Video Analysis: Rihanna "S&M"

Video Analysis: Rihanna "S&M"

This music video, “S&M” comes from, Rihanna’s fifth album “Loud”. The narrative of the video contains a lot of provocative dancing and a lot of sexual innuendos within the lyrics. This is used, according to the theorist Andrew Godwin in Dancing in the Distraction Factory to the lyrics and to the visual image and thus distinguishing it as a form of music video. However, it is possible that it has been used for another reason. It could also be used to invite the male audience in a form of Voyeurism. According to Pete Fraser in Teaching Music Video (BFI, 2004), voyeurism is the idea of looking in order to gain sexual pleasure. In this video they have used Rihanna in a combination of camera shots and editing with fragmented body shots to emphasize her sexualised treatment in the video. This then invites a male audience to gain sexual pleasure from the video.
The video doesn’t always make a lot of sense due to its surreal aspects. Rihanna can be seen in a certain part of her music video walking a person on a leash as if they were a dog. According to Steve Archer in How to Study Music Videos this can be seen as disjuncture. This music video seems to work by ignoring the original song and creating a whole set of new meanings through its visuals. This technique is used frequently by arty artists like Rihanna to assert their difference and originality. This thus comes into making her star image. Also, according to Dyer in the article Stardom, The incoherence of the star image ensures that audiences continually strive to make sense of the image. The disjunction of Rihanna’s video gives her a somewhat incoherent image and thus makes her audience want to buy and watch her material many times to make sense of her image.
The camera work in this video mainly consists of close ups and longs shots. The long shots are used to set the scene and help the narrative along. For example, there is a shot where Rihanna is singing from behind some clear material in front of what looks like some paparazzi. These are the shots that give the audience some insight into what the music video is about. The close up shots however, are used to advertise the artist. According to Steve Archer in How to Study a Music Video the majority of a music video, such as this one, consists of close up shots of the artist’s face. This is because the voice of the artist is seen as the most important part of pop music. The close up shots of Rihanna allow her to advertise her voice and star image to the audience to encourage them to keep buying her material. The vast amount of close up shots of the artist are balanced out by the long shots to, according to Steve Archer, allow the audience to watch the music video repeatedly in a more casual way, with a looser approach to their story telling.
This video contains some very fast, simple editing which connected a variety of very small shots. This can be a technique used to make viewers want to watch the video again. According to Steve Archer in How to Study a Music Video, some images are edited so fast that they are impossible to understand the first viewing and thus need to be viewed several times. This is a way to get the audience wanting to view the material several times and thus marketing her and her image. In some parts of the video the editing is matched to the rhythm and beat of the song. This is especially found in the chorus. This technique allows the video to represent the music and makes it a little bit more memorable to the consumer.
According to Steve Archer in How to Study Music Videos, lighting can show development in the song. In this video the lighting emphasises the chorus of the song. When the song develops into the chorus the video moves onto very brightly lit shots, for example at the start of the first chorus Rihanna can be found in an outside shot which appears to be very sunny and thus lit very brightly. This allows the audience to clearly see when the song is moving onto significant moments. Similarly in every shot the lighting around Rihanna is very bright. This is because Rihanna is the most important thing in this music video and the lighting highlights this and keeps the majority of the audience’s attention on Rihanna and thus marketing her image.
The mise-en-scene in this video is all very surreal. According to Steve Archer in How to Study a Music Video, mise-en-scene is used to guarantee the authenticity of the clip. This music video is the opposite to this. The clothing worn by the people in this clip is very brightly coloured and made to look over the top, the makeup is very colourful in some cases, the props used are random and the locations of the music video are very colourful and have a fake look to them. Rihanna’s video is created to be against the norm to sell her image as being artistic, different and original.
A video which is similar to this one is Katy Perry’s “California Girls”. “California Girls” is similar to this video because of its disjuncture. The visuals that go with the video are very random and bare little relation to the lyrics of the song. The visuals are very bright, very colourful and seem to be very wacky. It is the unique, wacky and creative style of the video which I like so much about Katy Perry’s “California Girls”.