Two new videos came out this week for songs sung by women in their early 20s. One is the one above. And while it's blatantly banking on reminding people of last year's smash hit "I Love the Way You Lie," and it's always creepy, because of what we know about her real-life past, to watch Rihanna flirting with the notion of domestic violence as turn-on, I like it. It's certainly very titillating. Like Requiem for a Dream, from which it also borrows heavily. The song itself is great, too, which certainly helps. Big dumb disco done just right. I think I like it more than any song of [...]

Since his all-time classic debut album Illmatic came out in 1994, Nas has all-too rarely sounded as hungry and as honest and as at ease with his prodigious rhyme skills as he did when he said, "When it's real, you're doing this even without a record contract." Unfortunately, since he got a big record contract and accepted the pressure to make big radio hits and sell millions of albums, he's not well-suited for the sort of high-end production with melodic choruses that tends to enable that. He's better over simple, less-adorned breakbeats. (The kind rappers tend to rap to even without a record contract.) Fortunately, for his oldest [...]

I don't know that I have ever seen a video that has less to do with the song it accompanies than this new one from Frank Ocean. Apparently, I mean. You never know the inner workings of an artist's mind. But judging from this, it seems that the title of the song might have been shortened from "Thinking About You and Cowboys-and-Indians Revenge Fantasies and Meteors and Witch Doctors and Magical Gemstones and Also Maybe Time Travel."