Before I even started the video I had to confirm that I was above the age of 18 due to sexuality shown. The red flag went up and I instantly had a radar for anything sexual. "Nah nah nah nah come on!" are the brilliant lyrics that come out of this singers mouth as she is getting dragged away by security guards with a drunken appearance on her face and insults plastered all over her slit white dress. I understand the creativity of putting labels on yourself as a way to say "screw you!" to all the mass media and paparazzi, but she could have been a little more tasteful if the whole idea was to prove a point. The further the video goes, the more intense the lyrics get. "Sex in the air" and "chains and whips excite me" are the lyrics that get sung while she has the known celebrity basher Perez Hilton on a leash. I'm surprised he would even agree to be treated like a dog in such an extreme and international music video.
The men surrounding her as dancing extras are all wearing bright colored ball gags with an expression of utter disgust on their face. They are all jotting down notes about Rihanna as she gets taped onto the wall wearing the label covered dress. Then there is a shot of her in a pink room with her bright red hair, rolling her eyes in the back of her head and singing while moving back and forth with a big "censored" sign across her chest. The men in this part of the video are half naked and humping a blow up doll behind her. If I didn't know any better, I would think that this is a song promoting drugs and sex fetishes... which isn't far from the truth.
Then the icing on the cake comes, and she is in a skin tight cat woman like, light pink outfit with half of her body exposed. As she sits with a large movie container of pink popcorn, all the others are confined in black tape. She walks towards them and dumps the popcorn on one guy and then pulls out the whip. This looks like her manager wanted her to do something racy and so this is the ending result. It is not tasteful or attractive and makes her look like a fake. It's understandable that you change your look to appear new and fresh when the new fish come into your swimming pond of celebrities, but there is no need to turn from an inspiration for young girls to a trashy s&m lover.
What a great, challenging piece to attempt to describe! This video is an incredibly complex text. However, I think that close attention to a couple of issues might help move toward a stronger understanding of Rihanna’s work. One piece of that is the color palette. What are the dominant colors? How do they change during the course of the video? For example, what happens at 1:46 in terms of the color scheme of this video? Something also happens at 2:46, and you comment about it, but what is the visual difference between those scenes and most of the others in this video? Another formal attribute worthy of description is the style of editing and camerawork. What is going on with that? Consider, for example, thematically similar videos by Madonna such as Justify My Love or Human Nature. How do they differ from Rihanna’s approach? What would we say about Madonna’s videos that might help distinguish them from Rihanna’s?
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