September 13th, 2012
Let’s Talk About Rihanna
Once upon a time, Nivea blessed me with a skybox suite setup to soak in her Wells Fargo tour stop. I took my Rihanna-loving friend and we had a gay ole’ time. She put on quite a show. A half-dozen outfits, an army of backup dancers, colors galore, a conveyor-belt runway and hi-tech visuals made the show really somethin’. And recently she announced a Spring tour with a Philadelphia stop on it: she’ll “dazzle” Wells Fargo Center with her Diamonds world tour on March 14th.
Meow, a lot has happened in the last year. First, she got beat within an inch of her life by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown. It was all over ‘the news.’ Then Talk That Talk happened. One of the most successful records of her life, it spawned the bigger-than-big single “We Found Love” (which recently won a VMA for Video of the Year – do people care about those anymore?). Holy Crap, it has over 200 million views. Then she talked to Oprah. And then Chris Brown got a tattoo of a (seemingly) beaten woman on his neck.
It’s a prickly topic. She doesn’t want to be the poster woman for survivors of domestic abuse. Fine. She also admits to loving the man who was convicted of beating the shit out of her. Okayyyy. Finally, she also admits to having grown up with an addict father who beat her mother. And everyone and their BFF has something to say about her/it/them: “HOW COULD SHE GO BACK TO HIM!?” “IF SHE FORGIVES HIM SHE’LL JUST GET BEAT DOWN AGAIN!” “SHE’S A MESS AND NEEDS HELP!” Maybe that’s just what I hear from the din of chatter that surrounds the Illumanti princess and Jay-Z pawn.
Furthermore, she’s not a brilliant vocalist, songwriter, dancer or artist. But I just love her. Talk, Loud and Good Girl Gone Bad are three of my favorite discs of the genre. She either knows how to pick the right producers, or someone she trusts and employs knows how to pick the right producers FOR her. Her and her camp know how to craft songs that coddle her Barbadian wail and it is working for her. Here’s hoping another corporate sponsor will drop another pair of free tickets in my Inbox but tickets go on sale on Saturday at noon.
Here’s a link to her VMA-opening performance of “Cockiness” with A$AP Rocky into “We Found Love.”
