Here are the latest notes for my music videos class.
Rihanna has done so much that I can only give a small selection of her videos here. Earlier in the semester, we have already watched Pour It Up (Rihanna, 2013), Sledgehammer (Floria Sigismondi, 2016), two versions of Stay (Sophie Muller, 2013), and two versions of David Guetta, f. Rihanna, “Who’s That Chick? (Jonas Akerlund, 2011).
Umbrella (Chris Applebaum, 2007). Rihanna already had two albums and half a dozen music videos under her belt before this single from her third album. But Umbrella was her first mega-hit, the song and video that established her as a major artist. It is in order to introduce her to a wider audience that Jay-Z presents her at the beginning of the video. I think that the video closely follows the logic of introducing Rihanna, as well as adhering to the structure of the song. I will explain this by giving a more detailed formal account than I usually do. We get a series of images of Rihanna, each one presented in multiple edits before we move on to the rest. The video starts with Rihanna seated in profile and wearing a large hat, with backlighting and smoke effects; this image alternates with that of Jay-Z and backing dancers on a stage, in front of digitally sylized streaks of rain. We cut to Rihanna whenever her “eh…eh” punctuates Jay-Z’s rap. When the first verse of song proper begins, we switch to close medium shots of Rihanna wearing all black (latex?) and dancing, which quickly rack in and out of focus. When the song reaches the chorus, Rihanna is seen in an all-white outfit; full body shots of her dancing alternate with closeups of her face, while the screen is awash with digital effects of water washing over her image. In the second half of the chorus (when she famously sings “umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh) the digital effects continue, together with a return to quick movements in-and-out-of-focus, and face closeups alternating with full-body shots; but Rihanna is now dressed in black, with her dance including en-pointe ballet steps, and with her holding an umbrella and using it as a sort of dance partner (unavoidably recalling Gene Kelley in Singin’ in the Rain). At the next verse of the song, Rihanna is now seen indoors, dancing in a space backed by wood panels and chandeliers; she still holds the umbrella, but she now wears a tight dress with buttons across the front and fishnet stockings. This setting and costume continue into the first half of the chorus. But when we get to the “ella-ella-etc” second half of the chorus, we are introduced to an extraordinary new series of images: Rihanna nude, and her body entirely covered with silver paint (this is the most famous series of images in the video). She is no longer dancing, but instead gives us a series of near-poses (she moves her arms, or her head, but not her entire body): she is crouched like a runner waiting to start a race, or her upper torso and face are doubled, facing each other across the screen, or her body is framed by a large triangle. These flash by quickly, almost in black-and-white, and sometimes with alternating negatives. The next part of the song is the bridge, and for this section, we have closeups of Rihanna’s face as she looks directly into the camera; again, the editing is rapid, Rihanna facing right and left in alternating shots. Then we come to the final chorus, and the video pulls out all the stops: now we see Rihanna for the first time with backup dancers. She is wearing black pants, and a black vest with a silver-white tie, and once again holding the umbrella and using it as a prop. During this section with the backup dancers, the screen is once more awash in digital effects: white streaks in back of the dancers that provide a stylized image of rain, and splashes on the soundstage floor, which seems to be covered in an inch or so of water. During the outro, as the song fades out, we see more shots of Rihanna in front of the stylized digital rain; in some shots she seems to be ascending into the air while everything is blurry; in other shots, she is on the stage, and beckoning to the camera/audience, wearing white partial gloves. — If you are interested in thinking about this video in greater detail, and especially in questions of how it portrays race and gender, see Robin James’ article “Robo-Diva”, accessible with your Wayne State ID here: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/doi/full/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00171.x
Disturbia (Anthony Mandler,2008) This is one of sixteen music videos that Anthony Mandler directed for Rihanna between 2007 and 2012. (Mandler has an extensive videography for other major artists as well). I wrote about this video at great length in my book, so I will only summarize briefly here. The video takes place in what looks like a Victorian insane asylum, with all the brutal images (archaic torture devices and jail cells) that such a location implies. (In the past, students have compared this look to that of the video game “Silent Hill,” which is set in a similar location). Rihanna appears both as the apparent director of the asylum, and as some of the patients. Most of the video is dark and murky, aside from the highlights on Rihanna’s face. This fits well with the lyrics of the song, which speak of sexual jealousy and torment that the singer cannot escape from, as well as the music, with a brutally insistent beat. The one exception to this overall look is in the first half of the chorus, when the vocals also soar: we see a group of dancers holding up Rihanna’s body, as if it were a human sacrifice, into bright orange light streaming from above and behind. The rest of the time, the images of Rihanna’s various iterations are disrupted by various densly layered superimpositions: streaks of light (simulating scratches on film stock), flames, multiple images, and so on. There are also a number of horrifically memorable weird images: Rihanna held by chains, on all fours, and snarling; Rihanna with her lower arms apparently burrowed into the wall itself, while spiders crawl over her upper arms. All in all, the video gives us an astonishing nightmare vision.
