via.

Huh? I’m not really sure what Mr. West is going for here. There is an odd scaling back of his overt self obsession, instead placing in the forefront a woman who has recently been embroiled in a genuinely sad abuse scandal, and is then portrayed as an object. The superimpositions of West’s menacing face which engulf her certainly do not help the tension that the video displays between standard rap video tropes and the larger scope of image production that includes this same woman brutalized. But perhaps I am incorrectly assigning blame, these images could also be attributed to Rhianna herself, though I feel hard pressed to read this video as a statement of freedom/power on her part.

In any event the video serves as an intersection between the images of celebrity culture and the images of artistic creation. I leave it to you to assign a moral value to this locus point.