On the Real: Agency, Abuse, and Sexualized Violence in Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette”

Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette,” her first single released after the domestic-violence incident involving her then-boyfriend Chris Brown, offers a key instructive moment that intersects the critical matrix of how we define and understand hip hop, gendered contributions to and experiences of the genre, and female hip-hop artists’ negotiation of complex issues of gender, sex, and violence. I argue that if we understand hip hop in its various, broadly imagined iterations, we can read Rihanna as a female hip-hop artist enmeshed in hip hop’s narrative production of “realness” through the discourses of sex and violence. The reality of a presumably private domestic-abuse scenario disrupts the constructed nature of the “keeping-it-real” posture upon which hip-hop discourse depends for its “cult of authenticity.” Arguing against theoretical positions that cast cultural performance as merely figurative, performative, or tropological, I suggest that Rihanna’s domestic-abuse scenario and subsequent “choice” to craft an eroticized response to it in the cover art for “Russian Roulette” constitute an elision of the public/private and real/performative discursive binaries. Such binaries converge to problematize notions of choice and consent for women who might otherwise be (reductively) read as complicit in their own gendered and sexual subjugation.