"Disturbia" Indeed (Part I of II)

I saw this music video the other day. Drag queens crawled around on the floor, dressed in tattered Victorian dresses, sporting enough mascara and black nail varnish to keep Fall Out Boy going for a year. This cheery atmosphere was accompanied by frequent allusions to rape, physical disability and mental illness. And the scene culminated in a dark corridor as a flurry of tarantulas assaulted the trapped singer, enveloped in barbed wire.

Surprisingly enough, I’m not talking about the new Marilyn Manson video. Nor the new Slipknot video. In fact, it was no metal, goth, or emo music at all – it’s “Disturbia,” the latest single from mainstream pop’s ‘gout du jour’, lil Miss Rihanna. The girl who took the most mundane and clunky object imaginable – the umbrella – and turned it into a worldwide pop culture sensation.

The video, released in late July, represents the final stage in a year-long image overhaul for the pint-sized twenty (!) year old. The makeover began with the naming of the singer’s third breakthrough album; in Good Girl Gone Bad, Rihanna’s make-up artists, PR agents, and costumiers have spent the last 12 months rigorously transforming the fluffy teen sensation into an edgy, dangerous pop siren. Twelve months ago, Rihanna was flouncing about singing childish double-entendres in the day-glo video to “Shut Up and Drive.” Since then, she’s cut her hair, drowned her face in mascara, and filled her wardrobe with more leather than an Amsterdam sex shop. She’s also starred in H&M adverts alongside ‘edgy’ artists like Good Charlotte and Scissor Sisters earlier this year, and went on a nation-wide tour with ‘adult’ performers like Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West. And this grand masterwork of PR has now come to a dramatic end with the video for “Disturbia,” in which Rihanna says the S-word (bleeped out of course) and, shock horror, holds a cigarette in her hand – though of course she doesn’t smoke it, because that, good lord, would be going much too far.

Now you might wonder why I’m harping on this. “It’s just pop music,” you might say. “It’s not like it hasn’t happened before,” you might say. And you would, of course, be right. But apart from the fact that this is one of the more ruthlessly efficient celeb makeovers in recent history, and apart from the fact that the subject in question isn’t a mature, in-control adult but a young, impressionable girl barely out of her teens, I think there is something about this particular image re-vamp that is of note. In short, it’s totally and utterly uncalled for.

Usually, a celeb’s image makeover happens for one of two reasons. The first, and probably the most notorious, is to accompany some shift in the singer’s personal life –a religious conversion, marriage, or a crisis, which, due to the singers’ fame, occurs in the glaring public eye. A good example here is MJ, who in five years went from being black to white (how’s that for an image shift?), and a few years afterwards promoted his new album by launching a huge Stalin-esque statue of himself down the river Thames. And, more recently of course, we have Ms. Britney Spears, whose image shift (or should I say, implosion) seems to have finally come to something of a halt. I don’t really need to remind you of the details but to put it bluntly, ten years ago she was promising never to have sex before marriage and today she’s partying with no underwear and starring in lurid videos about strippers and prostitutes.

Date Posted: 21 October 2008
The Odes Team.


Comments

You need to sign in to contribute to the La Crónica.

If you're new to The Odes, creating your membership is quick and easy.