With Rihanna continuing to show her lack of concern over not having released any new music since 2016 (unless you want to count the errant singles she’s been featured on), it seems only natural that, to further skirt putting out something new, she’s decided to star in a music video for her baby daddy instead. And this is something she’s no stranger to, having appeared in the 2013 video for A$AP Rocky’s “Fashion Killa” back when they were “just friends.” It was perhaps even Rihanna’s presence in the video that convinced Virgil Abloh (RIP) to direct.
The video was released after the two had already shared a little moment onstage at the 2012 VMAs, during which A$AP took the liberty of “subtly” squeezing her backside during a performance of “Cockiness”—which surely must have helped land him the gig as her opening act on the Diamonds World Tour in 2013, which kicked off in March, while “Fashion Killa” was later released in September. And maybe all that time on tour together is what helped develop such an authentic on-camera rapport. With the video opening on a vaping Rocky staring at an iPad (again, this was 2013), a casually-dressed Rihanna enters the penthouse through the elevator, coolly strolls down the hall and sits on the couch to cozy up to her future ex-husband.
The two are then seen in a high-end store all to themselves as Rihanna proceeds to make out with a mannequin (and this is where studio executives should have seen the spun gold idea of remaking Mannequin with her in the Andrew McCarthy role and A$AP in the Kim Cattrall one). Such are the perks of being given free rein on a private shopping spree.
The entire time all this is happening, there looms some ominous figure in the background that we keep thinking is going to pop out and mug them or some such. In the end, however, it’s just Kidult tagging the side of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street with the word “ART”—a whole 2012-era controversy unto itself. One that was loosely addressed when A$AP debuted the video on 106 & Park and commented of “using” Rihanna, “She’s a fashion killa in my eyes. I respect her jigginess. I respect her fashion sense so that’s why I used her as a female. It’s about art, the whole video, we wanted to base it off art.” Hence, also enlisting the then-popular Kidult to be peripherally in the video, with A$AP further adding, “We use his art and we use her art for being a fashion killa and made this conceptual video. Fashion is art.” Rihanna wouldn’t argue with that, nor the fact that the majority of her videos are art as well (maybe that’s part of why she had to stop making music—she was setting too many high precedents that would require her to top herself).
Especially the videos of Rihanna’s that were directed by Melina Matsoukas, which all have a very distinct aesthetic, including “Hard,” “Rude Boy,” “Rockstar 101,” “S&M,” “You Da One” and, of course, “We Found Love,” which garnered Matsoukas a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video. It is this song and visual in particular that “D.M.B.” seems to want to take the most inspiration from in terms of that toxic, ride-or-die dynamic that is so often romanticized… even in “tamer” songs like Jay-Z and Bey’s “03 Bonnie and Clyde.” The lyrics for which embody what A$AP is going for in “D.M.B.” Namely when Jay raps, “‘Cause mami’s a rider and I’m a roller/Put us together, how they gon’ stop both us?” It’s definitely “sweeter” than saying, “Dat’s my bitch (or, to wield the stylized rendering, “DAT$ MAH B!*$H”).
Incidentally, the video for “03 Bonnie and Clyde” was inspired by True Romance, another tale of love on the run from the law—heightening a two against the world rapport. This much is manifested in the chorus (sampled from 2Pac’s “Me and My Girlfriend”) sung by Jay and Bey, “All I need in this life of sin is me and my girlfriend/Down to ride ’til the very end, is me and my boyfriend.” This could now just as easily be declared by A$AP and Rihanna as the “D.M.B.” video paints another ride-or-die portrait that feels true to life. Especially in that scene of Rihanna going to greet A$AP as he gets out of the clink. Something that seems to still be a regular occurrence even after his Sweden wake-up call. And, ironically, it was in Sweden where “D.M.B.” got its first premiere via a commercial for a Swedish fin-tech company called Klarna. All the way back in mid-2021, when the images from the video were first being leaked—particularly those of A$AP and Rih chillin’ on a fire escape. After all, this is a “ghetto love tale,” as accented in the grotesque chorus, “Roll my blunt, fill my cup, be my bitch, rub my gut/Rub yo’ butt, be my slut, be my cunt, yeah, so what?/Fuck them hoes (that’s my bitch)/They don’t know nothin’.”
