Rihanna, fellow Bajan singer Shontelle, and production duo R. City wrote the song with its main producer, Sham "Sak Pase".

They wrote it during a writing camp, in Los Angeles of March 2010, held by Rihanna's record label to gather compositions for possible inclusion on the then-untitled album.

The video was criticized by the Parents Television Council, Industry Ears and Mothers Against Violence, who faulted Rihanna for suggesting that murder is an acceptable form of justice for rape victims.

In March 2010, record label Def Jam held a writing camp in Los Angeles for songwriters and producers to compose material for possible inclusion on Rihanna's then-untitled fifth studio album, Loud.

[1] Ray Daniels, the manager of musical duo Rock City (brothers Theron and Timothy Thomas), was present during the sessions, and stated that a writing camp typically involves the label hiring ten recording studios for two weeks at the cost of $25,000 per day.

SAK PASE explained that he found a flight to Los Angeles and began working on music as soon as he arrived, stating that he had "nothing to lose and everything to gain".

[2] In an MTV News interview, Rock City said they intended to write a song that would embody Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" (1973) from a female perspective and to "tap [Rihanna's] island origins in a way that sounded authentic".

[2] In September 2010, several months after Sham attended the writing camp, Rihanna called him and said that she wanted to record "Man Down" for inclusion on Loud.

Kuk Harrell produced Rihanna's vocals with Josh Gudwin and Marcos Tovar at Westlake Recording Studios, also in Los Angeles.

The song was mixed by Manny Marroquin at Larrabee Sound Studios in Los Angeles, assisted by Erik Madrid and Christian Plata.

[17] Slant Magazine critic Sal Cinquemani described "Man Down" as one of Rihanna's "most confident vocal performances" with her strong Barbadian patois.

[19] Consequence of Sound writer Ryan Burleson said that "Man Down" and another album track called "Fading" both "stand on their own sonically", and that the former is an homage to her Caribbean heritage with its dancehall melody.

[16] In her review of Loud, Emily Mackay of NME called its experimentation more "organic" than that on Rihanna's previous album Rated R (2009), citing "Man Down"'s theme of "doomed youth".

[58] Although the song spent only one week on the Italian Singles Chart (at number eight), it was certified platinum by the Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana (FIMI) in 2014 for selling more than 30,000 copies.

"[61] On May 1, 2011, three camera phone teaser photos, of Rihanna on a beach in a white Dolce & Gabbana dress and riding a bicycle in Portland Parish, were released.

[61] In an interview for MTV News, Mandler said that "Man Down" required "a strong narrative and visual" and that fans could expect something "dramatic and shocking and intense and emotions and uplifting and enlightening".

Disheveled, the woman cries in the street after an implied sexual assault, and the video ends as she runs home to grab a gun hidden in a dresser drawer.

[64] Janell Hobson analysed the imagery presented in the video for "Man Down" in her book Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender, which "challenges postmodernist dismissals of identity politics and the delusional belief that the Millennial era reflects a 'postracial' and 'postfeminist' world.

Hobson writes: "Because of this, Rihanna has had to wrest back control of the 'victim' image foisted on her, and she in turn has challenged us rhetorically and visually to question and examine the power, danger, and violences that shape our relationships."

[65] However, Hobson noted that Rihanna "rejects the victim stance" in the video for "Man Down", and elucidated that she played the role of a rape survivor who shot her attacker.

She attributed the location of shooting the video in Jamaica as significant, due to how the image of a gun proliferated during 1990s Jamaican dance hall's to "express female rage".

The prologue depicts Rihanna as a "dark-hooded" femme fatale whereby the narrative explains her motives for murder and provokes the spectator to sympathize with her because she danced in a provocative manner with a man in a club, which Hobson suggests is "somehow deserving of rape".

[69] According to the PTC and Industry Ears, if Chris Brown murdered a woman in a video that premiered on BET "the world would stop" and Rihanna should not have been allowed to release her clip.

[68][69] The week before the council's statement about the video it had objected to Rihanna and Britney Spears' performance of the "S&M" remix at the Billboard Music Awards, having called it a "profanity-laced, S&M sex show on prime-time broadcast television".

Shepard added that Eminem and Rihanna's video for "Love the Way You Lie" had not been criticized, despite the fact that she felt that it "glorified and romanticized" domestic violence.

[71] A Mothers Against Violence spokesperson criticised Rihanna for failing to present a solution, rather than encouraging the vulnerable youth, for which rape is a reality for many people.

[68] Director Anthony Mandler addressed the controversy in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter, saying that the visual evoked the reaction he intended and that it highlighted an issue still taboo in modern society.

[80] However, Gary Graff of The Oakland Press was disappointed with the lack of variety in the section, writing that it was "addled by a sonic sameness, even with Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme, whose guitar was buried in the bass-heavy mix, playing some intriguing licks and accents".

[79] British singer and songwriter Leona Lewis performed a mashup of "Man Down" with her 2008 single "Better in Time" at BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge in June 2011.

Katherine Hollisey-McLean of the Worthing Herald complimented the fusion of "Better in Time" with reggae beats,[85] while The Guardian's Malcolm Jack thought the performance was "cringey" and called Lewis a "reasonably priced Rihanna".