Throughout March, singer Rihanna will be touring to promote her new album, Unapologetic.
This is just the latest move in the recording-breaking career of the international superstar. Rihanna is number 4 in the 2012 Forbes Celebrity 100. She earns over $50 million per year. She is the most popular person on Facebook. And she’s just 24 years old.
Somebody help me
The Barbadian performer is known for her commanding voice and hit list of catchy songs — including the iconic ‘Umbrella’ — which blend Caribbean reggae and R&B. Her first release in 2005 positioned her as a party-loving socialite who just wants to dance: ‘Mr. DJ, won’t you turn the music up?’ By the time she released A Girl Like Me (2006), her mischievous sensuality was becoming obvious. Her flirtatious pleas for someone to save her from the irresistible lures of music and love seemed harmless: ‘S.O.S., please, someone come and rescue me’.
But when Good Girl Gone Bad was released in 2007, the title was a warning that the sultry star was going to cause trouble. The lyrics on the opening track hinted at her tendency to get carried away by the hedonistic atmosphere: ‘I just came here to party / But now we're [...] actin' naughty [...] I just can't refuse it [...] Please don't stop the music’. For as long as the beat keeps pulsing, she can distract herself and postpone her regrets.
Then, in 2008, she dramatically glided onto the stage at the MTV Awards in a gothic corset and fishnets, surrounded a cloud of dry ice and zombies. Her Thriller-esque performance of ‘Disturbia’ blamed her outlandish behaviour on something that was taking her over, ‘a disease of the mind / [that] can control you’. Rihanna was still a victim of sorts, but she was no longer an impish party girl. She was a ‘fine-tuned supersonic speed machine’ (‘Shut Up and Drive’) and, by the time she released Rated R (2009), she had become a straight-talking, leather-clad sex symbol.
But what prompted her sudden transformation from damsel in distress to fiery fighter?
Love in a hopeless place
In 2009 it was revealed that Rihanna has been the subject of domestic abuse at the hands of her musician boyfriend Chris Brown. She was determined to appear to her fans as strong and resilient, a phoenix rising from the ashes. So she released Loud in 2010, which opened with the defiantly masochistic ‘S&M’, in which she sang, ‘the pain is my pleasure’. Her duet with Eminem about a violent relationship repeated the same argument: ‘I like the way it hurts’.
Then came Talk That Talk (2011) featuring ‘We Found Love’, supported by a music video which made further uncomfortable allusions to her abusive ex-boyfriend. However, the video is better known because a farmer withdrew permission for his land to be used after seeing Rihanna’s ‘inappropriate state of undress’. He suggested that she needed to ‘be acquainted with God and to consider his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection’. Perhaps he was hoping that things would be better is she ‘found love in a hopeless place’ — a love that could lift her out of the darkness which was taking over.
A universal cry
I am often tempted to rant about Rihanna, to claim that she has contributed more to the pornification of the music industry in this country than any other star in the last decade and that her public response to a crushing personal tragedy was feckless and damaging.
Perhaps in these moments I need to remember that while her actions may not be admirable, we are all lost and in need of rescue. We all suffer the painful effects of sin and struggle to find peace. We are all tempted to find ways of filling the void we feel, or distracting ourselves from it.
And when Rihanna calls for someone to rescue her or asks for ‘somebody tell me how to mend a broken-hearted soul’ (‘Lost in Paradise’), she is giving voice to a need that we all feel when we’re cut off from the true redemptive love of God.
Rachel Helen Smith works as an events planner and freelance writer in Cambridge. More of her articles are available at http://www.rachelhelensmith.com
