Memphis is not only Ground Zero for flooding lately, it’s always been the “Ground Zero for soul” according to Al Bell, as interviewed on “The Tavis Smiley Show” on National Public Radio last Sunday. Smiley was giving Bell “mad props” for his recommended “Watts Stax” documentary, and Bell was announcing his (at least partially web-based) initiative to bring back soul, music that would make listeners feel good, without “titillating” them.
And yet, that very same night, there was titillation a-plenty as the Billboard Music Awards kicked off with a young African-American woman from Barbados, sporting flaming red hair and a white leather bondage-inspired one-piece, writhing around onstage in a performance of her chart-topping ode to sadomasochism, “S&M.” Despite winning a few important awards later in the show (Billboard Music Awards are sales- radio-play based, so these “awards” are earned by consumers purchasing the music and program directors spinning the record on commercial radio), neither Rihanna nor any other of the other performers, presenters or “award” winners were able to top that moment for sheer, giddy, shock-value and eye-popping, jaws-agape, over-the-top sexuality.
This was not the 20-year-old “Umbrella” wielder, this was the 23-year-old wielder of chains and whips, which according to the lyrics, “excite her.” Although the credit for the lyrics goes to songwriter Ester Dean, Rihanna clearly is invested fully in playing the part of the bondage queen, and the performance at the resurrected Billboard awards served as a natural extension of the similarly over-the-top music video (Rihanna is wrapped in plastic, the press wear ball-gags, Rihanna wears a black tube top that says “censored” on it, treats Perez Hilton like a dog, ties herself up on the floor, demonstrates her abilities to eat a banana, a strawberry, an ice cream cone, etc.).
Given her appearance in a recently remixed version of the song and her billing as a performer on the show, it was hardly a surprise that a clearly lip-syncing Britney Spears appeared toward the end of her performance, and brought it to an even more “scandalous” level, as Spears was the black leather yin to Rihanna’s white leather yang, and they both seemed to relish the opportunity to give their dueling stripper poles a spin.
Rihanna and Spears danced in-sync atop platforms, just out of reach of the groping attempts from the male dancers below and concluded with the now obligatory female-on-female kiss, although that seemed like an afterthought.
Considering all of that, it’s no surprise the music too seemed an afterthought, and indeed, if you changed the subject matter of “S&M” to say, collecting stamps or structural engineering (which Rihanna would no doubt refer to as philately and girder erecting), the single would be a fairly by-the-numbers dance track. The music, featuring a throbbing synth line, is nothing Daft Punk wasn’t doing years ago, and although the sample of Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant” is appropriate, it doesn’t add that much of a hook to the song and is more reminiscent of the pizzicato keyboard melody of The Cure’s “Let’s Go To Bed.” Either way, it’s a nice touch, and certainly fitting, given the subject matter, but it could have been better utilized, maybe as a motif throughout instead of being tacked on like a coda.
No, the star here, as it should be, is Rihanna’s voice. She seems to instinctively know when to belt it out and when to purr like a kitten, when to shout and when to whisper sweetly, and she covers all the dynamic bases on “S&M.” “Na-na-na come on,” she sings at the beginning, to invite us eagerly into her world, where there’s “sex in the air, I don’t care, I like the smell of it.” (The single is in fact known as “Come On” in the UK, since the BBC apparently didn’t like the scent of “S&M” on their airwaves.) Whereas those elegant bachelors in Marcy Playground seemed to mutter under their breath about the smell of sex (and candy), Rihanna is outspoken about her love of “being bad,” and her embrace of white leather brought to mind another performer who caused some controversy clad in a white wedding dress during a performance at a televised award show a few years back.
Just as Rihanna seems to be the heiress apparent to Britney’s pop diva throne, Spears herself seemed to bring the controversial merging of virginity and sex back from its dormancy after the virginal gauntlet was thrown down in the form of wasps everywhere, Madonna.
After writhing around in a white wedding dress at MTV’s Video Music Awards (An important show at that point, because MTV used to show videos), Madonna would go on to crawl around on all fours like a cat on a leash in the “Express Yourself” video and years after the publication of her controversial SEX book, she would go on to sing that she wasn’t “sorry, it’s human nature” and “Oops! I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex.”
But now Rihanna doesn’t have to apologize, and that is the most redeeming quality of “S&M.” She (and by extension, her writer Dean) is reclaiming sex as something that is rightfully hers, that she has no shame about, and she is broadcasting these preferences with pride, and from a position of power.
Rihanna performed a toned-down rendition of “S&M” on “The Today Show” the following Friday and when asked about the controversial performance on Sunday’s award show, she told Matt Lauer it was all part of her philosophy of “fun, fearlessness and sassiness.”
What does “S & M” stand for? The literalist would say it stands for sadism and masochism, philosophies that equate pain with pleasure as espoused by the Marquis du Sade. According to the Tumblr blog, shitmystudentswrite, “S & M stands for smoke and mirrors and was a common practice in the middle ages, before modern pop singers like Rihanna made it popular.”
But “S & M” means modern society has come a long way in the 25-plus years since Spinal Tap tried to release a record with a naked woman on the cover wearing a dog collar and with a man’s hand holding a glove in front of her face. Historians now know that Smell The Glove was released in the infamous “none more black” album cover to disappointing sales results (except in Japan).
If it were released today, perhaps the members of Spinal Tap would be forced to smell the glove by Rihanna. Perhaps if only in the imagination, one can catch the whiff of a future collaboration.
