There’s that old saying about “April showers…” And Rihanna is doing her part to ensure that this April is going to be a cold one.
The video for “Kiss It Better,” itself a sensual bump and grind of a song, hit the Internet Wednesday afternoon, with all the sexuality and states of undress we’ve come to expect from a Rihanna music video.
But it also arrives with an air of something slightly new and refreshing, at least at the end of a month that not a day seems to have gone by without so-called racy celebrity photos and the blaring faux outrage they inspire making headlines: an undeniable amount of sophistication, class, and, most definitely, beauty.
Like the swelling sonic aphrodisiac that “Kiss It Better” has become in the months after the release of Anti, there’s a delicate touch to the sweaty raunch of the video.
It’s shot in gorgeous black and white on a minimal set. Fabrics and garments billow romantically—occasionally right off our pop queen’s body—as Rihanna writhes, pleasures herself, and ponders: “What are you willing to do / Tell me what you’re willing to do / Kiss it, kiss it better, baby.”
The video is Rihanna’s take on the classic music video trope. You know the one. The perfume commercial made cool: the pop star posing in exquisitely framed black-and-white shots as fans blow their fashion-forward outfits fabulously and we all coo at their erotic perfection.
She’s borrowing heavily from Madonna here, a cross somewhere between the videos for “Justify My Love” and “Vogue.” There are some “Love Will Never Do” Janet vibes. Some Beyoncé sensuality is there for sure—maybe some “Drunk in Love,” a touch of “Partition”—because this is what pop stars do: they make sexy music videos, and often in black-and-white.
But the aesthetic is all Rihanna.
The sultriness of it all, while undeniably alluring, isn’t coquettish. It’s got all the Bad Gal RiRi empowerment the song’s confident, beautifully unapologetic lyrics command: “Boy you know you always do it right / Man, fuck your pride, just take it back boy, boy / Take it back boy, take it back all night.”
It’s a tall order to win attention away from the song’s hypnotic swirls of electronica, but Rihanna proves mesmerizing in her own right.
There are flashes of nipple through her sheer clothing, but it’s not a tease or even nudity for salaciousness’ sake. She’s caressing her curves, offering carefree glimpses of that infamous pierced areola because she seems to truly be indifferent about whether you see it.
She’s reveling in her own sexuality and beauty, and too involved in relishing the pleasure of that to be concerned with the opaqueness of her fabrics or what parts of her body she may be revealing in her process.
The vulnerable longing interplays with a sexual aggression, mirroring the push-and-pull ruminating in the lyrics: the alternate pleading—“What are you willing to do?”—and demanding—“Just take it on back boy.”
When pieces about the video’s release hit the Internet, they’ll undoubtedly siren-call attention to the nudity, as if there’s a part of Rihanna we haven’t seen before.
Her embrace of sheer fashion made headlines before, particularly when she arrived at the CFDA Awards in 2014 in a spectacular see-through gown, showing off the same eye for beauty and elegance in sheer fabric as she does in the “Kiss It Better” video. It’s not shock value. It’s prettiness, and its beauty is only amplified by the confidence Rihanna presents it with.
But the reason the video’s ’80s feel seems so remarkable from Rihanna is because of its restraint. (Welcome to 2016, when a video that amounts to a four-minute visual orgasm featuring copious nipple shots is praised for its restraint.)
Seared into our minds are the images from “Bitch Better Have My Money,” a surreal and pornographic assault of sex, drugs, and violence that is rightfully celebrated for the unabashed power and strength of the revenge fantasy, but understandably criticized for its brash assault of graphic imagery.
The recent video for “Work,” a hyper-sexual and fun dance clip, offered up intense sensuality to desensitized eyeballs. It seemed slight and uninteresting in every way that “Kiss It Better” seems adventurous and provocative, even while being less overt and hardcore.
Some critics are already calling “Kiss It Better” boring because of this. And, sure, in comparison to “Bitch Better Have My Money,” anything sort of a snuff film seems muted. But it’s the erotic subtlety of the video that, at a point when Rihanna is redefining herself as the “Anti” to the expectations that we’ve placed on her, that makes it more interesting.
Anti, her first new album in four years, is remarkable for its glaring lack of radio hits, the club bangers and radio earworms Rihanna had produced with the rapidity of a conveyor belt, turning her into pop’s biggest supernova. And she shined bright like a diamond while doing it.
But as she remarked at a recent concert in Brooklyn, Anti marks a new era for the singer. From a fan’s point of view, maybe we miss the hits. From a music lover’s point of view, we should be exciting by what the new era means, because Rihanna is doing what artists at this stage in their careers rarely do. She is trying harder.
Hear her sing on Anti. Hear her really sing. Hear her experiment with sound. Hear her make some of the most musically interesting songs of her career, and hear her not give a shit if you never hear them on the radio.
The whole idea is more layered than that. It’s not that Rihanna doesn’t give a shit. It’s that in not caring about commercially palatability, she cares more deeply than ever about her music, her sound, and her authentic self. She’s trying. Because she wants to.
The “Kiss It Better” video is beautiful. There’s a lot of sexy imagery in it, and I suppose that will be shocking enough for people to obsess over for the flash food of a news cycle. But the shock that will outlast that is the step that it represents in the continued evolution of Rihanna: from pop star to artist.