When Rihanna dropped her debut single “Pon de Replay,” in 2005 it was a catchy but disposable track that all but reeked of one-hit-wonder. There was no way to know she’d become one of the last of the truly global, music industry-machine last-gasp created pop stars (alongside Beyonce, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Adele, and Rihanna’s occasional music and real life consort, Drake), or that her reach – from the worlds of music to fashion to potent cultural icon – would become so expansive. Far from a powerhouse singer, she can be surprisingly and powerfully emotive, but more importantly she has that elusive “it” quality that pulls you to her even against your will. That – coupled with her innate inability to give a fuck what anyone thinks of her – have arguably made her the most interesting, dynamic pop diva under that overstuffed category heading. And she’s effortlessly sexy in ways that have little to do with her propensities for nudity and ribald humor.
Her new video “Needed Me,” from the critically-divided Anti album, showcases something of how and why she reigns. (Depending on your take, Anti is either sloppily half-baked or a masterpiece of 21st century pop experimentalism. Answer: It’s somewhere in the middle.) Checklist for the video: RiRi’s tits on glorious display; strip-club setting; plenty of jiggling, nearly naked female asses; lots of men waving their dicks guns around in macho displays of power. On paper, it’s a crazy-quilt of yawn-inducing clichés. But Rihanna and director Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers; Kids; Gummo) have created a vague, ambiguous tale of retribution that slides into place alongside similar Rihanna clips for “Man Down” and “Bitch Better Have My Money,” both of which were simultaneously heralded as robust feminist statements and derided for their violence. The offense that leads Ri to take out the male villain is never made clear, and though she’s left standing tall with her smoking gun, it’s an ambiguous, uneasy triumph for her. The uses of violence in many of Rihanna’s most popular videos, the way it accompanies and circles female bodies, and the feminine responses to it, gives her clips a charge and subtext (if not overriding text) that eludes so many of her female pop peers whose work is just as filled with exposed flesh and stripper/sex-worker aesthetics.
There’s lots of space to be filled in by the viewer. Those spaces nibble away at the clichés, maybe complicate them a bit, though the song’s lyrics provide some (maybe too literal) clues: But baby, don’t get it twisted / You was just another nigga on the hit list / Tryna fix your inner issues with a bad bitch / Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage / Fuck your white horse and a carriage. But this clip also exists outside the narrative of the song lyrics, is nestled in a much larger narrative Rihanna is sketching about violence, women’s bodies, and feminine power.
In the clip, Korine merges his patented sense of stylized grotesqueness (the masked and tatted men who populate the video) with Rihanna’s own glamor, and pushes the fusion into unexpected areas. While filming through a host of filters that cast reddish and blueish glows on Rihanna and her costars, capturing nightclub sheen and sexiness, he also lets his camera celebrate the thick, realistic bodies of the strippers on display. Rihanna might prove to have the biggest dick when all is said and done, but the way Korine’s camera caresses the decidedly non-model bodies of the strippers is its own powerful statement.