Rehab (Anthony Mandler, 2008) This is another video directed by Anthony Mandler; the song is composed and produced by Timbaland (best known for his work with Missy Elliott and with Justin Timberlake), and contains vocals by Timberlake as well as by Rihanna. The lyrics concern a relationship gone bad; the singer compares her ex-lover to a drug she was addicted to, which is why she has to go into rehab to get over it. The video consists largely of Rihanna and Timberlake in sultry poses. It is set in the desert. We see Rihanna walking in slow motion and then (clad in green bikini top and shorts) leaning against a red convertible. Timberlake rides towards her on a motorcycle; he arrives just as the music proper begins, gets off the motorcycle and takes off his helmet. He is clad entirely in black, including a leather jacket over a tank top. Also in slow motion, he moves over to an outdoor shower, rinses himself off, then approaches Rihanna. Nothing really happens in the video; Rihanna appears in different costumes, and Timberlake is seen both with and without the leather jacket. Quite unusually for mainstream music videos, Timberlake is objectified by the camera as a sexual object at least as much as Rihanna is. The two of them stalk around one another, and at times embrace one another, but they both move glacially, often keeping poses for longer than would be ‘natural’. Rihanna and Justin both exhibit a smoldering sexual passion that never quite ignites. The video is incredibly striking visually; color shots alternates with black-and-white one. The colors are highly saturated at some points, and diffuse at others; in both these registers, they are pushed almost to the point of abstraction. The black and white image is generally clear, but often slowed down. The color image is continually disrupted, or at least nuanced, by lens flare and other sorts of vibrant reflections in the preternaturally clear desert air. There is a greenish tint to the sunlight, a purplish glow inside Rihanna’s trailer, and an evanscent reddish gleam illuminating the performers’ faces in outdoor nighttime scenes. This video is one of my favorites, because of the way that everything feels suspended, as if it were on the verge of some climax (sexual or narrative, or both) that never quite arrives.
Rude Boy (Melina Matsoukas, 2011) Melina Matsoukas has directed videos for both Rihanna and Beyoncé (most notably Formation); most recently, she was the director of the great 2019 film Queen and Slim. The song is upbeat and filled with Jamaican and other West Indian beats and inflections (reflecting Rihanna’s roots in Barbados). The lyrics are filled with sexual swagger and innuendo; Rihanna taking control of the sexual action, and tauntingly asking her man, “can you get it up?… are you big enough?” The video, unlike anything else of Rihanna’s that we have seen, is aggressively graphical. Cut-out images of Rihanna dancing, and/or playing percussion, and/or riding a motorcycle or a variety of stuffed animals (all this presumably shot in front of a green screen) are juxtaposed with other graphic elements, including bright, zigzagged colors, a backdrop representing a giant boombox or a sound system’s enormous speakers, and words scrawled graffiti-style across the screen. Most of the time, Rihanna appears alone, but sometimes her image is accompanied by those of male models. Often Rihanna’s image is split or multiplied into identical or mirror-image figures, sometimes of different sizes, sometimes of different colors, sometimes of different degrees of transparency. And often these multiple Rihanna images are jerked quickly back and forth like an animated GIF (or like the visual equivalent of turntable scratching). There are also detached closeups of Rihanna’s lips, at one point multiplying and graphically stylized in the manner of an Andy Warhol painting. During the song’s bridge, Rihanna is dressed in a black-and-white bodysuit filled with the sorts of semi-abstract swirls we find in Keith Haring’s paintings; the background is also a Haring-esque design; and Rihanna is seated on a stuffed zebra, with its black-and-white stripes resonating with the Haring swirls. The return of the final chorus also returns us to the vibrant, colorful graphics of the earlier portions of the video. All in all, the rhythms of both song and video are unyieldingly hard; but also exuberant, energetic, and excessive.
