“WAP”? What Are you Pay attention to?

“WAP”? What Are you Pay attention to?

Have you ever heard about some songs that named with a suffix “explicit version” or “dirty version”? Do you feel uncomfortable or upset when listening to these explicit songs including sex description, violent, offensive contents, and foul language ("Explicit and Clean Track Qualifications", 2021)? For the biggest controversy of this topic, famous female rapper Cardi B released a song featuring Megan Thee Stallion, called WAP with strong sexual description lyrics last year. It raised a huge controversy with this song’s title describing women’s sex organs and its avant-garde lyric of sex desiring. Although it was controversial, it still sweeps the internet like a virus with people all around the world, including celebrities, teenagers, even underage on any social media, especially on Tik Tok. Tik Tok is an application that very popular among teenagers all over the world, but Tik Tok withdrew from the Hong Kong market earlier, although it was also very popular in Hong Kong before that.

Figure 1: Album cover of Cardi B’s song “WAP”

Besides, Tik Tok will randomly show videos to the user on the “recommended” page, and the users will receive the videos that are randomly distributed by the system, unlike YouTube that you can freely choose which videos to watch. After that, most of the videos have not filtered the background music, so that the “clean version” may replace by the “explicit version” and show it to underage users. Furthermore, users can choose the background music to shoot video, it is too easy to access the non-clean version, or they will follow other creators to shoot the same video, Besides, in the WAP Challenge hashtag on Tik Tok, we can see that there are some underage teenagers dances to WAP with sexy dance moves in front of their parents and recording their parents' embarrassed or confused reactions for fun. This challenge is virus-like, teenager may follow the sexy dance moves in the WAP Challenge. However, these may not be suitable for teenagers to imitate. Undoubtedly, WAP has a clean version, but in the WAP challenge, that dance move shots or nudity that still have sexual insinuates. What can their parents do?

Figure 2: People’s awkward reaction to “WAP” music video

Some people will say this is a kind of hip-hop culture, including scolding society, scolding specific people or objects, describing drug abuse or criminal behavior, their thoughts of sexual behavior, and description of sex. They think that creators should have the freedom to create. Although it has The Parental Advisory label for the explicit content on music applications like Spotify or YouTube Music, to prevent teenagers to listen to explicit content, it seems not to work on social media. How people strictly control the explicit contents to disappear on social media like Tik Tok or Instagram as a piece of background music? So, is it appropriate for underage? Therefore, how can we pay attention to effectively prevent young people from being exposed to such information with strong sexual descriptions online?

What do you think? Leave your comment below to tell us your thought!

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Reference

Explicit and Clean Track Qualifications. (2021). Retrieved 18 March 2021, from https://support.tunecore.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006691948-Explicit-and-Clean-Track-Qualifications

Tik Tok It (2020) (WAP CHALLENGE) You won't believe who did it.. [online video] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWQAC5txb-w [Accessed 18/03/2021]