“Trust the tale, not the teller,” D.H. Lawrence’s essential dictum, applies to Rihanna’s recent music video “We Found Love.” Transparently autobiographical in its reference to the 2009 assault incident involving Rihanna and Chris Brown, “We Found Love” answers back to those tellers—in this case gossip-mongers and pundits—whose pontifications reduced Rihanna and Brown to domestic-abuse stereotypes.
This video whirlwind recalling two young lovers on the edge of mutual self-destruction is a bad girl’s billet doux. Distanced by a British-accented woman’s narration (“You feel hopeless, but nothing can save you. And when it’s over, then it’s gone. You almost wish that you could have that bad stuff back so that you can have the good”), Rihanna implicitly rejects the victim status thrust upon her by media moralists. She brazens “We Found Love” as a deliberately shocking retort.
Working with director Melina Matsoukis, who previously directed Rihanna’s “Hard,” “S&M,” “Rude Boy” and “Rockstar 101” music videos, the pop star flouts the rules of feminist outrage by asserting her own participation in dangerous l’amour fou. The music track’s disco surges and climaxes convey Rihanna’s compulsive, convulsive id. Matsoukis cannily mixes fashion mag poses and lighting bolts with close-up dilated pupils and pill popping like on New Order’s “Fine Time.” The splintered, kaleidoscopic style blurs the memory of romantic attraction with sybaritic excess—sex, carousing at a rave, drugs, shoplifting and vomiting. Not just sensationalism, this b-p-m montage tells a complex tale: the trade-off of individuality with submission that young folks (perhaps especially women) go through as a risky maturation process.
In one startling image Rihanna presents her rump to be tattooed by her paramour (a blonde Chris Brown lookalike played by Irish model Dudley O’Shaughnessy) with the single word “Mine.” It recalls the unnerving female capitulation dramatized in the movie Splendor in the Grass, a classic depiction of young adult lovesickness. “We Found Love” revives that film’s moral basis which got lost in both the Chris Brown scandal and the way mainstream culture timidly depicts male-female relationships.
“We Found Love” provides a much-needed rejoinder to “I Love the Way You Lie,” Rihanna’s 2011 song collaboration with Eminem where her personal conflicts got tangled with his own neuroses. Once again, Eminem espoused the empowered class’ privileged misbehavior; the domestic abuse statistics with which the mainstream media stigmatizes black males occasions Eminem’s egotistic plea for sympathy. His irrational lyrics sounded masochistic in Rihanna’s mouth—a bitter truth brought out in the “I Love the Way You Lie” video directed by Joseph Kahn where Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan glamorously acted out an Eminem-Rihanna S&M pas de deux. The result celebrated pathology—Eminem’s specialty, as in the song’s obsessive, repetitive title phrase. But in “We Found Love,” the chorus, “We found love in a hopeless place,” provides perspective and articulates both male and female raging impulses.
These complications don’t make it to the gossip pages; they were also left out of the tedious movie Blue Valentine, which tritely explored gender tension and sexual-emotional compulsion. “We Found Love” is superior in its simulated loss-of-control rhythms. Rihanna’s vocals turn dance-music’s echoey declaiming (like Billie Ray Martin’s “Your Loving Arms”) into the sound of a woman walking an emotional tightrope, consciously risking erotic oblivion. It portrays that dance club phenomenon where thrill seeking and love seeking interact.
The joke image of Rihanna vomiting in the street (a computer-generated stream of bile) adroitly depicts her disgust with the moralizing mess in which she trapped herself. It also says something about who she is as a female free agent. That tattoo scene could also be her own version of the famous Arletty line, “My ass is my own.”
Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.