S&M (Melina Matsoukas, 2011) Another pushing-the-boundaries video directed by Melina Matsoukas. Rihanna mostly appears as a dominatrix, with various outfits and hairstyles. (Though there is also a sequence near the end where she is seen bound up). The lyrics reference sex directly, but in the visuals Rihanna’s s&m relationship is mostly with the press. One central repeating image in the video shows her in front of a room, wrapped in plastic, while the reporters interviewing her all have gags in their mouths. (Though there is also a sequence with Rihanna walking a man like a dog). The music is upbeat electro, and the actions depicted in the video come off more as comedic excess than as a serious exploration of the dynamics of BDSM. And let’s not forget the shots in which Rihanna simulates oral sex with a banana and with strawberries. Alll in all, Rihanna is challenging taboos — but playfully, rather than with anguish and tragic intensity. It’s her way of saying, in effect, ‘I can do whatever the fuck I want, and have fun doing it too.’ This is an empowering statement for a black woman — though it might not be for the likes of, say, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, or Brett Kavanaugh. The whole point of the video, it seems to me, is that powerful white men get away with stuff all the time, whereas minorities (like black women) get held to a very different standard. Here is a good article, written shortly after the video’s initial release, about the hypocrisy and double standard that were revealed by the controversy over the video,
We Found Love (Melina Matsoukas, 2012) Another video by Melina Matsoukas. The song was written and produced by Calvin Harris; it is based around one insanely catchy short riff (accompanying the line “we found love in a hopeless place”) repeated over and over again. (Calvin Harris appears briefly in the video, DJing at a rave, at approximately 2:06 and 2:10). There are two stretches in the song where we hear an accelerating soar — the rhythm pounded out more and more insistently, with synthesized sounds repeated at an ever-higher and higher pitch — followed by an abrupt drop (1:45-2:00, and 3:37-3:52). These soars are common in 21st century EDM (electronic dance music); they are one of Calvin Harris’ specialties, and he rarely does them better than he does here. A soar like this suggests mounting sexual excitement, culminating in a moment of orgasmic release. Note how the video’s editing follows the music by becoming more and more frenetic during these two stretches of the song: the shot lengths become shorter and shorter, and also much less linear. Quick shots of Rihanna and her boyfriend (played by the mixed-race model and boxer Dudley O’Shaughnessy) having sex (in the first sequence) or arguing (in the second sequence) are interspersed with shots of fireworks, of drugs (pills floating through the air; the lit tip of a joint in extreme closeup), of crowds in big cities moving at accelerated speeds, of the pupil of an eye dilating (again in extreme closeup; dilated pupils are often taken as a sign of drug use, though they can have other causes), and (in the second sequence) of a nuclear explosion.
Aside from this, the video gives us an entire mini-narrative. Though some critics have compared the videos to various movies about obsessive sexual relationships and substance abuse, what is striking to me is how the story is told without making use of narrative film conventions. Instead, Matsoukas uses radical montage, built up over the insistently repetitive nature of the song. Before the song proper begins, we get slow piano music and a voiceover (by the British actress Agyness Deyn) that foreshadows the entire video, with its reflections on love and loss, and on how good and bad moments in an intense relationship seem inextricable from one another: when it’s over, “you almost wish that you could have all that bad stuff back, so that you could have the good.” There is a montage that includes shots of council housing (UK housing developments for poor people) alongside shots from scenes that we will see in more detail later; but the shot lengths are much longer than they will be in the video proper (they match the slowness of the piano music and the spoken narration at this point).
At 0:45, a shot of lighting and sound of thunder signal the beginning of the song proper. This shot is quickly cut with one in which the strobe of the lightning is superimposed over Rihanna standing against the wall in a bedroom; then we cut quickly to a video game screen. Through the rest of the video, we see the relationship between Rihanna and her boyfriend in fragments. The earlier parts of the video show them deeply focused on one another, first playfully and then more intensely sexually; these shots are increasingly interspersed with representations of drug use (e.g., lighting up multiple joints at once, blowing pot smoke into one anothers’ throats, closeups of a pill bottle being opened and of the pills themselves) and of other illicit acts (e.g. shoplifting). In the later parts of the video, these sorts of shots are increasingly accompanied or replaced by ones of the couple arguing or even fighting, of them sulking at one another, of them in separate shots, both pouting or looking angry, in order to emphasize their separation. These are also accompanied by quick shots of police lights, of a building imploding, and of surreal images, like the one of Rihanna puking up streamers (4:03-4:04). There are also shots where Rihanna singing is superimposed upon background images of clouds or fire (the important thing here being that Rihanna is not in the background locations, but the separateness and semi-transparency of the two shots is emphasized – a similar thing was done in Mandler’s video for Disturbia, discussed above). The work of telling the story is done through montage, without necessarily having linear relations from shot to shot. Instead, the frequencies of the various sorts of shots change in the course of the video. The last sequence of the video is the closest we get to linearity, as Rihanna enters their apartment, sees the boyfriend passed out on the floor, and gathers her stuff; he wakes up and grabs her leg in an effort to get her to stay, but she hits him with her bag and leaves. Even this sequence, though, is cut with blurry shots of light strobing over Rihanna’s face, and with several closer shots of Rihanna singing (evidently not in the same location as where the action is taking place. Finally, the music ends. We get one final shot — held for about five seconds and then fading — of Rihanna sitting scrunched up in a corner of her room, head in her hands, facing the wall.
