Every so often, an album comes along that makes me want to write more than sing its songs.  The album is worth more on an analytical level than it is on a musical one, and thus, I always think about what I would say about it if asked, but never have a place for those collections of thought.  And then, when someone DOES ask me what I think of the album, I thrust as many tidbits from this imaginary article I’ve written in my mind at them when all they really wanted to know is if I liked it or not.

When entertaining the idea of getting a blog, I always figured that’s where I would put these reviews and so today, I want to start the process by offering my thoughts on what I consider to be one of the most exciting mainstream pop recordings of my short lifetime thus far.  That album is Rihanna’s “Rated R,” and my enticement with this recording isn’t based on any actual merit the songs contain, but rather, the fact that “Rated R” offers one of the most artistic leaps forward of any pop artist I’ve ever witnessed.  Just two years prior to its release, Rihanna’s previous endeavor “Good Girl Gone Bad’ was so purely radio-desperate, so nonsensically disjointed in its attempt to make every song distinctly perfect pop that the hooks were almost predictable.  Sure, the album spawned several top-10 hits and boosted Rihanna leaps and bounds above where she was before (and “Umbrella” is considered by pretty much every reputable magazine as one of the decade’s best songs) but regarding thought-worthy substance, the album lacked.  MY favorite offering from the batch of pre-packaged semi-gems was a small M.I.A.-influenced Timbaland track that hardly anyone knows, in which RiRi ponders upon the worth of a suitor’s love versus the worth of a new set of furniture.  It was one of those albums where, as the tracklist progressed, the songs were considered less and less important (aka likely to chart) to the label.  The hits came first, and the rest came last.  And that favored jam of mine (“Lemme Get That”) was number 9 out of 14 (right after “Sell Me Candy”, which not even I remember…)

A few months before the grand release of “Rated R” there was talk about Rihanna being more creatively involved this time, which didn’t excite me too much because, well, ANY creative involvement on her part would be an improvement from her three previous albums.  Getting Rihanna to write a song is like getting a toddler to drive a bus: I’ll applaud that bitch just for sitting in the drivers’ seat for a few seconds.  Which is a far more apt metaphor than it appears, since, when glancing at the songwriting credits of “Rated R”, Rihanna shows up here and there, always a ways down the list, more experienced songwriters (many times in abundance) boasting their names long before her’s gets credit.  Co-co-writer at best, and most of the time, not even that.  I can’t help but imagine a songwriting session with Rihanna, showing up an hour and a half late, humming a little, then leaving for a coffee and cigarette break with Katy Perry.

But let’s cut the girl some slack (not that I’m not already doing that, considering her album one of my all-time favorites).  It’s overly common knowledge that between “Good Girl Gone Bad” and “Rated R”, our girl had some trouble that would scar (pun DEFINITELY not intended) anyone, let alone someone who had to deal with it in front of the literal entire world.  She had broken up with someone she was madly in love with—who, still to this day, continues to almost STRIVE to prove he’s heinously one of the worst human beings around—from wearing a giant “OOPS!” chain after he beat our beloved superstar to releasing a despicable album that purposely strays from anything that could be taken as apologetic (…or good music), to, more recently, ruining a tribute to Michael Jackson, the single best, most angelic entertainer of all time (a tribute that Brown didn’t have the talent or, again, reputation, to even acquire said privilege anyway!) The easiest thing Rihanna could’ve done was come out with “Good Girl Gone Bad: Part II” (“GGGB: Reloaded” was already taken thanks to the “Disturbia”-added rerelease in 2008), another strand of 14 hits, 7 of which would’ve taken over our radios for another good two years.  Not only would it have been the easiest, but it would’ve been the most expected and totally accepted option too.  In an interview, Ne-Yo revealed that this was the plan, but RiRi scrapped all the pop hits they had come up with in favor of an art-album.  I’m glad she did, but she certainly didn’t have to: I was ready for another set of Rihanna megahits!  Sure, why not?  Then her tour would’ve done fine and she would’ve been back on top.

So, imagine my surprise when upon purchasing “Rated R,” I witnessed it begin with a Twilight-zone-inspired, dark, trippy, dubstepy, frightening 1 minute and 35 second taunt, void of ANY radio potential whatsoever, but still fucking awesome.  “Ladies and Gentleman, for those among you who are easily frightened, we suggest you turn away now.  For those of you who think they can take it, we say: Welcome to the Madhouse.”  Aside from a few “Na-na-na-na-na’s” and “Come on in”’s, these are the only words spoken.  The minor key and the deep cut of the bass lured me in, and I was ready.  But then, get this: Not even the NEXT song seems prepared for the airwaves!  That’s right—it’s not until the third track, “Hard”, where we see—hear—anything resembling what could logically exist next to the likes of Ke$ha or Gaga’s instant catchiness.  This is when I realized “Rated R” was Rihanna’s first actual ALBUM.

