“S&M” is the fourth single from Rihanna’s fifth album Loud (2010), released to U.S. radio on 23 January 2011. Ester Dean wrote it with producers Stargate and Sandy Vee. It is a four-minute, three-second uptempo Hi-NRG / Eurodance track: bass, keyboard, guitar, and a hook that puts chains, whips, and fetish sex in the middle of a pop single. Critics split between praising the construction and flinching at the explicitness. Chart math did not flinch. After the solo cut stalled at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, a remix with Britney Spears took the combined total to number 1. It became Rihanna’s tenth U.S. chart-topper and Spears’s fifth. The RIAA and Australia both certified it at the multi-platinum end of the scale; Wikipedia’s own sections list both five-times and six-times platinum for the U.S. at different points, and six-times platinum in Australia. The song hit number 1 in six other countries and the top ten in twenty-two more.
The video, directed by Melina Matsoukas, answered hostile critics with candy-colored softcore SM and a press-as-dungeon conceit. It was banned or night-restricted in multiple countries. Photographer David LaChapelle sued over visual sampling and settled. For pop history the usable fact is simple: a global radio hit made bondage slang, whip talk, and latex press-conference theater into mainstream furniture. For a BDSM site the usable fact is slightly sharper. The song is not a consent workshop. It is the moment a Top 40 chorus said “chains and whips excite me” and the industry treated that as a dance record, not a raid.
Writing the Hook: Dean, Stargate, a Song First Aimed at Spears
Dean told Gail Mitchell of Billboard how the lyric arrived. The first thing in her head was “Come on, come on.” She did not yet know what the song was. Then she remembered the playground proverb: sticks and stones may break my bones. The answer line wrote itself: “But chains and whips excite me.” When a track already “has a story in it,” she said, the words come as if the beat were narrating. She originally wrote the song for Britney Spears. That unused destination would come back as a remix when Rihanna’s fans demanded exactly that pairing.
Rihanna, speaking to Rolling Stone about the bondage and SM themes at the center of the single, was blunt about bedroom roles: she likes to take charge, and she loves to be submissive. Being submissive in bed was “really fun.” You get to be “a little lady,” with somebody macho and in charge. That is pop-star talk, not a dungeon interview, but it is also not a coy metaphor-only dodge. She was willing to say the lyric’s power-exchange content mapped onto actual taste.
Recording happened on the road during the Last Girl on Earth tour. Mikkel Eriksen and Miles Walker cut instrumental parts at Roc the Mic in New York and Westlake in Los Angeles; Sandy Vee worked at The Bunker in Paris. Kuk Harrell recorded Rihanna’s vocals; Harrell, Josh Gudwin, and Marcos Tovar produced them, with Bobby Campbell assisting and Veronika Bozeman adding vocal production. Vee mixed at The Bunker; Phil Tan mixed at The Ninja Beat Club in Atlanta, Damien Lewis on additional and assistant engineering. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, and Vee handled instrumental production. The credits read like a transatlantic pop factory. The lyric still sounds like a club dare.
What the Record Actually Does
“S&M” sits in E-flat minor, common time, at a moderate dance tempo of 128 BPM. Synths, keyboard, and guitar carry it. MTV’s Chris Ryan called it a steady-rocking dance track with “ominous, snarling keyboard sounds.” Rihanna’s range on the song spans about an octave, B♭3 to D♭5, delivered in a sexually aggressive tone. The subject is sex, sadomasochism, bondage, and fetish—the protagonist’s turn-ons and illicit proposals. It opens with the hook “Na, na, na, c’mon.” The chorus boasts, “I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it / Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it.” The post-chorus interpolates The Cure’s 1982 “Let’s Go to Bed.” The proverb flip—“Sticks and stones may break my bones / But chains and whips excite me”—is the line that made radio nervous and made the song immortal.
To Spin, Rihanna called the lyrics metaphoric. She said the song was mainly about confidence in identity and being impervious to rumors and criticism. Both readings can sit in the same chorus. Jake Conway, writing for Yale’s Q Magazine, accused the lyric of “divesting sex of emotion” and recasting violence as fetish, then admitted that Rihanna pays homage to those acts in an empowered dance-club mood. Ryan, less academic, said it was about “dirty, naughty, illicit bedroom activities.” A BDSM-literate listener does not have to pick one church. The record is a dance track that uses SM imagery as both literal kink and as a metaphor for surviving the press. That double use is why the video could be about journalists and still be full of latex.
