BBHMM: Rihanna's Violent 'Bitch Better Have My Money' Music Video

So, there's this Rihanna gangland "BBHMM" video.

M'okay?

Here: "Rihanna - Bitch Better Have My Money (Explicit)."

Does it promote violence? Violence against women? Does it glorify pot-smoking, gun-wielding thug life?

Prolly. Although it's not a new debate. Back in the 1990s everybody was all, "Violent video games cause criminal tendencies among young gamers, yo."

 And now here comes the radical feminist backlash, of course.

At the Guardian UK, "Feminists fall out over ‘violent, misogynistic’ Rihanna video":

Bitch Better Have My Money (BBHMM) is a slick seven-minute film, co-directed by one of the few black women in America who has managed to get right to the top of a male-dominated pop industry.

The plot is simple – an accountant has defrauded the singer out of money, so she kidnaps his wife, a spoiled, wealthy white woman complete with chichi dog and diamonds. With two friends, she bundles her into a trunk, strips her, swings her upside down from a rope, knocks her out with a bottle, then lets her almost drown in a swimming pool.

When that doesn’t get her the money, Rihanna finds the accountant, straps him to a chair, shows a collection of knives presumably used to finish him off, and then is shown blood-covered and naked in a trunk of money.

A show of sisterhood it isn’t, although the homage to Hollywood’s girl power blockbuster Thelma and Louise, with Rihanna and her co-conspirators riding off in a 1960s blue convertible, suggest the artist might think differently.

More at Bustle, "Who's The Wife In Rihanna's 'BBHMM' Music Video? Hannibal's On-Screen Wife Had Pretty Terrifying Night — VIDEO."

And at the Atlantic, "‘BBHMM’: Rihanna's New Video Does Exactly What It's Supposed To":

Of all the scandalized reactions to Rihanna’s music video for “Bitch Better Have My Money,” my favorite comes, as is not surprising for this sort of thing, from the Daily Mail. Labelling herself in the headline as a “concerned parent” (a term to transport one to the days of Tipper Gore’s crusade against lyrics if there ever was one), Sarah Vine opens her column by talking at length about how so very, very reluctant she was to watch Rihanna’s new clip. Then she basically goes frame-by-frame through the video, recounting her horror at what unfolds. “By the time it had finished, I wondered whether I ought not to report [Rihanna] to the police,” Vine writes. “Charges: pornography, incitement to violence, racial hatred.”