WS - Deconstruction 5 - Love The Way You Lie ft.Rihanna - Eminem

Artist - Eminem feat. Rihanna

Song Title - Love The Way You Lie 

Year -  2010

Genre - Hardcore Hip Hop

Director - Joseph Kahn


Love The Way You Lie ft Rihanna by American rapper Eminem is arguably the most powerful video I have looked at, in terms of meaning behind the song, and what happens in the visual aspect of the video.

The song is about a man who loves a woman, but she does not love him back. The video takes this to the next level and incorporates abuse into the relationship, a topic which many people have very strong feelings on.

This is an example of an artist and producer tackling a topic that is relevant to everyday people and a topic which they feel strongly about. It also shows that you can take the visuals in a video to a new level, while still keeping it relevant to the lyrics, and shows that the lyrics can be relevant, without matching them up exactly with the visuals.

The song is part of the Hardcore hip hop genre, often characterized by "an aggressive sound and confrontational lyricism reflecting the urban black male experience".

The lyrics in this song can be linked into the visuals and they do 'compliment' each other, however it is not as strong a link between them as there is in the "JCB song" video for example.  


The video stars Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan as the tweo characters for the Narrative parts of the video. Inter-cut into the Narrative scenes are shots of Eminem and Rihanna singing, and lip-synching is used in these parts. By using Fox and Monaghan, the video gets immediate attention as they are quite 'big' names in the entertainment industry, Fox in particular. It could be argued that both Fox and Monaghan appeal to the female gaze and male gaze theories respectively, which I have in an earlier post, suggested is a common thing in music videos. 

Joseph Khan, the director of the music video said the following about the video:

"We wanted to make a specific story about two people—Meg[an] and Dom[inic]—not a video that was representative of all couples or all domestic violence situations. Megan was the key to this video. I feel like people constantly pick on her because she’s so beautiful but I’ll tell you as a director the reason why their scenes in the video feel so real is because in the moment they were real."

The reason I have highlighted this quote is to show the importance of casting in a music video. The Director of the video has put a lot of emphasis on Fox for why the video was a success.

While I haven't been able to find an exact budget for this video, it is clear that it will have been high for a music video, especially a video in 2010 when Digitalisation has made watching music videos online for free much simpler. I would suspect the budgt to be large due to the actors starring in the video, as well as the special effects, such as the fire on the people.

The video is both Performance based and Narrative based, often inter-cutting between the two. Rihanna and Eminem perform the Performance based parts, while Fox and Monaghan act in the Narrative pats of the video. This is an idea that I will think about should I choose an idea that incorporates both aspects; using different people for the acting and performing parts of the video.