Does it matter if Rihanna likes the way it hurts?

This post serves as a companion to my post from July 4th on Eminem's newest album.

These days it seems that Rihanna is everywhere – the style pages of your favorite magazine, the top of the charts with her sassy spring hit “Rude Boy” and follow-up videos for singles “Rockstar 101” and “Te Amo,” and most recently singing the hook for Eminem’s new single “Love the Way You Lie.” The track comes off Em’s new album Recovery which is going into its fourth week at the top of the Billboard charts and the collabo with Rihanna is perched at number two in the Billboard 100. But what is the message of “Love the Way You Lie”?

On the chorus RiRi sings:
Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
Well that's alright because I like the way it hurts Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
Well that's alright because I love the way you lie I love the way you lie

Em’s raps describe a volatile and toxic relationship where both parties are to blame for the ongoing drama but only Rihanna is singing the chorus about being set on fire and liking it. “Love the Way You Lie” is a hot track – perfectly blending Em’s dead serious nasal raps with RiRi’s cold slightly accented delivery. But it’s also a troubling track given Rihanna’s very public relationship with Chris Brown. When Rihanna broke her silence about the night that the couple missed the Grammys because Brown hit her, she told Diane Sawyer on 20/20 that she left her abusive ex upon realizing how much her fans, especially little girls, were looking to her as their role model and example. How then do we reconcile this with the message given in this song – the message that the woman enjoys the pain of abuse, loves it even? Eminem may be presenting the disturbing nature of women’s denial of their abusive relationships and the ways that love can often blind them to the bruises and emotional scars, but I cannot get past the choice of Rihanna to sing on a track with this message.

The Rihanna of “Love the Way You Lie” is a far cry from the Rihanna that we first saw on 20/20 last fall, a defiant independent woman that on her Rated R album fights back against Brown on song after song. I am not arguing that we need to censor songs but rather that Rihanna and Chris Brown are for many tweens and teens their first public brush with intimate partner violence. Many of us were too young for Ike and Tina’s very public divorce, or even the film version with Angela Bassett. But many of us watched Rihanna’s interview and Brown’s subsequent (and in my opinion lame and self-serving) attempts to apologize. We read the blogs. We watched the YouTube videos. We rolled our eyes or deeply believed in C-Breezy’s sobbing breakdown at the BET Awards a couple weeks ago. And now “Love the Way You Lie” is part of that ongoing conversation. What message does this send to those little girls that look up to Rihanna? The girls that want her hair, her clothes, her superstar life?

When the music video drops in a few weeks, I’ll be interested to see what Em’s concocted to match his disturbing lyrics.