Release, Edits, and the Britney Remix
In the U.S. it was the fourth Loud single; in several other countries it was the third. U.S. contemporary-hit and rhythmic radio got it on 23 January 2011; urban playlists on 27 February. iTunes stores across Europe and South America carried it from 11 February. Argentina, Brazil, and some European territories received an 18 February EP: the single plus remixes by Dave Audé and Sidney Samson. A 28 February worldwide digital package added Joe Bermudez. Germany got a CD single on 18 March. The Spears remix landed worldwide on 11 April. In the United Kingdom the song was judged too explicit for daytime radio. BBC Radio 1 received an edit that stripped references to sex, chains, and whips and renamed the track “Come On.” That bureaucratic fig leaf is part of the song’s reception history: the hit could play if you deleted the title.
A remix with rapper J. Cole hit the internet on 17 January 2011. After the album version was out, Rihanna asked Twitter which collaborators fans wanted. Spears won. Public tweets between the two stars fed rumors before the official remix—Spears on a guest verse she also wrote—arrived in April. The industry logic was obvious. Dean had written the song for Spears in the first place. Fans wanted the unused destination stapled onto the hit. Combined sales of solo and remix versions are what finally pushed the Hot 100 from a two-week stay at number 2 (behind Katy Perry’s “E.T.”) to the top, on 293,000 downloads in the summit week.
Critics: Velvet Rope Echoes and “Forced” Sex
Sal Cinquemani at Slant heard an ode to sadomasochism comparable to Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope—the right comparison if you care about mainstream pop that treats SM as a mood rather than a joke. Other writers slotted “S&M” with Loud cuts “What’s My Name?” and “Skin” as Rihanna boasting about competence, the same stance she had taken on Rated R. The evidence line was always the same: “I may be bad / but I’m perfectly good at it… Chains and whips excite me.” Steve Jones in USA Today said the pulsating opener made clear where she was headed. Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly called it an “explicitly carnal opener” with “late-night-Cinemax naughtiness.” Nick Levine at Digital Spy gave four stars out of five and said the song makes the listener as “up-for-it” as Rihanna, all “ear-frotting” hooks, synths, and pounding beats.
James Skinner at BBC Music was the cold review that still gets quoted. He thought Loud lacked Rated R’s chart-friendly moments and found the overtly sexual lyrics “at odds with” the flirtatious appeal Rihanna seemed to want. He called her vocal delivery “forced” and said she failed to sound daring or convincing. That is a critic asking a pop SM song to be either more tasteful or more authentically feral, and being disappointed it is a club record instead. Mixed reviews did not slow the single. They just confirmed that bondage talk on a Hi-NRG beat still registered as a problem for some professional listeners in 2011.
The Numbers That Matter (Not Every Territorial Micro-Peak)
The UK story starts early: a 15 November 2010 entry at number 55, then a peak of number 3 on 5 March 2011 for three straight weeks. On the UK R&B chart it was number 1 for five consecutive weeks and the second-biggest-selling R&B/hip-hop single of 2011 in Britain. By December 2011 it had sold 643,000 copies there. The BPI later certified it quadruple platinum (February 2026). Across Europe it was a top-three record in several markets: number 1 in Poland; number 2 in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland; number 3 in France (her tenth French top ten) and in one Spanish listing; number 4 in Austria, Finland, and another Spanish listing; number 7 in the Netherlands; number 8 in the Czech Republic. Treat those as the shape of a continental smash, not as a trivia grid.
Australia is cleaner. The song debuted at 87 on 29 November 2010 off the album, returned at 27 on 30 January 2011 as a single, and hit number 1 on 13 February for five non-consecutive weeks. ARIA certified it six-times platinum, more than 420,000 shipped. New Zealand: debut 6 on 7 February 2011, peak 2 the next week for two weeks, back to 2 in week five, then platinum for more than 15,000 sales.
The U.S. climb is the career statistic people still cite. Hot 100 debut: number 53 on 4 December 2010. On the 23 February 2011 chart it jumped 31 to 8. It reached number 2 on 30 March and held for two weeks behind “E.T.” The Spears remix then sent the combined tally to number 1. It was Rihanna’s tenth Hot 100 number 1, tying Janet Jackson for fourth among female soloists, and she got from first number 1 to tenth in four years, eleven months, and two weeks—faster than any other solo artist. It was Spears’s fifth Hot 100 number 1. It was also Rihanna’s eighth Mainstream Top 40 number 1, making her the artist with the most number 1s in that chart’s nineteen-year history at the time. Dance Club Songs: number 1. Hot Latin Songs: 33. Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs: debut 80 (26 February 2011 issue), peak 59. Adult Pop Airplay: 24. Latin Pop Songs: 14. By June 2015, U.S. digital sales were 3,837,000. Year-end, it was number 2 on Dance Club Songs and number 15 on Mainstream Top 40. Canada: number 1 the week of 21 April 2011. Those are the load-bearing figures. The rest of the territorial table is the same story in smaller type.
