Rihanna Doesn’t Need to Say a Word

Music being dead isn’t a hot take anymore—it’s just the weather. But DJ Khaled’s Wild Thoughts makes the case so cleanly it almost becomes art in its own right. The formula: sample something already beautiful (here, Santana’s Maria Maria, doing all the heavy lifting from twenty years in the past), stack two famous names on top, and point cameras at everyone until they’re done. Bryson Tiller handles the verses with the reliability of a well-maintained appliance. Rihanna handles everything else.

And Rihanna has been doing this—the "everything else"—with growing economy of effort for years now. Somewhere along the way she clocked what Miley Cyrus figured out before her: if your body is genuinely spectacular, it can carry a song that the music itself couldn’t. So she shows up to music videos the way someone shows up to a meeting they already know the outcome of—technically present, visibly elsewhere, content to let her tits do the heavy lifting while her mouth does as little as possible.

It works, obviously. She barely opens her mouth to form actual words and that somehow increases her gravitational pull rather than diminishing it. I’ve watched the video three times writing this paragraph and I still can’t tell you what she’s singing. I don’t think that’s the point. The music is dead. The video is fine.