- [Man] Throughout the music video era,
we saw several transitions.
We were growing as culture.
- [Man] In 2000, it became about the vixens.
- [Woman] We were the aesthetic.
We were part of the fabric.
- [Man] I'd literally walk up to you, say hey,
I make music videos and would like to put you in one.
The next week you'd be on some set somewhere
doing something crazy.
- [Man] She had the curves, she had the face,
she had the attitude.
- [Woman] Women were getting paid like rappers,
those days were cut short very quickly.
- [Woman] The concept of video vixen
became a lot more salacious.
- [Woman] There was girls that were willing to do
a whole lot for air time.
- [Woman] Here's how we changed the culture,
here's how we owned ourselves, owned our bodies,
did our thing and came out of that all right.
(smooth music)
- You can tell, through music, where we are as a people,
you can tell the social climate,
you know, politically, everything.
You can tell through music.
- Hip hop was always braggadocios,
it was always talking about I'm this, I'm that,
but hip hoppers, they weren't making a lot of money.
But when you started getting into the 90s, the early 2000s,
we really started to see money.
- It was rock 'n' roll.
It was rock 'n' roll,
it was all the things that you heard about
from the white girls,
but it's set to a different time and in a different genre.
(upbeat hip hop music)
- Being a vixen is a female that's in a music video
that was the lead girl, the main girl.
She definitely has a stage presence and aura
that makes people wanna know who she is.
- She had an it-factor.
She had something about her, not just visually pleasing,
but she knew how to react to the camera.
- She wasn't a Vogue magazine model.
She had the curves, she had the face,
and she looked like the chick that was around the way
that you could get at.
- She got the attention and the eye of everyone,
to just the artist, not just the directors,
but the audience.
- The males wanted to see that,
the girls wanted to be that.
- I remember looking at those girls and I'm just like,
ugh, I just wanna be in one music video.
I just wanna be in one video
- Music video budgets back then, 400, 500.
Some big, big artists were million.
- Music videos became a lot bigger.
They became a lot more detail oriented.
They became like mini-movies.
- Well, I think the budgets are so high
because my competition isn't an urban act anymore.
We can't come trying to compete
with Nsync, Britney, Christina with a $2 video.
- It just seemed like record companies
were like battling to see who could have
the most inflated budgets.
- This is when we were still selling physical music,
there was money being made, money being spent.
- I could not do a video that wasn't in the club
that didn't have the Cristal
because they were pushing that party lifestyle,
they were pushing that, we made it.
And you always wanna see a pretty chick.
You know, that feels like success, you know?
It feels like money.
- These girls, at one point, were making big money
to star in these big budget videos
and they were stars in their own right.
- You know what it is, man, it's Rap City Q45.
I got somebody very special stopping through the building,
Gloria Valez.
- Women were getting paid like rappers.
- A lot of people didn't know
how much money I was actually making.
- I don't like to talk like numbers,
but yeah, I have no complaints about what I got paid.
- The phone calls maybe at two o'clock in the morning
for a video the next day with a major artist, the bag.
Like, I was getting paid like $10,000 a video.
- These girls started to become
just as popular as the artist.
- Melissa Ford, for some reason, people clicked.
Like, what, who's she?
- I think she was the one that just made everything look
very classy, very beautiful, very effortless.
- She was definitely not the typical stereotype
of ditzy and oh she just wannabe around the rappers type.
- Mainly, I got into music videos
because I was university student
and I was being offered American money,
tax free under the table,
and the ability to travel and meet new people
and I mean what 20 year old girl's gonna pass that up?
The first video was this video called Northern Touch,
it's pretty obscure.
Director X, be basically said,
you're the object of desire in this video.
Maybe three days later
I get a call from Hype Williams people saying,
Hype Williams wants you to be in his next video.
I was like oh my god.
Hype Williams, oh shit!
Fast forward to March 2000,
I'm on a $10 million yacht in Trinidad
doing Big Pimpin with Jay Z.
It was pretty unbelievable to actually be apart of that.
I was standing on the top level of this yacht
with another girl drinking Cristal and I looked,
I was like can you believe that this is our life?
She was like, "For three days it is, girl."
I was like, yes!
- Big Pimpin, for example,
we didn't approach it like a production,
we approached it like an event that we were all apart of.
We flew about 70, 80 people down
and just had the most fun you could have
and just rolled some cameras at the same time.
- For whatever reason,
Big Pimpin clicked with everybody
and then we just entered the craziness.
- [Jay-Z] It's big pimpin, baby.
That's right, big pimpin, spending cheese.
- When Gloria Valez did Big Pimpin,
the way that she just rocked
along with the whole look of everything,
I'm Big Pimpin' baby in every aspect of my life.