The Video: Softcore SM as a Press Conference
Matsoukas shot in Los Angeles on 15–16 January 2011. She told Billboard the video was inspired by Rihanna’s “sadomasochist relationship with the press.” It was not, she said, “just about a bunch of whips and chains.” A behind-the-scenes clip went up on Rihanna’s YouTube on 27 January; the full video premiered on Vevo on 1 February.
It opens with Rihanna arrested into a press conference, wrapped in plastic and taped to a wall, microphones and gagged reporters around her. Outside, in a beige latex dress, she leads a spoof Perez Hilton on a dog leash. She sits among CCTV cameras; the chair spins; she stands and whips reporters taped to the wall, then rolls on the floor, hands and feet bound. Toward the bridge she wears white two-piece latex and rabbit ears while headlines project across her body; she eats pink popcorn. After the chorus she sprawls on a newsroom desk in pink latex while photographers fire. Bondage-gear cutaways mix with a frizzy-wig look, a feather boa, and a midriff tube top printed “censored.” She eats a banana, strawberries and cream, jeweled ice cream, a heart-shaped eye patch on. The last tableau puts her on the newsroom desk with a smiley over one eye, a Rolling Stones tongue over her mouth, and a woman’s orgasm on the soundtrack. Drag performers Willam Belli, Detox Icunt, and Morgan McMichaels appear. The video is not a technique demo. It is a cartoon dungeon in which the journalists are the bottoms.
Reviews mostly liked the joke. The Huffington Post said she was “perfectly good at being bad.” OK! called it “red-hot, kinky and totally tongue-in-cheek.” Willa Paskin at New York read it as a goofy take on the SM videos associated with Madonna and Lady Gaga. Matthew Perpetua at Rolling Stone called it a “visual onslaught of candy-colored kinkiness” that viewers would enjoy despite (or because of) the saturation and the sex. Brad Wete at EW said she delivered the risqué video the lyric promised. Jason Lipshutz at Billboard praised “exquisite set pieces that offer a twisted take on hardcore sexuality.” The consensus: it is pop SM, bright, self-aware, and closer to fashion editorial than to a leather bar.
Bans, Watersheds, and Matsoukas’s “Intention to Get It Banned”
Eleven countries banned the video outright for sexual content. YouTube age-restricted it; that flag was later lifted. On 2 May 2011 France’s Superior Audiovisual Council, after daytime-broadcast complaints, barred the clip before 10 p.m. on music channels—grouped with Enrique Iglesias’s “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You)”—and allowed night play with or without youth advisories (“déconseillé aux moins de 10 ans” or “moins de 12 ans,” depending on the channel) because of sexual and sadomasochistic scenes. Those advisories are ratings context, not an invitation. Rihanna tweeted: they had watched “Umbrella,” and she was “full nude” in that one. An unrestricted cut went on her official site. Matsoukas told MTV News she goes out “with the intention to get it banned”—then corrected herself: not to get it banned, but to make something provocative. If people are talking, the video worked.
LaChapelle, Paulus, and Paying for a Visual Sample
David LaChapelle sued Rihanna, Island Def Jam, and related parties for copyright infringement, plus Lanham Act trade-dress, New York unfair-competition, and unjust-enrichment claims that were later dismissed. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York refused to throw out the copyright count. She listed overlaps a jury could find substantial: hot-pink and white striped walls; two single-hung windows on the back wall; glossy hot-pink window casings and interiors; opaque panes with a half-vector stripe pattern on yellow; a solid hot-pink ceiling and baseboards; a hot-pink couch under the windows; women in frizzy red wigs; a woman posed on furniture; a man wrapped in black tape; a frantic mood; hard light, intense saturation, sharp detail, almost no shadow. Rihanna and LaChapelle settled for an undisclosed sum. He called it “not personal, it’s strictly business,” and said musicians pay to sample beats; sampling an artist’s visuals should work the same way. In June 2011 German photographer Philipp Paulus sued over the scene in which Rihanna, in an expansive dress, is taped to a wall behind plastic—the look, he said, of his Paperworld series. The video’s SM imagery was not only a morals problem for broadcasters. It was a collage problem for photographers who recognized their sets.
Brits, Billboard, Tours, and the Afterlife
Rihanna first sang “S&M” at the Brit Awards on 15 February 2011, inside a medley with “Only Girl (In the World)” and “What’s My Name?” She had wanted to perform “S&M” alone to match the UK single release. The Brits told her to tone down the sexual references and reportedly asked her to consider another song. Coverage said she was angry. Even an awards-show medley could not carry the unedited fetish chorus without a fight.
She opened the 2011 Billboard Music Awards with Spears on the remix, 22 May, MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas. Billboard later listed it among fifteen “awesome” BBMAs performances. On 27 May she sang it on NBC’s Today summer concert series with “Only Girl,” “What’s My Name?,” and “California King Bed,” and fielded questions about the Spears show. Was she surprised it was called controversial? “It was cool. Nothing popped out. We didn’t make out.” Twitter fans, she said, just liked seeing them together. Some people would always find it “too sexy.” People talk whether you are doing bad or good. “You just have to do you.”
