Blame Tumblr. Blame horny teenagers. Blame the lonely bros who sit at home in digital circle jerks. Blame Twitter. Blame the industry. Blame lazy, uninspired marketing. Hell, blame the entire Internet if you must, but hey everyone, can we please stop making pornographic music videos?

Look, I’m not some crazy ass finger wagging conservative who’s looking to ban pornography on the grounds of sin or anything like that. I’m all for freedom of speech and expression, and I understand that (legal) porn has its place. But it doesn’t necessarily have a place in music videos or parading as artwork for singles, albums, mixtapes, etc. In the not-so-distant past, people used to be able to hit up a site, spot the NSFW tags, and click (or not click) accordingly. But more and more these days, most bloggers are either too busy or too lazy to watch an entire music video to know if what they’re posting is actually porn or not.

Hell, sometimes bloggers post artwork that is no more than an Instagram-tinted vagina and have the post sitting on their frontpage. Yes, this actually happened, and yes, it was Mario’s new single; don’t click that if you’re at work. I’m not one to point fingers or anything, but shit, that’s a pretty big mistake and one that should be taken care of immediately, rather than ignored. Never mind the fact that you might cost someone their job because you were too careless to just glance over the artwork– or the fact that you could exercise that old concept of discretion and pass on posting a single’s artwork … but that’s another discussion entirely.

My point isn’t that some schlub might get the ax because he was too busy browsing porn-happy music sites and didn’t focus on his 9-to-5. It also isn’t to point out the fact that many of these videos and covers are further degrading women by commercializing the female body as a marketing tool like a hot cheeseburger in a shitty McDonald’s commercial. Honestly, I could go off for damn near a million words about how hip-hop … no, music in general hyper-sexualizes and degrades women, and how some females are on the front lines leading the warped degradation their own gender. But that’s not what I’m going for here.

My point is that by promoting music that uses straight-up pornography to sell itself will only speed up the process in which our collective brain is turning to the most base form of mush. There is hardly ever anything artistic, edgy, romantic, or redeemable about the particular videos and “artwork” I’m referencing. Take the video I saw about two weeks ago by some Wiz Khalifa jabroni—I think his name’s Berner? (who cares?)—that featured completely naked women dancing around in a wrestling ring.

Tell me, what does this do for music or our culture at large? What does a video from any member of the Maybach Music Group rapping at a strip club—with strippers getting naked right in front of them—do for anyone? Nothing. It makes me think we’re all just a bunch of cavemen involved in an endless circle jerk, rendering our parts useless because all we’re doing is jacking ourselves off into oblivion in the name of our over-stimulated, lonely, vacuous culture.

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