Blood, Money, and Whatever Rihanna Wants

You can map the current landscape of pop music in about eight minutes by alternating between Rihanna and Taylor Swift. Everything else is either scaffolding around those two poles or a sad echo of the same tempos, the same melodic shapes, the same lyrical furniture rearranged into a new configuration. Pop has never been required to be original. But it does mean that when either of them does something genuinely committed, it registers differently.

The video for "Bitch Better Have My Money" is Rihanna at full power. She hacks, she saws, she swears, surrounded by an obscene arrangement of luxury goods and blood—and a few women of the moneyed-and-miserable variety have stripped down for the occasion, which I’m not going to pretend to be neutral about. It’s transgressive in the most enjoyable way, which is to say it isn’t really transgressive at all, just unusually committed to its own logic.

The song was written by Bibi Bourelly, a Berliner who was twenty years old at the time, apparently as a thought experiment—she just wanted to know what it felt like to write something for Rihanna. Kanye heard it and approved. Writing that sentence, I felt briefly like a celebrity gossip correspondent and wanted to apologize to everyone I’ve ever respected. So: when does Taylor Swift do the blood-and-chaos version?