Molly Beauchemin: I'm guilty of this, and maybe you are, too: When I first heard the lyric "your wife in the backseat of my brand new foreign car", I thought it was a boast of Rihanna's fly-ness, not a literal statement. I was in the headspace of thinking "hide your kids, hide your wife, Rihanna's stuntin’ so hard she's snatching up your girl to go topless sunbathing on a yacht in that country you can't afford,” but instead of this sexually-underscored fantasy Rihanna is literally telling homie that his wife is actually in the trunk, which is a kind of amazing flippa da script. What I thought was sexy bravado is actually pin-up Freddie Kruger going all Texas Chainsaw on her accountant, and I’m amazed and think it’s hilarious how this has so easily subverted my expectations of what all these lyrics mean. Like sure, Rihanna might be into BDSM, but she’s about to roll up with chainsaw and actually use it—that’s a hilarious, boner-killing curveball. I love that for once, when a pop star plays a murdering psycho, it isn't in the trope of "crazy ex-girlfriend". This is some mercenary shit, but I admire RiRi going all in.
David Turner: Rihanna's personal brand remains solidly IDGAF. Her deep side-eye at damn near everything can almost be taken for granted by folks. Thankfully the "Bitch Better Have My Money" video isn't interested in letting people take a single thing about her for granted.The video's black-ass revenge plot, becomes a turnt road trip and ends with Rihanna's face full of blood after enacting revenge on a bougie, wrinkly white dude. Undeserving whites were scrubbed out by black woman and her crew. *finger nails emoji*
Jes Skolnik: The thinkpiece conversation already active hours after this video dropped--about whether “BBHHM” is feminist or not--is utterly off-the-mark. It does not matter. Feminism isn’t a perfect binary framework you can set over a piece of pop media to see whether key points align. It’s a complex set of theories and practices which are sometimes in conflict with one another. The world we live in is fucked, far from a utopia despite so many everyday struggles and small fights. Rihanna knows this, and she’s carved out a space for herself in which survival-level politic is always referenced first – and this is what speaks to me personally about the music she’s making currently and the imagery she’s using. This entire song and video is about how one does not fuck with Rihanna, which is, any way you look at it, an incredibly bold assertion of power that deserves our respect and a deeper context than ‘is this feminist or not.’
Meaghan Garvey: There’s a very simple A$AP Yams tweet that’s stuck with me for years: “never vocalize the vision.” Or basically, let your work speak for itself, and let everyone else talk. You can apply that message in infinite ways, and today I’ve been thinking about it in terms of our current biggest rockstars: Ye, Tay, Bey, Rih. Bless ‘em all, every one—but all of them are regularly guilty of spelling out their own sociocultural importance, in one way or another, with the exception of Rihanna. To those currently drafting your thinkpiece about how it wasn’t very #feminist of Rih to torture that poor rich lady: nooooo one cares about your basic-ass, probably non-intersectional praxis. Rihanna doesn’t need to spell it out for you if you still don’t get it yet; time is money, bitch.
Ian Blair: I could probably watch a visibly-perturbed Rihanna hurl a phone from a "Catalina Freight Line" barge in the middle of the ocean and shoot it with a laser scope handgun at least 562 times. That's about the same amount of times I replayed the Kevin Hart "40 Year Old Virgin" scene before my computer couldn't process the #Levels any longer. Perhaps I will eclipse that record today.
Sydette Harry: Only the Bad Gyal could do this.This video woke me up and gave me a new lease on life, geopolitical signification, pulp movie tributes, and adult fun. This is a video that is unambiguously for adult people, from the ever present breasts to the bongs, this is adult fantasy. Rihanna's take the hyper masculine road movies, revenge fantasy, heist movie and is unapologetically feminine, with not an ounce less violence. The first movie I thought of was the Russ Meyer classic “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill” except because it’s Rihanna our amazing heroine lives.
The video’s visuals contrast the hyper wealth of her piggish accountant with the chic transience of her multicultural band of kidnappers. Rather than just Tarantino-style revenge, her elaborate cutlery is labeled not by the effect, but by the offense she is exacting revenge for. Rihanna is a savage, but she is doing it for all the reasons any person who has ever been screwed financially is. She’s owed and he thought he could get away with it . He thought wrong. Not only does she triumph blood-soaked, naked and covered in money, she makes sure her opponent is none other than Hannibal, the murderous madman of our television moment. Rihanna doesn’t just triumph she makes sure to take out the baddest motherfucker on TV. That her captive ends up giggling and toking with her seems inevitable, because really she’s having a better time, and in the end Rihanna doesn’t ask her to show anything she doesn’t show herself. That Rihanna herself is the blood spattered legs hanging out of the trunk drives home the most important thing: it’s between her and the bitch who had her money--and she wins.
Safy-Hallan Farah: The New York landscape in Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” which runs the gamut from futuristic, electro-funk DJ Afrika Bambaataa to shabby corner store bodegas, has changed. Jay Z, the archetypal NYC rapper, is New New York, collapsing categories like age, income geography and class. New New York’s borders function like psychic gerrymandering, a capitalist byproduct of geographical and class transcendence. Rihanna, whose talent is often credited to Jay Z-- he “discovered” her-- is New America. She tells us so in "American Oxygen," an immigrant anthem; emotes so in “4, 5 Seconds,” a rambunctious, Fiskian country song right down to the denim worn by Rihanna in the video; and Rihanna shows us, finally, in “Bitch Better Have My Money.”