Naturalizing Male Authority and the Power of the Producer

Abstract

Hip-hop videos have for some time inspired a substantial amount of academic work investigating how ethnicity and gender is represented. Much has been written about the problematic representations of African-American women in hip-hop videos and how they are reduced to props for the male star (Pough et al., Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, 2007; Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 2008). Recently several scholars have also examined the representations of black masculinity, and the limited negative stereotypes African-American male artists are offered to embody in these videos (Forman and Neal, That’s the Joint, 2012; Perry, Prophets of the Hood, Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, 2004). A currently under-studied area is the power structures present in the relationship between a male producer and a female artist. In this article I will explore how gender and ethnicity is represented in the relationship between the male producer and the female artist in folk/rock singer Nelly Furtado’s video Promiscuous. In this video the famous Miami producer Timbaland shows up alongside Nelly Furtado. After her second album flopped, Furtado retained Timbaland to produce her third album, Loose, which became her bestselling effort; the single “Promiscuous” became her first number-one US single as well. In the video for the song, Timbaland and Furtado rap and sing a flirtatious dialogue together, and in this article I will compare their professional histories with the video’s representation of Timbaland’s masculinity. Are Furtado and Timbaland presented as equal partners here? How is their potential partnership referred to through the music, lyrics, and images, respectively? As the female star of the video, how is Furtado contrasted with her producer/co-performer? Most importantly, how is the relationship between Furtado and Timbaland presented in this video? I will supply a brief historical background for the relationship between female performers and male producers to shed light on the interaction depicted in Promiscuous. Using audiovisual analysis as my approach, I will identify several strategies in Promiscuous that appear to naturalize male authority in this particular context.