Two colours dominate this video.
The blues and oranges. Look how the blue lines on his jumper match the blue line of her shorts. The red on his jumper and the reddy-orange of the milk carton. Her slightly-clashing but dominant orange nails. The nails throughout shift between blue and orange.
Two-thirds of the way through this colour scheme spreads out from distinct items and takes over the entire video:
It's tempting to see these colours as public/private. The juxtaposition of the public sexuality that Rihanna performs in orange with the unexpectedly genuine-seeming intimacy between her and Drake in the blue scenes.
Orange is for outside, public, performance. Blue is for inside, private, the home.
I am genuinely surprised at how touched I am by the smiles Rihanna and Drake share in the blue scenes. So many videos perform a version of intimacy - so often in the home, in fuzzy light - yet there's something intangibly different here.
Elaine Castillo is right in her wonderful recent essay on the PANK Magazine blog:
"It’s why Rihanna and Drake’s “What’s My Name?” holds me so much. Am I the only one who finds this song deeply melancholy and wistful? The genre of song being: erotic melancholy. One of my favorite genres. Something erotic and melancholy about: “Say my name, say my name—wear it out.”"
She's not the only one. The synths in the background throughout, with their minor keys. A sense of loss. The more I listen, the more sad it becomes.
And of course blue is the colour of melancholy.
Elaine Castillo is right in her wonderful recent essay on the PANK Magazine blog:
"It’s why Rihanna and Drake’s “What’s My Name?” holds me so much. Am I the only one who finds this song deeply melancholy and wistful? The genre of song being: erotic melancholy. One of my favorite genres. Something erotic and melancholy about: “Say my name, say my name—wear it out.”"
She's not the only one. The synths in the background throughout, with their minor keys. A sense of loss. The more I listen, the more sad it becomes.
And of course blue is the colour of melancholy.
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Blue and orange are also the colours of Blogger, the platform I use.
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Blue/Orange is a play written by the English playwright Joe Penhall. It is set in a London psychiatric hospital, where a patient claims to be the son of an African dictator.
The play premiered in 2000 and starred Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor. In 2005 the BBC made it as a TV film starring Brian Cox, John Simm and Shaun Parkes.
On the BBC page for the film, it suggests that Penhall was inspired by Tintin and the Blue Oranges, a live action French film from 1964.
According to Wikipedia "the term of the 'blue orange' is a moderately popular image among the French, and was originally inspired by Paul Eluard's strange quote 'Earth is blue like an orange' as a reference to the colour of the fruit when it rots."
Eluard, who knew Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, and collaborated with Max Ernst, was married to Gala before she left him for Salvador Dali. He was also friends with Man Ray and Picasso.
His poem The World Is Blue As An Orange:
The world is blue as an orange
No error the words do not lie
They no longer allow you to sing
In the tower of kisses agreement
The madness the love
She her mouth of alliance
All the secrets all the smiles
Or what dress of indulgence
To believe in quite naked.
The wasps flourish greenly
Dawn goes by round her neck
A necklace of windows
You are all the solar joys
All the sun of this earth
On the roads of your beauty.
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Rihanna is from Barbados.
The official colours of its flag are ultramarine and gold. In heraldry, a trident is always called a barbe, making a pun on the name of the country it represents.
Barbados' coat of arms is blue and orange too.
New York City, where the video for "What's My Name?" was filmed, has a flag. It is a vertical tricolor of blue, white and orange.
Castillo writes:
"the video's utopian vision of New York. A communal New York. A New York you fall in love with, and in. It's telling that neither Rihanna nor Drake are Americans; American-dreaming being the province of immigrants."
The Lower East Side - those streets Rihanna waltzes through - is part of the island of Manhattan, itself part of what was named New Amsterdam by settling Dutch migrants. The Dutch national colour is orange.
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The video for another single from the same album as "What's My Name?", "Only Girl (In The World)", also has lots of blue and orange:
Hi Mark, Elaine here; just wanted to say thank you for the PANK mention. And YES, on the surprisingly moving (and yes, intangibly different) intimacy of the Rihanna/Drake video. The way he sort of half-mouths the lyrics to himself at the beginning; how he fans them both off during the line "crack a window."
ReplyDeleteI love the notion of the blue/orange as marking private/public; so very apt. And yes, on the minor chords! Thank you for articulating that, I didn't have the vocabulary for it, now I know this is where so much of the song's wistfulness comes from.
I seem to remember we met at the Digital Desperados screening in Glasgow? If so, good to run into you again on the Internet.
Thanks again,
Elaine
Hi Elaine,
ReplyDeleteWe did meet at that screening, nice to (virtually) meet again! Not sure if I said how much I liked your films!
