The Air America Runs On

Indiana passed a law in spring 2015 that let businesses refuse service to gay customers under the banner of religious freedom. Around the same time, police shootings of Black men were making national news with a regularity that had stopped feeling like news. The country that produced Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver—three men who spent their careers making American hypocrisy legible—kept looking in the mirror and finding nothing to correct.

Rihanna dropped "American Oxygen" into that moment and the video did what the pundits couldn’t: it made you feel it. Protest footage, civil rights imagery, immigrants arriving at ports, athletes, flags, Ferguson. Not subtle, but subtlety wasn’t what the moment needed. What it needed was a voice with millions of listeners asking out loud what kind of freedom America was actually exporting.

Whether Rihanna personally authored every layer of meaning in the video or whether that was the director and the label—I don’t know, and it doesn’t entirely matter. The right thing at the right time carries its own authorship. The song landed where it needed to, and the fact that it came from a pop star rather than a journalist or a politician was arguably the point. The audience that most needed to hear it wasn’t watching cable news. It was watching her.

The image that stayed with me was the simplest: the flag, and someone on their knees beneath it. That image was going to get a lot more complicated before the decade was out.