{"id":1229,"date":"2012-11-18T11:56:17","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T11:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/up\/wordpress\/2012\/11\/18\/rihanna-turns-a-negative-into-a-positive\/"},"modified":"2022-10-29T15:02:01","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T14:02:01","slug":"rihanna-turns-a-negative-into-a-positive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/rihanna-turns-a-negative-into-a-positive\/","title":{"rendered":"Rihanna turns a negative into a positive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Only four years after the singer Rihanna broke through with her magnetic hit \u201cUmbrella,\u201d the brand Rihanna has firmly established itself. The brand has quarterly deadlines to hit, profit margins to tally, employs highly skilled professionals to have meetings on the comings and goings of one of the world\u2019s preeminent pop stars. And when the seductress from Barbados has a fresh product to launch, as she does with her new album \u201cUnapologetic,\u201d the machine runs in overdrive.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>Were all this effort in service of a new fast-food burger launch \u2014 \u201cUnapologetic\u201d is the aural equivalent \u2014 the pitch might read, \u201cMore defiant, now featuring dubstep!\u201d Which is to say, while the new Rihanna record may be at times sonically exciting, what resides beneath the new bass-heavy, Skrillex-inspired music is still a fast-food burger, one with a lot of extra sauce and some very disturbing ingredients. Said trouble arrives within \u201cNobodies Business,\u201d a duet between pop singers Rihanna and her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, and anyone who\u2019s been following their tempestuous relationship \u2014 it got violent the night before the 2009 Grammy Awards \u2014 can fill in the blanks.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>A love song, \u201cNobodies Business\u201d is like a sad inversion of Sonny and Cher\u2019s \u201cI Got You Babe.\u201d Instead of singing about connection, true love and wanting to shout it to the world, the song features a convicted abuser and the woman he assaulted asking everyone to shut up and leave them alone.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>She and Brown sing these words as a duet, which negates their entire argument; it feels like a pose that only invites a new round of media attention, something that both had to understand when they were singing it in the studio. It\u2019s a little sickening, because for the first time since the incident, her addressing the complicated issue feels not like a defence of love but a marketing manoeuvre, a way of turning a negative into a positive. That she follows \u201cNobodies Business\u201d with \u201cLove Without Tragedy\/Mother Mary\u201d is even more confusing. After just informing her listeners that there\u2019s nothing more to say, she seems to dredge up that fateful night in the song\u2019s opening verse. \u201cWho knew the course of this one drive \/ injured us fatally \/ You took the best years of my life \/ I took the best years of your life.\u201d Then she goes further: \u201cFelt like love struck me in the night \/ I prayed that love don\u2019t strike twice.\u201d It\u2019s tough to stomach, hearing her describe being struck by what she calls love; its usage mirrors the refrain of the Crystals\u2019 1962 anachronism \u201cHe Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>Granted, a contrary argument can be made that Rihanna is merely shining light on the darkness, which is one responsibility of an artist. By exploring love\u2019s many conflicting emotions \u2013 some of which can indeed be dangerous \u2014 she\u2019s providing necessary air. That argument, though, assumes we\u2019re talking about art here, and not commerce. Another nausea-inducing track, \u201cPour It Up,\u201d suggests that the latter is the main goal of \u201cUnapologetic.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>The opening line \u2014 \u201cThrow it up, watch it all fall out\u201d \u2014 seems like an ode to getting sick, in fact, until it becomes clear that Rihanna is singing about money, strip clubs, doing shots of tequila and \u201cmaking it rain\u201d with bills. These lyrical turns poison her seventh studio album, a title whose meaning reeks of defensiveness instead of defiance, even while musically, Rihanna has evolved into one of the more forward-thinking pop divas. She\u2019s gone all-in on dubstep, the bass-heavy subgenre featuring wobbly synthetic noises and big, noisy bass-drops. Half the record, in fact, features hints of dubstep. Others draw on the \u201cchopped and screwed\u201d sounds of Houston and good old-fashioned dance pop. Featuring slow, down-pitched snares and a crawling momentum, the most notable of these, \u201cNumb,\u201d is a duet with rapper Eminem, who\u2019s repaying Rihanna for the \u201cLove the Way You Lie\u201d chorus that revived his career. But this is not that, and the following lyric should explain why. After becoming a metaphorical cop in \u201cNumb,\u201d Eminem describes himself like this: \u201cI\u2019m the siren that you hear \/ I\u2019m the butt police, and I\u2019m looking at your rear, rear, rear.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<p><strong>Eminem, one of the greatest rappers in the genre\u2019s history, wrote that line. Rihanna can be as unapologetic as she feels she needs to be, and can support Brown all she wants. But when she starts dragging down Eminem, somebody needs to atone.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only four years after the singer Rihanna broke through with her magnetic hit \u201cUmbrella,\u201d the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,56],"tags":[69,1119,1438,515,1436,1437],"class_list":["post-1229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrity","category-news","tag-a","tag-into","tag-negative","tag-positive","tag-rihanna","tag-turns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3064,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions\/3064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}