Music Videos
Rihanna "S&M"
The director Melina Matsoukas filmed the music video for “S&M” in Los Angeles on January 15 and 16, 2011.[67][68] Matsoukas explained Billboard that the video was inspired by Rihanna’s “sadomasochist relationship with the press … it isn’t just about a bunch of whips and chains.”[69] On January 27, 2011, a behind-the-scenes clip was posted on Rihanna’s YouTube channel,[70] and the full music video premiered on Vevo on February 1, 2011.[71]
As the video opens, Rihanna is arrested into a press conference, where she is covered with plastic wrap and taped to a wall. Microphones and gagged reporters surround her.[69] In an outdoor scene, she wears a beige latex dress and leads a spoofed Perez Hilton around by a dog leash. Rihanna is then shown seated and surrounded by CCTV surveillance cameras; her chair begins to rotate, and she stands and begins to whip reporters, who are taped to the wall of the room. She then rolls on the floor, her hands and feet bound with rope. As the bridge of the song approaches, Rihanna wears a white two-piece latex and rabbit ears, while images of headlines are projected against her body where the wall behind her and eating pink popcorn. After the chorus, she appears in a newsroom. Reporters take photographs of her while she sprawls across a desk wearing a pink latex dress. Scenes of Rihanna and others in bondage gear are interspersed with images of Rihanna with frizzy curls while wearing a feather boa and a midriff-baring tube top with “censored” printed across it. The video then alternates between past scenes and images in which Rihanna eats fruits and cream, and jeweled ice cream while wearing a heart-shaped eye patch. In the last scene, she lays on a newsroom desk, with a smiley face emblem over one eye and a Rolling Stones tongue logo over her mouth, along with a woman’s orgasm sound.[72][73] Drag queens Willam Belli, Detox Icunt, and Morgan McMichaels appear in the video.[74]
Date:
January 27, 2011