One final thought on mapouka

So I (finally) got a response on my one post about something sexual, which probably goes to show that sex does indeed sell. And I think the fact that these are African girls shaking their behind hardly hurts either. There's plenty of examples of that kind of exotica titilating the white western middle class, from Paul Gaugin's paintings of nude Tahitians and contemporaneous depictions of harems to today's "Savage" pornography.

I think that helps to explain mapouka's rise to internet popularity and its descent into pornography. Doesn't this BBC News report linger a little too long on the "nude" aspects of the dance? Journalists have to sell copies too; anything with a sexual undertone will be put into the spotlight. (Especially in Britain!)


I'm wondering, does this apply to booty music as well as to booty dance? One of the first mentions of Brazilian baile funk in the mainstream western press was in a very similar story in The Independent, about a series of graphically depicted sexual acts including the infamous "chair dance" which in hindsight supposedly was just an urban legend... The sexual fantasy of the westerners entering into shallow-breathing myth.

Is part of the obsession recently with hard, sexualised, third-world genres a product of exotic titilation with their subjects?