project a grittier image. He tried to appeal to fans of gangsta rap, for one thing, and on the single ‘Pumps and a Bump’ he tried to get sexy. Whether a track that features lyrics such as “You can slippity slip out ya clothes and take a trip” actually managed to achieve that is very much open for debate.
To accompany this sex-fueled romp of a single, Hammer released a video that featured him wearing a Speedo that did not leave much to the imagination. Wearing his little trunks, Hammer dances around a pool with a lot of girls wearing skimpy swimsuits of their own—and, sure enough, it all proved a bit too rich for MTV. The network felt the promo was too graphic and banned it, leading to an alternative video being shot. In it, Hammer wears much more clothes.
3. Sir Mix-a-Lot – ‘Baby Got Back’
It seems almost quaint to think that Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ caused the stir that it did. Following its release in 1992, there was a lot of fevered talk and hand-wringing about its sexualised lyrics that objectified the female body. Perhaps that was justified, but compared to hip-hop and even pop music nowadays, a line like “I like big butts and I cannot lie” just seems entirely pedestrian. Sensibilities have undeniably changed over the decades.
The video for ‘Baby Got Back’ stayed true to the song’s subject matter, presenting Sir Mix-a-Lot having a boogie upon an enormous female arse. MTV banned it for being inappropriate, but that just added fuel to the fire of its popularity. The ban got people talking about it, and, in the end, it returned to MTV on the condition that it only be broadcast after 9pm.
2. Kanye West – ‘Monster’
The video for ‘Monster,’ Kanye West’s track with Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj and Bon Iver, generated a great deal of negative publicity following its release in 2011. The video was inspired by horror movies, bearing several visual references to famous films and otherwise incorporating horror tropes like zombies. But the controversy stemmed from the perceived misogyny of the video, which presented some women as doll-like corpses that Kanye could rearrange at will.
The music video became the subject of a petition calling for Universal Music Group and MTV to stop showing it. One of the petition’s leaders, Melinda Tankard Reist, wrote of the promo, “The mainstreaming of videos like this increases desensitized and callous attitudes toward violence against women… Women are reduced to sex-doll-like playthings.” In the end, MTV relented and it was banned.
1. Public Enemy – ‘By The Time I Get To Arizona’
After the controversial Arizona governor Evan Mecham cancelled Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a furious Chuck D started writing a song that ended up being featured on Public Enemy’s 1991 album Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black. The track, ‘By The Time I Get To Arizona,’ railed against Mecham and the wider political establishment, and its video went a step further. It showed paramilitary forces entering Arizona to violentally ensure that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed there, while cutting back and forth to fictionalised clips of members of the civil rights movement, and King specifically, being racially abused.
Establishment sorts predictably had an issue with the violence that the video depicted, but so, too, did King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, as well as other non-violent Black activists. Even so, Chuck D has always stood by the promo. “I’m for peace,” he told Spin in 2011, “but I can make a visual statement about how I feel about what happened. The actuality is that I shot a video in rebuttal to something that happened in real life.” It was ultimately removed from MTV in the wake of the controversy surrounding it.