NSFW

By Bryan Reed

R&B singer Erykah Badu was charged last week with disorderly conduct, stemming from a public nudity stunt the singer pulled at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Chances are she’ll be found guilty. She did, after all, video tape the event and release it as the video for her song “Window Seat.”

That video echoed a similar one released last year by pop duo Matt & Kim, in which the pair stripped to their birthday suits in Times Square. And Matt & Kim were hardly the only musicians parading their naughty bits (or those of others) in music videos last year. The Flaming Lips, Girls, Marilyn Manson and Raekwon were among the flood of artists releasing music videos specifically for the Internet’s lax (read: mostly non-existent) indecency guidelines.

It makes sense, mostly. MTV and VH1 don’t play many videos, and more viewers are going to the Web for video content anyway. This allows artists to release content unhindered by FCC guidelines. There are no indecency fines in cyberspace.

Quickly, videos featuring nudity (or other potentially offensive content, but mostly nudity) came to be labeled “NSFW,” which stands for “Not Safe For Work,” and can be roughly interpreted as “Boobs!”

At once a warning and an incentive, the NSFW tag became something of a marketing ploy. Prominent music blog Stereogum even assembled a list of 2009’s Top Ten NSFW Music Videos. In my other life as a music critic, this trend was especially notable in the press release e-mails I got boasting “Band X releases new NSFW video!” One French metal band, which had hired a European porn star to appear in their video in BDSM scenes was cause for a literal deluge of press releases boating which video hosting services had officially banned the video.

As the trend evolved from intriguing to annoying, I began to wonder not what these decisions said about the artists or the Internet but about us. The level of artistic freedom enabled by the Internet is to be celebrated. And I’m not one to get mad over a little superficial (forgive the choice of words) titillation. But at what point does an artist’s right and ability to evoke or to titillate an audience become an unspoken obligation? At what point does a trend become a rule? And at what point do we as viewers stop questing the artistic merit of the media we consume?

Now, surely the low-brow has its place. And nudity isn’t exclusive to the low-brow, either. But the stream of NSFW content that 2009 ushered in (and 2010 shows few signs of slowing), can’t be all good can it? It seems like the acronym has overshadowed the content it serves to warn against/advertise.

Even Stereogum concedes in their post, “The affordability of video production technology has made it easier for everybody to get in the game; the unceremonious death of music television has shifted the means of music video distribution to the internet, where it’s less about FCC than about NSFW; and let’s face it, blogger hit counts love no four letters more than NSFW.”

Ultimately, it’s not a question of whether certain content is appropriate or not, but whether the intent serves the art, or the pageviews, and how much that matters.

photo credit: Mandiberg