- [Woman] I feel like the term video vixen
developed a negative connotation
when piracy was a big thing that was
basically making record companies hemorrhage money.
(smooth hip hop music)
- The music industry took a hit
that no one was prepared for.
- [Reporter] Piracy causes huge losses for the U.S economy.
- [Reporter] The music industry no longer controls
the distribution of it's own products.
- There are no more record stores.
- We have to use all the resolve and imagination
we can summon to baffle this piracy.
- If a contractor builds a building,
should people be allowed to move into it for free?
- No one bought CD's out of the goodness of their heart,
they bought CD's 'cause that's how they got the music
and when the platform changed,
so did the people.
- Labels started firing people.
The A&R department all but disappeared all together.
- As a video director,
I started to see the budget change
and I remember speaking to Har from Bad Boy
and said "Yo, Teeth, it's the last one.
"We not doing these budgets like this."
And I was like, why? (laughing)
Life is good.
And he's just like yo, the record sales.
I mean, we have to change the business model.
We can't have all this excess
and not have it coming back in.
- X, we gotta do it again.
- We gotta do it again, man.
- We'll do it again, man. - Soon, soon, soon.
- Big things are coming, there it is.
- An artist, they don't have as much money to spend
but you had to make your music video.
You had to do all the same things,
you just weren't making as much money.
- You know, just the popularity of music
had shifted away from North East Coast,
you know, Brooklyn, Bronx, New York running things
to a more Southern rap and stripper culture.
- A lot of those rap songs have a sexiness to 'em
that instantly take you to like a strip club
and instantly take you to the beach
or places where you see women like that.
♪ Found you, Miss New Booty ♪
♪ Get it together and bring it back to me ♪
♪ Hit the Player's Club ♪
- When Buffie bust on the scene in 2005,
it was the same thing as she's like dark skin,
she's from the south, she's a stripper,
she's admittedly a stripper
and the strip club culture was just exploding.
- You know, she came out with a big butt.
She started that, you know, with the big booty
and embracing her thickness
'cause she was thick-thick.
(laughing) You know?
- Buffie was one of the rare, rare ones.
Super dark chocolate, built like a brick house,
had that southern movement with her, real sweet smile,
and dudes just fell in love with her.
(upbeat hip hop music)
- Hey, it's Rap City right now
and today we're doing Who's that Girl?
- Actually, I never really tried to be a video model.
It happened and I tell people this all the time,
it happened by mistake.
I took some photos,
the photographer put the photos online
without my permission.
So, of course, I was upset
but then that was back around the time
when message boards was really popular.
So I started a Yahoo Group and from that group
is when I was contacted by G-Unit.
They contacted me through my Yahoo Group
and really I didn't even believe
that it was really them actually contacting me,
so I was like, yeah right.
So they contacted me like four or five times
before I actually e-mailed them back.
So they sent the number
and I blocked my number and called them
because I wasn't for sure.
Next thing you know,
I was on the phone with Tony Yayo and 50 Cent.
I was like, is this really happening? (laughing)
- She's just so seductive and it was really interesting
because we was tryna keep Yayo focused.
It was amazing, everyone was amazed by her body.
- That first video I was in,
I think they paid me like $2,500 to be there, the main girl.
Before the whole thing was over,
girls was getting $300.
They had to pay for their own flight.
You had to get your own hotel.
Things changed drastically
by the time I got out the industry.
I was hearing all types so I'm like are you serious?
It changed so much where I was like,
I actually felt sorry for some of those girls.
- People in the hood, girls in the hood like,
yo, I'm tryna get that money, you know?
I wanna do that, I'm pretty, people think I'm cute.
And so the other girls in the club were seeing that
and they want that as well,
they want that lifestyle as well.
- 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.
- And so it just became a whole evolution
that brought it to where we are now.
Casting calls, I hated them with a passion.
Something was very wrong about having a casting call
and you coming in with little to nothing on
and then we tell you, all right, let me see you dance.
All right, turn around, let me see your butt.
All right, now let me see you drop it, yeah, yeah.
And be like oh, I can't believe we're doing this
and they're doing it!
You know, they came there for that.
- All people wanted to see at that time was nakedness.
Hot women, glistening in oil.
If you didn't have that in your video,
no one was watching.
