“S&M,” a single from Rihanna’s album Loud, hit U.S. radio in early 2011 as the album’s fourth single. Ester Dean wrote it with Stargate and Sandy Vee. On a fast Hi-NRG and Eurodance beat, the chorus puts chains, whips, and fetish sex in the middle of a pop record. The industry used bondage imagery as a dance single. For adult listeners who know BDSM, the useful fact is what the record does not contain: no negotiation workshop, no aftercare, no safeword. It has the line “chains and whips excite me,” and a video that goes all in on the image.
Dean has described the lyric as a playground proverb turned over. The first words in her head were “Come on, come on.” She then used “Sticks and stones may break my bones” and answered it with “But chains and whips excite me.” She originally wrote the song for Britney Spears. Rihanna recorded it. She told Rolling Stone the power exchange matched her own taste: she likes to take charge, and she also likes to be submissive. Being submissive in bed, she said, was really fun. To Spin she read the lyric as confidence in her identity and as a way of standing up to rumors. Both readings sit in the same chorus: sex talk, and a pop clapback.
The record was cut on the road during the Last Girl on Earth tour. Mikkel Eriksen and Miles Walker recorded instrumental parts at Roc the Mic in New York and at Westlake in Los Angeles. Sandy Vee worked at The Bunker in Paris and mixed there. Kuk Harrell recorded Rihanna’s vocals. Phil Tan mixed at The Ninja Beat Club in Atlanta. The song is in E-flat minor, common time, a moderate dance tempo of 128 BPM. Rihanna’s range on it covers about an octave, sung in a sexually aggressive tone, including “I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it.” The solo version stalled at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, behind Katy Perry’s “E.T.” After the album version was out, Rihanna asked fans on Twitter who they wanted as a collaborator. Spears won, and Spears wrote her own guest verse. Combined sales of the solo and the remix took the chart to number 1, on 293,000 downloads in the summit week. It was Rihanna’s tenth U.S. number 1 and Spears’s fifth. Accounts of the RIAA certification differ between five-times and six-times platinum in the United States. Australia is six-times platinum. The song also reached number 1 in six other countries and the top ten in twenty-two more.
Melina Matsoukas directed the video, shot in January 2011. She framed it as Rihanna’s sadomasochistic relationship with the press. It opens with Rihanna brought 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 also wears pink latex, sits among CCTV cameras, and whips reporters taped to the wall. Rabbit ears, pink popcorn, a banana, strawberries and cream. It is not a technique demo from a leather bar. It is a cartoon dungeon, and the journalists are the bottoms. Eleven countries banned the clip outright for sexual content. YouTube age-restricted it; that flag was later lifted. On 2 May 2011 France barred music channels from playing it before 10 p.m. David LaChapelle sued over visual overlap. He did not shoot the video. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York refused to throw out the copyright claim. The parties settled for an undisclosed sum. In June 2011 German photographer Philipp Paulus also sued over the scene of Rihanna taped to a wall behind plastic, which he said matched his Paperworld series.
In Britain the song was judged too explicit for daytime radio. BBC Radio 1 received an edit that cut the references to sex, chains, and whips and renamed the track “Come On.” Rihanna first sang it 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. The Brits told her to tone the sexual references down. The performance with Spears was the opening of the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas on 22 May 2011, not the Brits. On the Loud Tour the stage opened as a stylized S&M set, and when she moved into the song she changed into a white bondage corset and handcuffs. Spears put “S&M” on the 2011 Femme Fatale Tour. In the 2012 film Pitch Perfect, Ester Dean herself sang it in an a cappella cover with other cast members.
The single does not document a real BDSM scene and does not show negotiation. It turns “chains and whips” into something radio could sell. Jake Conway, writing for Yale’s Q Magazine, said the lyric recasts violence as fetish and then pays homage to those acts in an empowered dance-club mood. Chains and whips excite the chorus. A real scene is a different piece of work.
