I can’t believe what music artists have to do these days to stay relevant in the culture. Forget about releasing songs, or even a video, it has to be surrounded with a mise-en-scène so colorful, so one-of-the-kind that it has to be exhausting, because not at all connected to what a singer or a musician should do. But Rihanna knows what people want and she seems to have fun, so why not?
She dropped a new video on Wednesday night, but the premiere of ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ in Los Angeles took some epic proportions. Let’s be clear I wasn’t invited because I am not a Tidal subscriber,… yes, the streaming service has to make a lot of efforts too to stay in the flow. Tidal literally kidnapped 80 of Rihanna’s fans who had won a contest. Their phones were confiscated (a classic), they were thrown in a bus blasting her music and driven to a mysterious location. They were blindfolded, graciously paid with real money for guessing lyrics correctly, they were even fed and they finally arrived in a warehouse in historic Filipinotown (according to the LA times it was the Bob Baker Marionette Theater) where they got to watch the premiere of her new video.
Of course the story of the video, if you can say that it has a coherent story, is about Rihanna and her gang kidnapping the wife of a rich accountant, so the fans’ kidnapping story was totally making sense in this context, but isn’t it a lot of effort for a short movie? According to the participants, the whole deal, including the wait to get in the bus, lasted 4 hours, 4 hours of their life to see a 7-minute clip!…Still they got to see and meet Rihanna, which has to be priceless if you are a fan. Plus she poured dollar bills on the crowd, so it was not too shabby.
As for the video, you can watch it below, it is exactly what people want from Rihanna, a senseless scenario and just an excuse for the diva to play her vengeful and unapologetic bitch, her very sexy bad girl, smoking weed while sitting on a pile of dough.
For the record Eric Roberts plays a horny sheriff and Mads Mikkelsen the corrupt accountant, but the video awkwardly touches Rihanna’s personal troubles, and I am not only talking about her money problems with her accountant! She uses violence to solve her problems in a very Kill Bill manner, and the girl knows about violence in real life. But they warn us at the beginning there is bad language, nudity and violence? Well, there is no real violence, just suggestion of it, to tell you the truth I didn’t even find it to be disturbing, and it looks like this video was only made for its shock value.
But it will work, people are gonna be outraged by this video, it is gonna be banned from some networks? Countries? I personally can’t stand her singing voice but Rihanna knows how to serve what people expect from her.