Rihanna- Shut Up and Drive Analysis

This is "Shut Up and Drive" by Rihanna, we chose to analyse this as some aspects of the video inspire us for our own video. Rihanna is a very confident character and comes across very powerful in her videos. She is very attractive and could definitely be seen as an object of the "Male Gaze". Rihanna is portrayed as an independent woman in her videos by her body language and posture. As we chose to do the song "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse, we thought Rihanna would be a good comparison as they are both confident. Amy is confident in a different way to Rihanna and doesn't seem to appeal to the Male Gaze as much as Rihanna does. Amy is more masculine than Rihanna although they are both portrayed as fairly tough.One part of the video that inspires me is that you do not see Rihanna singing constantly, she tends to move around and do other things while the song plays. I think this is vital in a music video because it makes the video look more realistic and interesting to viewers. I love Rihannas unusual style because that's what makes her such a good artist.

For Rihannas video there are general conventions of the R&B genre where she seems to dance around and have some sort of routine, By using Andrew Goodwin's theory we can see that there is a illustrative relationship between the lyrics and visuals. As some areas of the song, the lyrics do link in with the visuals. Such as when she sings "Shut Up and Drive" and the cars drive off which we can see in the clip above.