Rihanna's 'S&M' video is here and it's....okay - watch the premiere now

What's teal and ugly and red on top, and got a stylist fired?

Rihanna has done a lot.  She released some good songs ('Pon De Replay'), then some BRILLIANT SONGS ('SOS'), a few shit songs ('Russian Roulette') and then seemed to settle into a nice groove of having above-average but slightly forgettable singles come out at a rate of approximately one every two-and-a-half weeks.

Though her song output has found a rut pleasant routine, her videos have continually been getting better and better.  At some point RiRi or her people decided that she was a big enough star that she could stop caring about looking foolish and just GO FOR THE GOLD which in the music business equates to ACT BATSHIT CRAZY ON CAMERA, and, to her credit, it's resulted in some pretty amazing clips.

...until now.  The video for 'S&M' has just come out and it's sort of what you'd expect from a Rihanna video, except if Rihanna was a Russian girlband and it was 2003.

To be fair it's not terrible - and it's actually kind of entertaining, but it reeks of "let's chuck every idea we have at the wall and see what sticks."  We imagine it is the product of a number of committee meetings, each of which went something like:

Record Exec 1: "The song is called S&M so maybe we should put some S&M things in it"
Record Exec 2: "Yes but she already did the whole 'Rated R' "dark" thing and we all know how that turned out..."
Record Exec 1: "Ok then let's make the S&M things NEON and therefore DIFFERENT"
Record Exec 2: "And we should make her be behind plastic wrap for some reason.  You know, because it's edgy."
Record Exec 1: "How are we so good at this?  You'd think the Klonopin would hinder our creative abilities somehow."
Record Exec 2: "We are geniuses, let's take our private planes to Hawaii for the evening."

THE END

Rihanna - S&M - The best home videos are here