I believe that was the era of the BET Uncut.
- BET Uncut used to keep a lot of us super late at night.
I'ma just tell you, it was a real thing.
And yes, it was a cultural indicator of how far you can go.
- See, now I can't blame it all on Uncut,
but if you open a medium to say, show us your rawest,
well, somebody's always gonna get rawer and rawer and rawer.
And so it opened the door for access to people
that would normally not get access
to doing these type of videos.
♪ I said it must be your ass ♪ ♪ 'Cause it ain't your face ♪
♪ I need tip drill ♪
♪ I said it must be your ass ♪
♪ 'Cause it ain't your face ♪
♪ I need a tip drill ♪
- I mean, look at Tip Drill.
Who directed Tip Drill?
Benny Boom directed Tip Drill,
but that's not the name he used as his director's credit.
A lot of mainstream directors didn't want
to get in that way.
They didn't want their name on it
but we were shooting 'em.
So the shift was changing because you could get racier
and you're not gonna see Melyssa Ford get butt naked
and somebody swipe a card through butt,
it wasn't happening.
- It was a lot.
You remember, they were having full on debates on BET,
like full shows about what's going on
with all these girls in music videos.
- I'm Jeff Johnson and we're talking about
women and hip hop.
How can you maintain integrity
when money in many cases is the issue?
- I can't answer that question,
but I would like to ask Nelly.
When you do a video like Tip Drill,
do you think about yourself as someone
who's setting a price on the black female body?
- When Tip Drill came out, Nelly's video,
and the Spellman women spoke out against it
and boycotted that video
because of the credit card swipe through the butt cheeks,
that really changed things as well
because artists were not ready for that pressure.
- Now I agree, when we did Tip Drill
and I wanted to address to the ladies, to Spellman,
I got a backlash and I was going to get protested,
you feel what I'm saying?
And I felt that was unfair
and I am a little bitter on this subject
because I did an adult video that was for adults
and instead of you pulling a brother to the side,
you wanna protest my stance,
but you have yet to protest,
you have yet to picket in front of any of them strip clubs
that are no more than a 10 block radius from your school.
- Don't blame us for selling us, blame them for buying it.
- Because you know what hip hop is?
Hip hop is a mirror, all hip hop is a mirror
and it's staring at America right back in it's face
and that's what you're getting right now,
it's a big mirror and this is what you created.
And America is looking in this mirror
and sometimes they don't like what they see,
but it's what you created.
- The viewing audience, especially women,
started to feel like, you know,
I'm not really standing behind this.
This isn't very empowering.
- There wasn't a really high level of respect, I feel,
for women during that time.
- I think in hip hop and in music in general,
especially the urban market,
they never really talk highly of women ever.
Country music is lovey-dovey and they praise their women.
Latin music, salsa, merengue,
they praise their women, it's beauty.
But in hip hop, not so much.
So we kinda get used to it.
We bop our heads and we rap along
even though if they're dissing us,
calling us hoes or whatever,
because it's what we grew up on, you know?
And it just got worse.
- So people started to wonder,
as a music video model or vixen,
why would participate in a project
that calls you all kinds of B's and hoes
and this, that the other?
- After strip club culture was introduced into videos,
once porn culture was introduced into music videos,
for a lot of these girls who were just
even in it just to make an honest living,
a lot of their value went down
in terms of where we saw them
just in the public court of opinions.
- I had it rough as far as like
blog sites, internet, and things like that.
They definitely were, the comments were bad.
They were horrible, they was at my neck, for sure.
- Naturally, that just shit rolled down hill, you know?
Like everything just became sporadic
and the girls, in retrospect, had to figure out
like what's our next thing?
- I stopped doing videos.
I was already onto the next,
'cause you can do videos for so long,
that's like a stepping stone.
A video career vixen, it's not longevity.
- You know, I knew that there was an exit ramp
that I was going to take eventually.
- I knew it wasn't going to last long
so I'm like what am I gon' be doing
when it's all said and done?
- Yeah, things got really dark when the money changed,
but luckily for me, I had an antidote for that
and started writing books. (laughing)
- When the book came out,
it put a stamp on all of us.
Whether or not you were in a trailer,
you know, performing fellatio,
or you were in a corner reading a book,
catching up on your studies,
we were all lumped into the same category.