There are still a lot of things in the video I have not mentioned — a complete shot breakdown would be much longer — but I hope I have said enough to show how the music-video-montage style of narrating really works (many videos do similar things, but Matsoukas does it with particular skill and emotional force), and how different it is from other kinds of cinematic storytelling. The music video works because of how it modulates emotional ups and downs so powerfully through audiovisual means. Rihanna and Matsoukas convey a vision that is at once deeply romantic and ecstatic, and yet also utterly desolate.
Bitch Better Have My Money (Rihanna & Megaforce, 2015) This is an amazing and weird song and video. The video, with its extreme violence, was certainly intended to provoke controversy and outrage, and it succeeded (see, for example the horrified review here. But what such critics didn’t get was how Rihanna is playing with, and messing with, quite familiar movie tropes: above all, the genre of revenge fantasy. (Think of most of Quentin Tarantino’s films, for instance). Rihanna links this tradition to the frequent hip hop theme of demanding to get paid (for some earlier examples, mostly involving male rappers, see here.) This also relates back to the financial self-sufficiency theme in Rihanna’s video for Pour It Up, which we discussed (at looked at some readings about) earlier in the semester.
Of course, as always with music videos, we need to consider the music and other sound alongside the lyrics. The video is seven minutes long, much longer than the audio of the song by itself. At the beginning and the end, we hear nature noises accompanying the shot (only fully revealed at the end) of Rihanna lying in the case filled with money. There are also diegetic sounds as Rihanna drives through the night with the trunk. There is also elevator music playing (with sarcastic implications) while the accountant’s wife (played by Rachel Roberts), white and affluent, finishes getting ready to go out. The song itself has a harsh rhythm, and repeated lyrics (the title of the song) over some really bizarre sounds: what Robin James aptly describes as a “woozy carousel synth loop.” During the time the song is playing, we see the kidnapping of the accountant’s wife; although some of these scenes are sadistic in content, they have a comedic edge to them. As Rihanna and her associates move and manipulate the kidnap victim — for instance making her appear to wave when a cop walks by — I was reminded several times of the 1989 grotesque comedy film Weekend at Bernie’s. The shots of extreme luxury (as when they are on the yacht), and the shots of drinking liquor from the bottle and smoking from a bong, also recall many (usually male-dominated) hip hop videos, even as here they are being enjoyed by Rihanna and her all-woman gang of kidnappers. Though Rihanna messes with the kidnapped wife, the latter part of the video, and of the song, deals instead with her violent revenge against the accountant himself (played by Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish actor probably best known in the US for his role as Hannibal Lecter in the TV series Hannibal). An onscreen note identifies this character, rather than his wife, as the “bitch” the song refers to (while we see this, the catch-phrase of the song is phase-shifted so it sounds like a deep masculine voice). He is helpless, bound in an easy chair, while Rihanna takes her time looking over her various tools of torture. All in all, Rihanna is taking images from revenge fantasy movies and macho hip hop videos, and reclaiming them for her all-woman crew over the nightmare-dementia of the song.
There’s a lot more to say about this video, but I will stop here. For a more complex and more complete take on the video than I am able to offer, see the discussion by the philosopher and music theorist Robin James; part one of her discussion here – the page also contains links to the other two parts.
Calvin Harris f. Rihanna, This is What You Came For (Emil Nava, 2016) This, like We Found Love, is a collaboration between Rihanna and Calvin Harris, but this time Harris gets the main credit, with Rihanna as the featured artist. The song is an exuberant club dance number. (Fun fact: the song was actually written by Harris in collaboration with Taylor Swift). The video is directed by Emil Nava, who has done over a dozen videos for Harris, together with work for other well-known artists. The video opens with a glitchy video test signal, and then it gives us several distant views of an enormous cube, standing in various wilderness settings, but also at one point seemingly on a soundstage, surrounded by strobing spotlights. For most of the video, we see Rihanna singing and dancing either inside the cube, or just in front of it. All five walls of the cube (aside from the open, sixth side where the camera is located), behind, above, and wrapping around Rihanna, are video screens depicting everything from the wilderness outside to crowds at a rave, to different abstract colors. The colors may remind us of Director X’s video for Drake’s Hotline Bling (2015). But that video’s cube was sleek and minimal, restricted to glowing in various pure colors. In contrast, This is What You Came For expresses a go-for-broke maximalism; even when there are only colors on the wall, they contain mixed and varying hues. At times, it is hard to determine whether the images are projected on the walls of the cube, or whether the cube is just transparent, showing us what lies outside it. (There are also some shots of a car under the strobe lights; it does not seem to be inside the cube). On the other hand, though Rihanna seems to be dancing and walking inside the cube, more physical than whatever might be projected on the walls, her image also occasionally glitches, reminding us that it is a video construction as well. Overall, the video blurs the line between what is ‘really’ there and what is just a computer-generated imagery. The song seems to celebrate the technological possibilities of continual transformation.
A close reading of the video by Brad Osborn, including a careful breakdown of its visual and musical parameters, can be downloaded here.