IF YOU ARE NOT TOO CURIOUS about what your children are so deeply engrossed in when on their mobile phones, iPad, tablets and other Internet-ready gadgets, let me tell you what I have discovered to be one of the latest major attractions.
It’s a video on YouTube and other places of Nicki Minaj’s latest release, Anaconda, the attraction of which is not the lyrics but the singer and her dancers’ “barely” outfits and what we Bajans would call wutless gyrations that could qualify her and them to be the rudest dancehall queens.
If you are not too computer-savvy and do not know about YouTube, let me explain. It’s a free video sharing Internet site where anybody can watch and share any kind of videos. It’s currently the most visited site, behind Google and Facebook, and reportedly attracts two billion (2 000 000 000) views a day.
Now, in case your taste in music has resulted in you knowing nothing about Nicki Minaj, let me tell you who she is. She is an American hip-hop singer who, like our own Rihanna, was born right here in the Caribbean – in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago, to be exact. Christened Onika Tanya Maraj, she moved to Queens, New York, with her family at the age of five.
The raunchy content of her Anaconda video has attracted the attention of so many fans and critics that in a mere 24 hours of being released on August 19, it logged 19.6 million hits and broke the single-day record previously held by Miley Cryus’ Wrecking Ball. Anaconda has now gone past 80 million views and the reaction for and against has been very, very hot.
One critic wrote: “The video is nasty not sexy, I almost vomited. And if you go to YouTube you will see that the comments aren’t only people who like the video but hundreds of dislikes. For the video to break a record, I was like, ‘What the?’”
Among the supporting responses from fans was this: “Everybody that is dissing this song, they are just doing it becuz they can’t perform or have the skills to do it like her!! Yall just jelous that ya men is checking the video everyday!!! Hahahahahaha. I find the video is just the same like every other video from other rap artist that are showing a.. and whaever more!! So what do you think about Pour It Up from Rihanna? Same **** !!!????”
On another serious note, something has to be wrong in Barbados when the following lyrics were written and recorded by The Merrymen way, way back in the mid 1960s and nobody obviously
paid any attention:
Too many guns in this town
Yeah too many guns passing round
And every day you open de paper
All you can read bout is murder
Man it’s a shooting spree
But they don’t worry me.
Yes this one have a gun, that one have a gun
Man the gon shoot each other for fun
But when the men kill de men
All gon remain is women….
The name of the hit record was The Guns. You younger ones would know it as a Spice hit, but that came decades later.
* Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.