I'm having an ongoing discussion with a friend about R&B in general, Rihanna and Beyonce in particular, about lyrics that are strangely convoluted in relation to gender roles (though there's less of that here, more so in "Only Girl"). Anyhow, on the surprising intimacy of What's my name?, he noted how Drake's drawled delivery evokes mornings-after, and how the NYC it depicts is painfully nostalgic to the point of nostalgia for something that never existed (Mark Fisher and hauntology etc).
Reading what he wrote, I realised how the lyrical delivery, the minor chords, and the NYC visuals all work to reinforce each other -- there's a sort of aesthetic whole to this video, almost like a short film, that there isn't in a lot of other similar videos.
Somehow, too, this all connects to a certain (though I'm finding it hard to pin down) vulnerability in Rihanna's songs/videos. I guess the refrain of "What's my name?" is pretty clear in this regard (uncertain identity etc), but it appears across other videos too ("Only Girl"'s almost desperate tone - the "bigness" of the production), as if she's trying to work out who she is...
I could go on for ever about this stuff!
Mark
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteI remember you were very kind about the films, especially ENVOI, and I thank you for it!
I love the idea of Drake's lazy delivery being a morning-after voice. I love his little smile to himself after he's seen her, felt the flash of attraction. And the nostalgic NYC in the video is 100% hauntological. Yes, on the video's cinematic feel; even the video's class markers feel classic, archetypal. Like a 21st century West Side Story--or Lower East Side story, as it happens. Snippets from a film (a musical, surely) about two lovers from different backgrounds.
Rihanna's output in relation to sexual violence, masochism, female vulnerability, radical disclosure, and romantic longing is really fascinating. "Only Girl" broke my heart the first time I heard it. I like the video, but I sort of prefer the live version she performed on the X Factor, can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbpJQhowiyo
Those strings at the beginning. How she's wearing a dress that on another person's skin-tone would be nude, flesh-colored. A complicated nakedness, as in the "What's My Name" video. How the dress is in some way like an abbreviated bridal gown; paired with biker boots. How she is talking to, and talking through, a certain visual lexicon of femininity (reminds me of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette): cakes, flowers, confection, dress. The sweet and the fierce. "The only girl." Girlhood. Girl in the world.
Even the fabric of her dress is dévoré velvet; devoured. And the food fight at the end. How the event of the performance exceeds the performance, the performance exceeds the stage. Even after the "performance" has ended.
Dermot O'Leary protesting. “Rihanna, make them stop!”
“It’s fun, I want some. It tastes good.”
“What have you done! What have you done to our stage!”
"They're getting loud, they're getting loud with the food."
...
“I thought Lady Gaga was weird, this is wei----”
...
“Ladies and gentleman, the incredible carnage that is, Rihanna!”
There was also recently a post by Megan Milks, on the blog Montevidayo, about Rihanna, and Roxane Gay in the comments talks about Rihanna working through sexual violence issues in her songs and public image. Here: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1629
I love thinking about this, too, especially since R&B and hip-hop are the musical genres I listened to practically exclusively growing up. I'm always taking it personally, probably too personally!
Elaine
I like the snippets from a musical idea - certainly fits with the colour scheme, how musicals often create two sides (west side story a perfect example) and both for the story and because it's visually impressive they separate the two sides through colours or styles. a bit like rap battles, too, i guess.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm wise to it, I'm seeing similar portrayals of NYC in other videos - LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great", and I was watching Kelis videos last night and the start of "Milkshake" is similar. I wonder if looked at in depth this particular hautological depiction of NYC is a broad trend. I know Mark Fisher sees a broad trend in certain musics (dubstep etc) but I'd be interested to see how far he sees it in others, especially mainstream pop.
I know that X Factor video! Funny what grabs the attention - I noticed about the combination of the dress and the boots, and the performance! The staging of it was what most impressed me, how it somehow manages to create multiple storylines at the same time, which you are able to pay attention to without your attention being taken away from Rihanna herself.
"Only Girl" in general seems 'bigger' than "What's My Name?" - the production for a start is much more maximal, as opposed to WMN's more minimal and repeated synth/drum thing. OG's chorus which stretches something to breaking point - it sounds almost desperate, like this is the last straw/possibility. It's less intimate than WMN, far more public, almost like an ultimatum delivered to one particular person but in public, so that person can't dodge it.
I had a bit of an epiphany moment with R&B. I turned on the TV on a Sunday morning years ago and there was a Beyonce concert on, and I was transfixed. Up until then, I'd had a filtered, slightly-removed knowledge of it - I grew up with people who listened to it and sang it in the playground (though I never knew the original songs, just the kids "cover' versions) and then heard it in snatches on the radio and in people's cars driving by - even the other day I realised I knew all of Rihanna's songs of the last 5 years because I'd heard them in cars and shops. Nowadays too you hear people walking round playing it on mobile phones - that tinny sound that excludes all the bass. So my experience of really listening to it properly these last few years has been a strange one of filling in the gaps, joining up the dots, but also connecting with something that was always there but that I was unaware of - like I've always liked this music without knowing I did.
Mark