So to have a woman like her,
it was like that's the fantasy world of every guy
that wants to be a Jay-Z or a Bun B and Pimp C.
- She shined more in that video,
I think than some of the artists, you know what I mean?
And the song was bananas.
♪ Big pimpin, spending cheese ♪
♪ Check 'em out now ♪
♪ Big pimpin on B-L-A-D's ♪
- The Big Pimpin video,
I didn't know it was gonna be that huge, honestly.
The night before, we all hung out,
and I was really, really young.
I wasn't even 21 yet so I shouldn't even have been drinking.
And that day I met Pimp C.
We hit it off, I was listening to his music,
he was listening to mine and we were vibing,
and then I went to the trailer and fell asleep.
Another girl was I my position there.
He was like no, I was Gloria here,
I'm not having this girl,
and he fought for me.
That is so dope.
They woke me up.
If you really look, I hardly have any makeup on.
My hair was just brushed and that was my outfit,
that was actually my birthday outfit.
And I just put that on and he had a fur,
he was like, yeah.
'Cause people weren't doing it in the summer,
wearing a fur coat.
We started that shit, you know?
I'm sorry. (laughing)
- She got notoriety and other girls got notoriety
and they became celebrities.
- I got one of the stars of Jay-Z's video,
Gloria Valez right here.
What's up, baby?
- What's the deal, baby?
- And you can check her out.
She was in a XXL.
She got Eye Candy of the Year
and she gon' be in The Source 2001 calendar, right?
- That's right.
- All right, so I'ma have her here
and you can get her at home,
put her on her wall and everything and do what you do.
You know what I'm saying?
- The audience was looking to see who the new girls were
and everyone wanted to know what their names were.
So magazines like Vibe and XXL
and some the other urban or hip hop magazines
started featuring the girls.
- Before social media and how e-mail took off,
everyone used to write in to say what they felt
or how they felt about a particular issue.
"Yo, who's that girl in Ludacris video?"
And we were like, what? (laughing)
Like damn, why they ask about her?
Then boom, another letter.
I open up another one,
"Yo' who is that girl in Q-tip video?"
or "Who is this girl in such-and-such video?"
I'm like?
- We started King Magazine November of 2001
and straight out the gate,
our very first issue we had Leila Arciery
who we knew most from Q-tip's Vibrant Thing video.
So we knew earlier on that these girls were stars.
You know, they weren't just an accessory,
they were something that we had to deal with
and we were really excited to be able to introduce
a platform that allowed them to consistently shine.
- Features became covers, multiple covers, calendars
and so I was a lot more like Pamela Anderson back then
just in terms of like the merchandising of my image
and it just being kind of everywhere.
SO I became like the blueprint foundation of video modeling,
so to speak.
I wasn't trying to do that, it just happened.
- As much as people want to get at
all all the different magazines
that covered these women back then,
if not for those magazines,
they would not have a voice.
If you can go anywhere in the country
and look at any newsstand in the country,
you see a Gloria who's in Jay-Z's video
next to Jay-Z on the cover.
Woo, now we talkin' like let's bring the status up.
- We brought something different, you know?
And so they see you everywhere,
they wanna know more about you.
They want to touch you, they want to be there.
- I think they represented for some women
that were never even seen before,
you know, in mainstream.
Here's some of the most beautiful women of color
that you will ever see.
- We used to get a lot of flack
when we started King Magazine
because we always had beautiful women of color on the cover.
Yeah, bathing suits, bikinis, and it's like,
oh, you guys are objectifying women.
No, these are beautiful women.
It's like, this is like a love letter, a tribute.
- You know, bringing that conversation
from the barbershops in the hoods of America,
especially in black neighborhoods, to the pages.
And it was like a dream come true.
- Vixens and models gave the young black girl
an alternative view of beauty.
You know, like I'm not going to ever look
like this chick on Cosmo,
but I can look like this chick
on BlackMen's Magazine or on Smooth Magazine,
which wasn't much different,
like their attire or anything else.
- They glorified our natural bodies, you know?
It wasn't just one shape.
They glorified all cultures of women.
- These video vixens will never get credit
for makig some little brown or black girl
feel as if she's beautiful.
They'll never get credit for making,
not only black and brown girls feel as if they're beautiful,
but also influencing girls in white culture to say,
hey, I wanna look like that too.
- Until hip hop came along,
beauty was still skinny girls,
maybe some boobs was,
my goodness she's voluptuous, right?
And then suddenly the world got to see
what ass is all about.
Like why did Kim Kardashian say you know what?
This booty thing works.
- What video directors and casting directors realized
was they could get girls that looked
physically just like me from the strip club
who were very, very, very comfortable
being naked in front of cameras
and pay them a whole lot less.