American Oxygen
Rihanna’s American Oxygen
video lays out the contradiction without flinching. The title is the setup—oxygen is what keeps you alive, except here it’s metaphorical and suffocating. The video cycles through imagery of American life and death, side by side: the freedoms and the violence that props them up.
It’s strange because none of it is hidden. The police killings. The mass surveillance. The religious freedom laws that are thin cover for homophobia, like Indiana proved. You could read about it all in an afternoon. But there’s something different about seeing it packed into three minutes of pop music, set to production that sounds almost reverent. Like Rihanna’s acknowledging the weight of it without needing to perform outrage.
What gets to me is how little it matters that she made the video. I don’t mean that as a knock on her—she has one of the biggest platforms available. I mean that nothing changes from it. The killing continues. The listening continues. We breathe the same oxygen, toxic as it is.
There’s something knowing about that choice, I think. Making the statement anyway, even when you know it won’t fix anything. Not because she’s naive, but because the alternative is silence. She’s not pretending the video will change America. She’s just refusing to pretend America is something it’s not.