There was so much pomp and circumstance surrounding the impending release of Rihanna’s Anti—false-starter singles, months-long Samsung campaigns, a freaking global treasure hunt for fans—that the small, intimate, and insular nature of the eventual album took some getting used to. The music videos, then, have been helping that acceptance along: “Work” was just two clips of her and Drake, whining first in a club and second in someone’s pink-hued living room, while “Kiss It Better” went even more minimal, and traded up: Drake for a sheer white sheet. The brand new “Needed Me,” directed by Harmony Korine, injects some of the Oldboy-accented revenge verve of last year’s “Bitch Better Have My Money,” spiked with Korine’s own Spring Breakers, but that only comes to a head in the last minute or so. Mostly the clip is concerned with how a topless Rihanna looks glowering into windows and strolling, emotionless, through a strip club thick with gyrating naked bodies. It works, in much the same way “Work” and “Kiss It Better” do: by representing the body as the most direct visual expression of the self.
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