Ashton Hassinger
Professor Erica Delsandro
English 101
1 May 2013
Smack That Analysis
The music video my group and I chose to analyze was “Smack That” by Akon.
Once upon a time Akon was sitting in a jail cell listening to “Smack That” on his iPod
while singing along. A cop by the name of Chad Gates approaches him and calls him
“Konvict”. He solicits “Konvict” to help find a witness for 24-hour release from prison.
The cop hands him a picture of a pretty lady and Akon asks eagerly, “So when do we get
started?” The cop takes Akon to gather his belongings while the song starts up in the
background with the introductions of the rappers. There is a clip of a Lamborghini
Gallardo driving under city lights. The car eventually pulls into an alleyway and Akon
gets out of the drivers seat. They go to a door and shake a few bouncers hands. The next
scene they are in a strip club. The video switches back and forth between clips of Akon
singing in the alleyway while clapping, clips of him singing in the strip club while
clapping, and clips of ladies in very questionable clothing dancing in the club. Akon is
seen shaking hands with a bunch of different men; assumedly inquiring about the woman
he is searching for. He then moves on to asking the women in the club. The cop gets
distracted and has a woman dance in front him while he is sitting down. The women
prove to be no help so he moves on to the bartender. The bartender seems infuriated after
Akon shows him the picture of the witness and throws the picture back at Akon. Akon
finishes his drink and throws his glass into the mirror behind the bar. He then notices at
woman heading back a dark hallway in the club and follows her. Once in the hallway a
group of women start to grope Akon and seem to be trying to stop him from going deeper
into the hallway. He ignores them and ends up in an office. A man, presumably the clubs
owner, turns around in his chair while the witness is sitting on the front of his desk. The
lady realizes she has a chance to escape and hits the fire alarm. Akon picks up a chair and
throws it through a window looking out into the club. They both run out of the club with
the cop chasing after them. They get into Akon’s Lamborghini and get away.
The underlying fairy tale archetype is a “Cinderella” story quite obviously
because there is a male hero saving the female character from some sort of distress. In the
music video Akon is saving the stripper from the club owner as well as a life as a
stripper. For the previous statement to hold true one must realize that most strippers are
not strippers by choice, but usually by the need to provide for themselves or others. There
was a quote, however, from Maria Tatar’s “The Classic Fairy Tales” that helped us
solidify the idea even more. “They took away her beautiful clothes, dressed her in an old
grey smock and gave her some wooden shoes.”(Tatar 117) This quote makes another less
recognizable connection apparent. The stripper must act as someone different and dress
in a less desired fashion just as Cinderella had to clean and wear rags, even though she
was a wealthy merchants daughter. Although the music video “Smack That”, by Akon
presents a “Cinderella” story, it also glorifies less desirable behaviors look down upon by
our society.
If one were to take a closer look at the lyrics of part of the song one would start to see
that the fairy tale story feel we got from the video and the lyrics disagree. The lyric,
“Smack that, all on the floor,
smack that, give me some more,
smack that, 'til you get sore,
smack that, oh ooh”,
is very degrading toward women. It is talking quite clearly about sadomasochistic sexual
acts, which are looked at as somewhat weird in our society. In the situation the lyric
portays Akon has already decided that the woman is going to partake in this type of
interaction because he is in the power position both in society and in this sexual act
because he is the man.
Looking ahead in the song one will notice more lyrics contrasting with the fairy
tale idea. The lyric,
“Maybe go to my place and just kick it like Tae Bo,
and possibly bend you over, look back and watch me”,
is also another degrading line aimed at women. This not only implies that Akon already
thinks that this woman is willing to go back to his place, but it also shows how Akon is so
sure that he will be able to “bend her over” and have sex with her, even before they leave
the club. This is very degrading to women because he already assumes the woman is
going to go home with him, most likely because she is “asking for it” by the way she is
dressed. It is highlighting a common assumption among men that if a woman is dressed
provactively she either thinks sex means nothing or she wants to have sex with anyone.
The other rapper in the collaboration, Eminem, also has some interesting lines.
The lyric,
“Plus from the club to the crib it's like a mile away,
Or more like a palace, shall I say”,
really helps connect everything else to make it appear that it may be a “Cinderella” story.
He is comparing his own house to a palace. It is one way in the song and video the
rappers used to flaunt their money. One of the characteristics of a prince is that they are
wealthy. This is the collaborations attempt at comparing themselves to Prince Charming,
hoping that the women will think they will be treated like Cinderella.
My group chose a clip to show how desired Akon is to women down on their
luck. In the clip, Akon is walking down a dimly lit hallway to the back of the club, all the
while women are on both sides of the hall, the entire length of the hall, groping him or
trying to get him to stop and pay attention to them. This shows quite well how Akon is
the focal point of all the women’s attention. They know he most likely will not stop but
they still try to tempt him, showing how little they care about being just another girl he
was with and how little respect they have for themselves.
The next clip we showed portrayed the cop in a bad light. In the clip, a stripper
walked up to Akon and the cop, got the cops attention, walked him away from Akon, sat
him down in a chair, and danced and flirted with him with multiple other girls. This
portrays the cop in a bad light because he was sent there to look for a certain woman and
not get distracted by strippers. It also goes to show how manipulative a woman’s
sexuality can be.
The last clip my group showed was one of Akon and the girl fleeing the club. In
the clip, it shows Akon finally making his way to a office in the back, after the hallway in
the previous clip. The stripper throws the fire alarm while Akon picks a chair and throws
it at the window looking out into the club. The two climb out the window and run to the
car in the alleyway, leaving the cop behind and saving the girl from both the cop and the
club owner. This really makes it evident that it is a “Cinderella” story because it shows
the male character saving the damsel in distress from some sort of peril.
Social pressures have a way of molding us into our certain genders. “People go
along with the imposition of gender norms because the weight of morality as well as
immediate social pressures enforces them. Consider how many instructions for properly
gendered behavior are packed into this mother’s admonition to her daughter: “This is
how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from
looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming”(Kincaid 1978)”(Lorber 46).
This quote goes along quite well with the music video and the idea of it being designed
after a fairy tale. It shows how most girls eventually realize that just being a good person
will not be enough to attract a man. They realize the have to go against their own morals
and act and dress provactively to attract and hopefully keep a man. Even though the
strippers in the video are quite extreme examples the majority of women find themselves
acting and dressing differently than they would really hope to.
Works Cited
Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Print.
Lorber, Judith. "Night to his Day": The Social Construction of Gender. N.d. Graphic.
BoltPrint.
Music video by Akon performing Smack That (C) 2008 Universal Records, a Division of
UMG Recordings, Inc. and SRC Records, Inc.