Photo courtesy of NBCUniversal
Money is unclean. Cash flows; as it slips constantly out of debtor’s hands into creditor’s, fingerprints, stains, emotional and moral significations muck up the paper—over time, cash even builds up its own scent. That musk rarely transfers onto polite women anymore, who rarely touch dollar bills in the age of Venmo and sugar baby feminism. Rihanna still wants it in cash. Bad Gal, unmoored and uninspired by American dichotomies of cleanliness and defilement as she is, prefers her payment liquid and solid to the touch.
Liquid like a stack, but also liquid like a perfume. "My fragrance on and they love my smell," she teased on "Pour It Up", and we thought she might knowingly dot her nape and her inner wrists with money smell before the video even came out. And when it did, the dollar bills that hit the gleaming linoleum in the underwater strip club, that collected on her and the sea women, were stamped with her face.
"Bitch Better Have My Money", #BBHMM as its been hinted at for weeks on her and her friend’s Instagram accounts, is another chapter in Rihanna’s unfolding prosperity gospel. We’ve yet to get the visuals. But the synesthetic verve with which she snarls about getting what's hers amounts to an image and to her scent. Travi$ Scott and Wondagurl’s gothic trap mirrors the construction of incantations, of hypnosis. For the wayward bitch, however, it’s Rihanna’s Set It Off growl that guarantees something like torture. Like brrap! brrap! brrap! She pulses out of the half-humorous, half-deadly threat over and over again, that the bitch restores the natural balance of indebtedness that must always tip towards genius. In typical Rihanna coyness, the difference between the tower of menace she threatens and the tower of money she’s owed dissolves into mere performance. Pay me what you owe me is a speech act; by her utterance, the money will appear.
Rewind three years ago. Two money odes on Unapologetic that predate #BBHMM, "Pour It Up" and "Phresh Out the Runway", came out alongside Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring. Coppola termed the economy of images "trash culture," which was basically a lexicon of scenes of white girls acquiring money informally (read: illegally) and therefore a code for white girls acting like romanticized (read: criminalized) cash-strapped black girls. It’s paradoxical, that speaking about money publicly, holding it publicly, is associated with the underclass. Emma Watson holding a wad of cash, even in character, is redundant rather than criminal; it’s nostalgic for an image that only ever existed in fantasy, not time.
Just as Rihanna’s eponymous girlness-as-image brushes against but never touches affective white girlishness, she functions just outside of the womanish labor so often determining blackness. Her girlness shapes her relationship to cash. Black girls, we get that the necessity of survival casts a pallor on #BBHMM’s gruff staccato delivery, but we are relieved that she never rightly mentions the labor. This is our treasured kind of liberation, concurrent with the struggle critics and listeners alike have strangely wholly ascribed to Kendrick’s mode of self-reflexivity.
There is an anxiety for the image of propertied black women in general, of black women recouping historical debts. The interlocking machines of mainstream pop, rap music, and America are very much contingent on their devaluation. Anxiety mounts when the kind of property is pure cash money. Black girls with money are financially independent and visually, confrontationally untethered to men or to goods. It’s filtered through varying inflections of allegedly bygone puritanism: The black girl flaunting money is ratchet, the black girl with money bankrolled her way there through sex, therefore the black girl with money does not properly own it. Since the racist and the sexist are also by definition prudes, this black girl of their fantasy, no matter how tall her money, can never signify wealth, a sort of class ascendance that has as much to do with politesse in gender roles as it does one’s stock profile.
Meanwhile, Rihanna will pose with the fan of cash on Instagram, lick and stick the bills between her lips in the video. Nicki will walk out of restaurants with Meek Mill demurely carrying an unzipped bag stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars. Twenty years ago, Lil’ Kim, who may be owed the most, presaged the new millenium’s anxiety, a reaction redux as old as the country, with her double entendre: fuck niggas, get money. At the iHeartRadio awards in LA Sunday night, Rihanna transplanted Kim’s second meaning in performance, dressed in her saturated green furs and chill-girl wining against a dancer backdrop of whom none were men. Money doesn’t replace men, although one may fall in love. The tower of cash is less a phantom penis than an extra appendage, an expression of a bad bitch’s increasing girth against social enclosure. Cash collapses her image, her life, and her music in one.
Sprawled amongst her earnings, the moneyed black girl is an enlarged version of herself necessarily taking up the space of her debtors, she’s an image of material liberation. #BBHMM is Rihanna in situ. This loan shark’s bop makes storied materialistic references of course, to Louis XIII cognac and your wife in her foreign car, but you get the sense it’s her briefly becoming a meme of the club male ego that can’t tell breasts from wealth. Rihanna has always loved memes.
If luxury goods are just that, memes, signifiers of money rather than the unmediated, vulgar thing itself, then Rihanna is a glo up purist. Singing about money is something different from singing about opulence; cash cycles through our street economies touching us, while wealth sits sterile with them on top. We know that Rihanna, who outside of the much-anticipated R8 has become the face of Dior and stars in DreamWorks' number one movie Home, is wealthy now, and she’ll eventually be worth billions. But as a black woman whose artistic inventiveness outpaces her peers and music executives by what feels like whole years, she will also perpetually be owed. To be a black woman and genius, is to be perpetually owed.