Things also get a little incestuous when Rocky announces, “I share my clothes with my bitch like she my sis.” He even allegedly shades Chris Brown—despite having previously appeared in his video for 2015’s “Picture Me Rollin’—when he raps, “I don’t beat my bitch, I need my bitch.” This toxic trope of the male as “protector” (see: The Northman) also appearing in Brown’s work, even if that “protector” feels obliged to be allowed himself to smack “his” woman around. But no, A$AP insists that’s not his vibe; he just happens to have a very 1950s ideal of a woman when he describes, “Shе clean my crib, she feed my friends/Shе keep my secret, she keep my fridge packed, my freezer lit.” This “fictional” aspect of the “ghetto love story” being at war with his true-to-life account of Rihanna’s wealth when he brags, “She got bank accounts too/With big amounts, shit you couldn’t count/Just pick the number that you couldn’t count to.”
And while Rihanna came from the far more picturesque backdrop of Barbados, A$AP has always been at home in the project aesthetic of Harlem (you know, the non-gentrified parts), which is what the video makes clear. The montage of hood images devolves into a collage style by the end, with direction from Rocky for AWGE (the creative agency founded by A$AP Rocky). A ghetto collage, if you will.
As he gets out of prison for the umpteenth time, one of the members of the crowd outside holds a sign that reads, “Free Rocky,” reminiscent of the period during his Sweden legal issues. The speed-up method of various moments in their relationship is then used again in the same way that “We Found Love” employed, itself an editing technique brought to the forefront by Madonna’s 1998 “Ray of Light” video.
At the time of “We Found Love” being released, Rihanna said of the video’s concept, “We’ve never done a video like this before. This is probably one of the deepest videos I’ve ever done … it’s all about love and love being like a drug, you definitely get that from this.” That’s also the sentiment A$AP wants to get across in the ride-or-die messaging of “D.M.B.” But, unlike the youthful folly and naïveté exhibited in “We Found Love,” the Rihanna of now ought to know better than to bother romanticizing a relationship that is anything less than “adult” (or, at the least, “kidult”). The damaging reiteration of “standing by your man” every time he fucks up isn’t something to be peddled as “true love,” so much as an outright disregard for oneself. This is something Rihanna acknowledges throughout “We Found Love,” even in the voiceover intro by British model Agyness Deyn, who laments, “It’s like you’re screaming, and no one can hear. You almost feel ashamed, that someone could be that important. That without them, you feel like nothing. No one will ever understand how much it hurts. You feel hopeless, like nothing can save you. And when it’s over and it’s gone, you almost wish you could have all that bad stuff back… so that you could have the good.”
With that, the crashing thunder and lightning appears (looking not unlike the later single cover for “This Is What You Came For”), leading us back to the beginning of Rih’s relationship with the so-called love of her life, played by Dudley O’Shaughnessy, who was accused of looking a lot like Chris Brown. For Rihanna, the “ghetto love story” takes place in Belfast, where her drug-addled romance flourishes amid skate parks, deserted fields and fish and chips restaurants. The decline of that high (mirrored by their drug-taking) begins around the two-minute, forty-eight second mark, when the Trans Am that was once a place of love starts to spin out of control, a literal image for a metaphorical state. And even the lyrics, “We found love in a hopeless place” can refer to a more figurative state that one is in, unexpectedly meeting a person who becomes like a drug because you encounter them while in need of some kind of “salvation.”
Spelling out “Yours” with a sparkler, the projected backdrop behind Rihanna changes into a fiery, explosive one. The highs of her drug use then start to become perilous as she ODs, passing out on the street at one point. This, too, reminds one of the dynamic presented in the 2006 movie Candy, starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish—complete with O’Shaughnessy spelling out “Mine” on Rihanna’s ass cheek with a needle (obviously, a response to her previously spelling out: “Yours”—albeit far less invasively).
This intensity of devotion is clearly what A$AP Rocky wants to convey in his own manner, yet it comes across as languid and non-committal. Perhaps a testament to how only in one’s youth can that level of intensity exist. In addition to the courage to actually finally decide to leave a toxic situation with the knowledge that you still have your whole life ahead of you to find someone better. In “D.M.B.,” Rihanna seems to have settled for a “milder” form of toxicity, choosing to stay rather than leave by the end of it.
As “fate” would have it, when Rihanna appeared in the video for “Fashion Killa,” A$AP foretold their haute couture destiny together in the lyrics, “And Versace, got a lot, but she may never wear it/But she save it so our babies will be flyer than their parents.” Hopefully, said babies will also be flyer in the sense that they won’t feel obliged to keep emphasizing the idea that toxic love (whether in “intensity” or “settling” mode) is the “best” love. But as we all know, generations tend to get worse the further down the line they go.
