By: Theo Weldon
Among the greatest tragedies to befall me in these past weeks was the fact that I did not get the opportunity to share my analysis of the music video for Rihanna’s We Found Love with the class. I’m going to remedy that tragedy now by examining the discursive clusters that surrounded We Found Love in the broader social context of the year it was released (2011).
We Found Love sounds uplift. At a surface level, it could be read as conveying the message that “love triumphs all.” It should be noted, however, that the Rihanna says “we found love in a hopeless place,” she says nothing about love being a positive force and/or a solution to hopelessness. Just the opposite, she says “I’ve got to let it [her feelings] go.” The music video reflects this skeptical view of (hopeless) love, as Rihanna and her lover’s passionate romance descends into a cycle of drug use, explosive arguments, and reckless adrenaline hunting.
With the music video as context, We Found Love takes on a new meaning. Young love is passionate, but it can also be harmful and self-destructive, causing those who partake to lose their grip on reality. The two-toned message is clear… or is it? There is a good bit of extratextual context that is worth considering here. For one, the artist herself, Rihanna, suffered physical and emotional abuse in a highly publicized relationship 2 years prior to the songs release. Morbid as it sounds, the song “rewards” audiences for understanding the extratextual circumstances of the artist. We can take this further. Jason Mittell encourages us to situate genres and texts within prevailing social power structures and to look for “political implications and effects” in “seemingly nonpolitical case studies” (Mittell 19). We Found Love is a pop song, but it is a product of a specific cultural/political sentiment in the late 2000s/early 2010s. We could think of number of pop songs that carry upbeat tunes and darker messages: Outkast’s Hey Ya!, Foster the People’s Pumped up Kicks, Ke$ha’s Die Young. I imagine this historical genre as a product of rising cynicism in the 21st century. 9/11 and the War on Terror ended the honeymoon period the United States had experienced after the Cold War, and the 2008 financial crisis left a generation of youth fearing for their economic futures. Through this framework, we can view Rihanna’s hit single as emerging both personally and societally from a discursive cluster of disillusionment and loss of innocence, one reflected by hundreds of texts, musical or otherwise, produced since the early 2000s.
2 replies on “Burning Bright and Burning Out in the Most Hopeless Place Ever (2011)”
Hi Theo,
I also was disappointed to not analyze the music video for “We Found Love”. I’ve only heard the popular song on radios or maybe at parties, so the dark tones of the video surprised me. As I looked at the YouTube comments for the video, they echoed the sentiments you described in your blog post. It’s interesting to connect the historical and personal contexts of Rihanna’s video to our discussions on how television audiences can interact with shows beyond just programming. By being invested in Rihanna’s “story”, fans are rewarded with a new deeper meaning which can also be seen as a form of fan service or attention from RIhanna herself. In doing so, the producers of “We Found Love” may be trying to encourage a cult-like audience through the references in the video.
Theo,
First off, respect for doing such a deep dive into a song I haven’t listened to since middle school. That’s badass. Similar to our discussion of Animals by Maroon 5, your post has me thinking about how surface-level most people’s engagement with popular songs often is. There are surely big Rhianna fans that specifically listen to that song because they like Rhianna (not sure if there are actually any Calvin Harris fans but who knows). For me and probably many others, though, We Found Love was just a song that came on the radio all the time- I never thought much else of it. It’s also interesting to think how the inherently simplistic lyrics in many ways encourage such disengagement. As you point out, the words “we found love in a hopeless place” are vague enough that one needn’t don their thinking colander to get the vibe of the song. But if you actually consider them in the context of the rest of the song and the person singing it, a whole new meaning is revealed, which the music video basically confirms. Banger post.