Research Into Existing Products - Contemporary Music Videos

This music video is about an accountant has defrauded the singer out of money, so she kidnaps his wife, a spoiled, wealthy white woman complete with chichi dog and diamonds. With two friends, she bundles her into a trunk, strips her, swings her upside down from a rope, knocks her out with a bottle, then lets her almost drown in a swimming pool. When that doesn’t get her the money, Rihanna finds the accountant, straps him to a chair, shows a collection of knives presumably used to finish him off, and then is shown blood-covered and naked in a trunk of money.

Representation is very clear in this video, as it is showing women as stronger dominant characters as she kills the male at the end. However ethnicity is also brought into this, as the white woman who is middle class is shown as weak compared to rihanna who is shown as more powerful due to her killing and torturing the white woman. ethnicity is further represented as the white woman is shown as middle class and rihanna is shown as working class.

Rihanna is performing tropes and cliche's that are more commonly assosiated with males. For example she comes across as a gangster due to the fact she is doing drugs, being violent and is rich, which is more commonly a role of men. 

The Daily Mail posted this article in response to the video:

Sarah Vine, the writer of the article, said " This video contains, in no particular order, extreme violence, torture, drug-taking, guns, negative racial stereotyping (towards both black and white), sexual exploitation and murder. Actually, sorry: not just contains, but also glorifies and justifies." Also "by the time it had finished, I wondered whether I ought not to report her to the police. Charges: pornography, incitement to violence, racial hatred." 

However people of my age who have grown up in today's scoiety may be desenstitised to the video due to being exposed to these sort of issues over social media. We know more about issues such as drug taking and violence due to media such as TV and social media. Also these crimes have became more commonly committed by teenagers of modern society. Adults who grew up in a society where these things were a lot more fron upon and less common would be more outraged by this video. 

There have been videos previous to this one that show some of these issues. An example of this is Lady Gaga and Beyonce's song "Telephone" and Lady Gaga's "Papparazzi". 
Both these videos contain asepcts of nudity, sexual activity, violence and murder, just like the Rihanna video.