Harmful Imagery: A Content Analysis of Popular Lebanese Music Videos

Abstract

This study examines three categories of harmful imagery; violence, substance use, and sexual objectification in the most popular Lebanese music videos performed by Lebanese artists and other Arab artists who collaborated with Lebanese directors and released content between 1990 and 2020. The analysis provides information about the frequency of harmful imagery in two periods (1990-2004) and (2005-2020), compares their changes, and explores their gendered aspects. The analysis found that harmful im- agery nearly categorically increased across the two periods studied. This study illus- trates that while the role of women in the Lebanese video clip industry drastically in- creased from the first period to the second, so did the objectification of their bodies. Over time, Lebanese video clips have increasingly mimicked the hyper-sexualized aes- thetic of Western, especially American music videos of various genres popularized by the American cable network MTV (Music Television), pointing to the successful prolif- eration of the MTV aesthetic in the Lebanese video clip industry.