There isn't really a more eloquent way to describe this music video than: this video makes no damn sense. The music video for Rihanna’s latest song “Diamonds”appears to be, essentially, four and a half minutes of a hundred different types of symbolic imagery all thrown together so that they make absolutely no sense when viewed as a whole music video. In the beginning of the video Rihanna is, I guess, rolling a blunt with diamonds and I can understand the symbolic reference to the song’s title but that one symbol is cut between clips of 4 other scenes, and I suppose that’s basically what the whole video is like.
Throughout the video for “Diamonds” we see Rihanna singing, smoking, laying on the ground, running in the street away from some headlights, and a whole slew of things that have nothing to do with diamonds or a fantastic, beautiful, love like the one she sings about. At one point there is a horse running through a desert and then it’s rearing back on its hind legs, then it’s laying on the ground, then it finds it’s horse soul mate I guess and they run off into the sun set. In some clips, Rihanna is sitting in a trashed room as everything, in slow motion, fixes itself and goes back up on shelves and what not. Sometimes she’s looking up at the aurora borealis as if she’s confused as to how it got there. Towards the end it looks like she is viewing some kind of post-apocalyptic battle where people are on fire.
And this only scratches the surface. I have the strong feeling that whoever directed this music video was trying to turn a shitty song into something sort of abstract and artsy but they clearly did not know how to do that. You can’t throw a bunch of disconnected symbols into a music video and call it abstract because you wind up with a video that is just altogether nonsensical and useless. I would say “keep trying, Rihanna” but, at this point, I’d rather say “hmm, we better stop here, huh RiRI”. You can watch the video for “Diamonds” here: