S&M

The Hook: A Song That Wasn't Really About the Bedroom

Ask most people what "S&M" is about and they will smirk and say one word: sex. That is exactly what Rihanna wanted you to think first. The title is a provocation, the beat is a strobe-lit Eurodance stomp, and the video is a candy-coloured parade of latex, rope and ball gags. It got the song banned, age-restricted and argued about in newspaper columns across two continents.

But the most surprising thing about "S&M" is that its real target was never a lover. It was the media. Rihanna has said in interviews that the song and its video were partly a response to the way journalists and gossip sites treated her, and once you know that, the whole thing flips. The whips and chains become metaphors. The "pain" becomes the endless headlines, the judgement, the commentary from strangers. And the pleasure is something cooler and harder: the decision to stop flinching and start enjoying the fight.

It is a pop song wearing a fetish costume to deliver a message about fame. That double layer is why it still feels clever more than fifteen years later.

Background: Barbados, a Bad Year, and a Bright Red Reinvention

To understand "S&M," you have to rewind to 2009. Robyn Rihanna Fenty, the girl from Saint Michael, Barbados, who had been discovered by producer Evan Rogers and signed to Def Jam as a teenager, was by then one of the biggest stars in the world. "Umbrella" had made her a global name. Then, in February 2009, came the assault by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown on the night before the Grammys. Photos leaked. Every detail of her private trauma became public property, discussed on morning TV and in tabloid columns from Los Angeles to London.

Her 2009 album "Rated R" was dark, guarded and steely, the sound of someone building armour. Then, in 2010, she did something nobody quite expected. She dyed her hair a vivid fire-engine red and released "Loud," an album bursting with colour, humour and swagger. It was a deliberate shift from survival mode back to fun, and "S&M" was one of its boldest statements.

The song was crafted with the Norwegian production team Stargate (Mikkel S. Eriksen and Tor Erik Hermansen), the French DJ and producer Sandy Vee, and songwriter Ester Dean, who had a gift for writing bratty, unforgettable hooks. The sound is pure early-2010s European club pop: a pounding four-on-the-floor kick, buzzing synths, and a chorus built to be shouted back by thousands of people at once. It sits comfortably next to the electropop wave that was dominating radio at the time, but Rihanna's half-laughing, half-snarling delivery gives it a personality all its own.

There is a strong British thread running through the song's story, too. "Loud" was a huge record in the UK, and "S&M" became one of the defining tracks of Rihanna's Loud Tour, which reportedly included a run of around ten sold-out nights at London's O2 Arena in late 2011. It also became a lightning rod for the UK's long-running arguments about what is suitable for daytime radio and pre-watershed television. For a British audience, "S&M" is not just a pop hit; it is a little time capsule of the moment the culture wars over music videos really heated up.

Core Meaning: Turning the Whip Around

Lyrically, "S&M" works on two levels at once, and the fun is in watching them blur.

On the first level, the narrator is simply owning her appetites. She describes herself as someone who might look sweet but who openly enjoys being a little bad, someone thrilled by danger and unapologetic about what turns her on. There is a teasing quality to it, a woman telling the listener that she is not embarrassed and not asking for permission. In 2010, for a female pop star to sing that openly about kink on mainstream radio was still enough to make programmers nervous.

On the second level, the language of pain and pleasure becomes a code for celebrity. The chorus takes an old playground saying about insults never really hurting you and twists it into something more defiant: not just that words can't hurt her, but that she has learned to take a kind of thrill from them. The criticism, the scandal, the moral panic about her outfits and her choices, she absorbs it all and grins. The message is that the people trying to wound her are actually feeding her.

That reading is not a fan theory dreamed up after the fact. The video makes it explicit. Rihanna has spoken about wanting to poke fun at the press, and director Melina Matsoukas built the clip around that idea. In one of its most memorable scenes, Rihanna sits at a press conference in front of reporters who are literally bound and gagged, their mouths taped shut. In another, she leads gossip blogger Perez Hilton around on a leash. Newspaper headlines flash by with labels slapped on her. The journalists who had controlled her narrative are suddenly the ones being controlled.

So the "S" and the "M" stand for more than the obvious. They describe the relationship between a star and the public: the press dishes out punishment, the star is supposed to submit. Rihanna takes that script and flips the power, playing the dominatrix to the whole media machine. Seen that way, the song is less about sex than about control, consent and who gets to write the story of a woman's body and life.

Cultural Context and Legacy

The reaction to "S&M" was almost a proof of its point. The video was reportedly banned or restricted in around eleven countries. YouTube placed an age restriction on it. Several American radio stations reportedly retitled the song "Come On" to avoid saying the initials on air. In the UK, broadcasters reportedly limited when the video could be shown, and edited versions circulated for daytime play. The more people tried to hide it, the more people went looking for it, which is exactly the dynamic the song was mocking.

There was legal drama too. The photographer David LaChapelle sued, claiming that several scenes in the video closely resembled his own images. The case was reportedly settled out of court, but it sparked a lively debate about where homage ends and borrowing begins in the visual language of pop.

Then came the masterstroke. In April 2011, a remix featuring Britney Spears was released. Britney, of course, knew more than anyone about life under the tabloid microscope, and her presence turned the song into a duet between two women who had both been chewed up by the press. The remix helped push "S&M" to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, reportedly Rihanna's tenth chart-topper there, making her one of the fastest artists to reach that milestone. In the UK it was a big hit as well, reportedly peaking at number three on the Official Singles Chart and becoming a staple of club nights and student unions for years.

The song also helped cement a new template for Rihanna. After "S&M," she was no longer just the hitmaker with the great voice and the great singles. She was the star who could take scandal, sexuality and public judgement and turn them into art and spectacle on her own terms. You can draw a line from this song to the fearless, joking, boundary-pushing persona that would later carry her through "Anti," the Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty empires, and her famously unbothered public image.

Why It Still Resonates Today

Listen to "S&M" now, in an era of social media pile-ons and viral outrage, and its message feels almost prophetic. In 2010, the main enemies were tabloids and gossip blogs. Today, everyone with a phone can become a critic, and anyone can become the target of a mass shaming. The idea at the heart of the song, that you can refuse to let other people's cruelty define you, and even find a strange freedom in laughing back at it, speaks directly to that world.

The song has also aged into something of an anthem of sexual self-confidence. For many listeners, especially women and LGBTQ+ fans, it was one of the first mainstream pop songs to treat kink not as a shameful secret or a punchline, but as a normal and even joyful part of who someone might be. It arrived just before "Fifty Shades of Grey" made the subject a bestseller-list talking point, and it helped make the conversation feel less taboo.

And on a purely musical level, it still works. The beat hasn't gone stale. The chorus is still instantly singable. Drop it into a DJ set and a room full of people who were children when it came out will scream along. That combination of a smart message and an undeniable hook is rare, and it is why "S&M" remains one of the most distinctive entries in Rihanna's catalogue: a song that dressed up as a dirty joke and turned out to be a manifesto.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Loud (2010), the full album — Hearing "S&M" in context shows how deliberately Rihanna swung from the darkness of "Rated R" into colour and fun. Tracks like "Only Girl (In the World)" and "What's My Name?" share its bright, confident energy, while "California King Bed" shows the tender side of the same era. Together they sound like someone deciding to enjoy life loudly again.
• The Britney Spears remix of "S&M" — This is the version that took the song to the top of the US charts, and it changes the meaning in a fascinating way. Two women who had both been dissected by the press trade lines over the same beat, turning the track into a shared, knowing wink at their critics. It is a small piece of pop history worth hearing back to back with the original.
• Rated R (2009) — To feel the full force of the "Loud" reinvention, go back one album. "Rated R" is moody, guarded and full of armour, the sound of someone surviving a public nightmare. Play it before "Loud" and the defiance of "S&M" lands with much more weight.

📚 Follow the story

• Rihanna (the photo book, 2019) — Rihanna's huge visual autobiography follows her from Barbados to global stardom in hundreds of images. Paging through the "Loud" era, with its red hair and bold styling, shows how carefully she controlled her own image at exactly the moment the media was trying to control it for her. It is the visual companion to the song's message.
• The work of Melina Matsoukas — The director behind the "S&M" video went on to make Beyoncé's "Formation" and the film "Queen & Slim," and to direct episodes of "Insecure." Reading interviews with her about her collaborations with Rihanna reveals how much thought went into the satire of the press in this clip. It turns a "shocking" video into a piece of considered visual commentary.
• Coverage of the David LaChapelle lawsuit — Looking back at the reporting on the photographer's claim against the video is a surprisingly gripping read. It opens up a bigger conversation about how pop music borrows from fine art and fashion photography. You will never watch a glossy music video the same way again.

🌍 Visit the places

• Saint Michael and Bridgetown, Barbados — Rihanna grew up in the parish of Saint Michael, and the street where she lived in the Westbury area has reportedly been renamed Rihanna Drive. Walking through Bridgetown, a UNESCO World Heritage site, you can feel the island confidence and humour that run through her music. It is the starting point of the whole story.
• The O2 Arena, London — During the Loud Tour, Rihanna reportedly played around ten nights at the O2, one of the defining runs of her UK career. "S&M" was a highlight of those shows, a full-volume singalong under the lights. Standing on the Greenwich Peninsula, you are at one of the places where the song truly came alive for British fans.
• Los Angeles, California — The "S&M" video was shot in Los Angeles, the city that is also home to much of the celebrity press the song was satirising. A wander through Hollywood, with its paparazzi hotspots and tabloid culture, makes the video's mockery of the media feel very real. It is the natural habitat of the very machine Rihanna was talking back to.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Build your own "Loud" night — Put together a playlist of "Loud" era singles and early-2010s club pop, then play it front to back. Notice how "S&M" stands out with its mix of humour and defiance. Hearing it among its peers shows how far Rihanna pushed the mainstream at the time.
• Watch the video with fresh eyes — Sit down with the official video and ignore the costumes for a moment. Instead, count every reference to journalists, headlines and media control. Once you start seeing the satire, the clip turns from a shock-value spectacle into a sharp, funny piece of commentary.
• Try a dance-pop production session — Free music software lets you rebuild the basic ingredients of the track: a heavy four-on-the-floor kick, a buzzing synth line and a big shouted chorus. Even a rough attempt will show you how Stargate and Sandy Vee built something so simple yet so addictive. It is a hands-on way to appreciate the craft behind the hook.

🎵 Listen to this song