On the Loud Tour the stage opened as a stylized S&M set. She performed Prince’s “Darling Nikki” with three semi-nude female dancers, spanking, groping, and miming cane strikes, then transitioned into “S&M,” shedding a white tuxedo for a white bondage corset and handcuffs. Spears put “S&M” on the Femme Fatale Tour (2011) in a medley with “…Baby One More Time.” Rihanna sang it at Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend on 24 May 2012 as the third song, and on most dates of the seven-day 777 Tour in November 2012 for Unapologetic. The single also walked into other people’s media: the cold open of Hawaii Five-0 season-one episode 17; a Lee Latchford-Evans (Steps) cover in a 2012 Ultimate Tour medley with “Moves like Jagger”; and, in Pitch Perfect (2012), an a cappella turn by Ester Dean herself with Alexis Knapp, Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, and Brittany Snow, later issued on the soundtrack inside the “Riff Off” medley that reached number 86 on the Hot 100. The writer of “chains and whips excite me” singing it in a college-comedy riff-off is as complete a mainstreaming as a chart position.
Commercial configurations were the usual 2011 stack: a 4:04 digital single; an EP with Audé’s 7:27 club mix and Samson’s 6:49 club mix; a remix bundle of radio, club, and dub versions by Audé, Bermudez, and Samson; a German CD with the Samson radio mix; and the 4:17 Spears remix. Liner-note management ran through ASCAP/BMI, 45th & 3rd Music for Stargate and Walker, Tim Blacksmith and Danny D. for Stargate, Empire Artist Management for Vee, Suga Wuga Music for Harrell. The record was a professional object. The chorus still sounded like a dare you were not supposed to play before the watershed.
Why the Hit Still Belongs on a Kink-Media Shelf
“S&M” did not teach anyone how to tie a column tie or negotiate a hard limit. It did something pop is better at. It put sadomasochism, bondage, and fetish into a 128-BPM export that radio could not entirely refuse—even when BBC Radio 1 filed the serial number off and called it “Come On.” It let Rihanna say, in interviews, that she liked being submissive in bed and still run the biggest female pop machine of that moment. It let a video treat journalists as gagged bottoms and still look like a fashion ad. It got banned, age-gated, sued, remixed by the woman it was first written for, opened an awards show, and then turned into a pitch-perfect joke in a movie about college a cappella.
Keep the key numbers and throw away the rest of the territorial spreadsheet: UK 3 (R&B 1; 643,000 by late 2011; later 4× platinum); Australia 1 for five non-consecutive weeks (6× platinum); New Zealand 2 (platinum); U.S. 1 after the Spears remix, tenth Rihanna chart-topper, fastest soloist to ten, 3.84 million downloads by mid-2015, Dance Club Songs 1; Canada 1; number 1 in six further countries, top ten in twenty-two more. Keep the production chain, the Cure interpolation, the LaChapelle settlement, the French 10 p.m. rule, the Loud Tour corset. For adult listeners the song is a period artifact of bondage-as-pop-confidence: not underground leather, not Fifty Shades balladry, but a club record that made “chains and whips” a sing-along. That is how SM enters the mainstream—less as a practice, more as a chorus people already know how to shout.
Pop SM Before and After the Chorus
Cinquemani’s Velvet Rope comparison is the right historical hinge. Mainstream pop had already rented SM imagery—Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant,” Madonna’s Justify My Love and the Sex book, Janet’s velvet-rope era, later Gaga’s fashion-dungeon videos. “S&M” is the 2010–11 club version of that rental: less art-house, more radio, a proverb flipped into a fetish couplet, a video that makes the press the submissive. Dean writing it for Spears and Rihanna later handing Spears the remix is the other hinge. The unused first home of the song becomes the chart-topping guest verse. That is how a bondage pop single behaves as an industry object: written on spec, cut on tour, mixed in Paris and Atlanta, banned in eleven countries, sued in New York, opened in Las Vegas, covered in a cappella.
What the record does not do is document a scene. There is no negotiation, no aftercare, no talk of marks or safewords. Rihanna’s Rolling Stone remark about liking to be submissive and her Spin remark about metaphor can both be true because the song was built to work as sex talk and as a clapback. Matsoukas said the video was about a sadomasochist relationship with journalists; the images still sold latex, leashes, rope, and a desk-as-altar. Adult viewers can take the hit as a period document of how far SM vocabulary had traveled by the Loud era—far enough to be a first track, a Brits problem, a Radio 1 rename, and a number-one remix—without mistaking it for a dungeon class. Chains and whips excite the chorus. The rest of a real scene is still homework.
