When a Rihanna stan account posted a video of a locked down neighborhood in coronavirus-stricken Italy coming together to sing "Bitch Better Have My Money," the idea of people making the best of a bad situation with a little help from Robyn Fenty seemed too good to be true.
It was.
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The video, which has 95,000 retweets and over 300,000 likes as of now, is fake. It does show isolated Italians singing together on their balconies, but the audio was dubbed on top from another source.
Everyone's flawless American accents should have been the first clue that something was up. And the fact that all those people knew every word to "Bitch Better Have My Money," which is more likely to happen at an actual Rihanna concert.
Fear not though, the real audio is almost as delightful as the fake. In a plot twist that seems to indicate we can have nice things, those isolated Italians are actually...doing the Macarena.
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Yup. They're having a throwback dance-off in isolation. The original video was included in a collection of videos compiled by Leonardo Carella, an Italian doctoral candidate at Oxford, who identified the city as Turin in a longer thread showing people playing music in Naples, Siena, Florence, and a number of other cities.
A close look at the Turin video does indeed show people doing the Macarena's unmistakable dance moves, booty-shakes and all, which is the third clue that something was up with the Rihanna audio.
Seriously, there are like five songs that require extremely distinctive dances and this is one of them. Any other video would have been easier to fake.
Still, the Rihanna clip did its job in spreading joy and Fenty fever, and no one is under any obligation to stop sharing it. Just know that coronavirus can't stop the internet from being the internet and to take even the benign things with a grain of salt.
Topics COVID-19
