Rihanna - Bitch Better Have My Money

I apologise if I am unintentionally and unknowingly repeating something that has already been said.

It is very tempting to just leave it at 'yas' but I shall try to elaborate.

When I was a teenager, I had the unfortunate rockist attitude that all the big names in pop were playing the game 100% For instance, artists like Avril Lavigne or P!nk who were/are somewhat subversive in their opinion didn't seem any different to the ''manufactured'' stars of the time. I am probably in a lerightgeneration mindset for thinking that there is less reason to believe this is possible than ever before. Probably no one agrees with me (I've seen someone say on social media that manufactured pop music has ruined music...in 2015. Death, taxes, etc.) but there's enough evidence to back it up right here I think.

Going from that, I have a huge amount of respect to any pop star who can sufficiently convince me that they are not attempting to score pop hits for the sake of pop hits and nothing else. You could of course make the observation that the 2015 Rihanna arc is a strategic authenticity quest, but there's a stark contrast between recording a radio friendly, acoustic guitar driven track alongside two musical icons, and well, making a ratchet jam that almost sounds like Rae Sremmurd.

And unlike "FourFiveSeconds", I think BBHMM has a lot more to offer than the clickbait surface. Rihanna embodies the intent of the song so well. No longer is she the naive teenager unconvincingly singing a ballad that she can't back up the intent behind it ("Unfaithful"). This time she really does sound like she calls the shots. The high points of the song are when she really engages with it ('Your wife in the backseat...' is a surprising earworm).

The song is also indeed a very unpleasant sounding one, and I mean that in a good way because it should sound unpleasant. Like how the main synth hook clashes uncomfortably with the pounding drums in the chorus, deliberately amped up in the song's outro too. Incidentally though, just before that outro (2:39 onwards) is one of the sweetest sounding synth melodies I've heard all year, and I've had a heavy diet of synth pop this year!

Much of all of this can apply to the video too, which is just a really gripping & powerful piece of cinematography. More power to ya RiRi. 4.3