The first time I sampled “Rated R” in its entirety, I was in my car, driving around Conway with my friends.  One of whom pointed out, while listening to “Hard”, that it seemed Rihanna was bragging about her newfound strength post-Chris Brown.  She can’t be touched; she’s gone through something that has hardened her, so don’t even try.  Considering this to be the case, I viewed “Rated R” as Rihanna’s attempt to boast and maintain her swagger while simultaneously being hindered by her vulnerability, haunted by trauma post-Brown.  While this Is interesting enough, upon further examination, I see it a bit differently.  If “Rated R” is a concept album (and yes, I DO give it that much credit.  If Ludacris can call “Battle of the Sexes” a concept album, so can Rihanna…), then the concept, to me at least, is one girl’s life and mentality before and after a perfect relationship gone horribly un-perfect in a totally unexpected, random way. 

If this is the case, “Hard” is a declaration of Rihanna’s strength and happiness with her boyfriend.  “That Rihanna reign just won’t let up” she brags, “My runway never looked so clear, got the hottest bitch in heels right here.”  Sure, there are the lyrical moments that suggest a kick in the ass or middle finger to Mr. Brown (“While you’re getting your cry on, I’m getting my fly on”) but spare me those for a moment in favor of a portrait of her success while it existed with him.  While she was with Brown, she was on top of the world.  While she was with him, she had the year’s biggest hit and a remix of said hit (“Cinderella”) that featured him and did pretty well itself.  She was breaking records left and right with her unprecedented chart-singles-to-album-quantity ratio (“Umbrella”, “Don’t Stop The Music”, “Shut Up and Drive”, “Hate That I Love You”, “Rehab” and eventually “Disturbia” AND “Take a Bow” ALL coexisted on the SAME album, “GGGB”), she had just won her first Grammy, she was performing at every notable awards show there was, her tour had done extremely well, and she was just turning 20.  If there was another female in the business doing THIS much slaying at the time, I certainly can’t remember her—Britney was still in the process of letting all her crazy out while simultaneously selling as few copies as she could of “Blackout” [Remember during Britney’s VMA performance, the shot of Rihanna laughing at the former pop Princess with her bitchy-looking friends! LAWLZ!], this was all on the eve of Gaga’s emergence, and I can’t really remember what Beyonce was up to because, frankly, I don’t really care.  When she sings, “where them girls talking trash?” what I had previously viewed as a “fuck off” to the idiot, future-anti-feminist teenybopper bitches that found some non-human way to wrap their imbecilely small minds around defending Brown post-incident may in fact be Rihanna’s remembrance of a time when, if other pop stars were to dare talk trash about her, she’d just stand up for herself by outselling all them hoez, with ease.

If “Hard” is RiRi’s recollection of happy memories of her life and career while she was with her ex, then “Mad House” and “Wait Your Turn” serve as mere introductions to the album.  Fucking awesome introductions, but introductions nonetheless.  “Mad House” sets the tone, whereas “Wait Your Turn” allows for the semi-obligatory “it’s been a long time but now I’m back” track, while simultaneously presenting (in a similar fashion I imagine a ringleader presenting the bearded lady at a circus) that Rihanna is allowed to curse now (“I’m such a fucking lady”)!

In all fairness, there is a song that comes between “Hard” and “Rockstar 101” but I permanently deleted it from my iTunes (not just unchecked it) within my first week of having the album.  It’s called “Stupid in Love” and I hate it and I didn’t want it to detract from my otherwise flowing admiration of the album, and I refuse to let it.  My removal of this song is convenient, because it would really mess with my analysis if it did exist.  Does this result in a glaring flaw in my thesis? Sure. But whatev! They shouldn’t have put that shitty song where they did!

Moving on to “Rockstar 101”, which should’ve come after “Hard,” and in my mind (and my iPod), it does.  The same concepts are developed here, in a far less pleasant way.  Rihanna’s bragging in “Hard” just seems repetitive now and all the cleverness within “Hard”—both musically and lyrically—has been stripped for “Rockstar.”  It’s now a little annoying and maddening.  This over-the-top pride angers us and turns us against RiRi. “You’re not a rockstar! You can’t even play an instrument! You don’t write your own songs! Sometimes you even sound like crap! Quit bragging!”  What was fun just one track ago is now horribly irritating, but, if this is a concept album, we can at least entertain the idea that this crappy, repetitive version of the same previous song is on purpose: Her pride is sinister now.  She needs a humbling.  This is MUCH different than saying Rihanna in any way deserved what comes next, in the form of “Russian Roulette”, where the album makes it big shift.  Just because she sang a few too many of her own praises doesn’t mean that night in the car should’ve happened—NO ONE deserves what Rihanna received, and neither her nor I are saying that she had this coming.  However, Rihanna makes a major point to avoid playing the victim in “Rated R”, despite the fact that she was one.  And, in “Rockstar 101”, she sings with an intensity unmatched by any other lyric of the track, “I’ve never played a victim, I’d rather be a stalker.”  She’s making sure everyone knows, before “Russian Roulette”, that she wasn’t a perfect girl before, nor will she be after, her coveted relationship came to its end.  She’s so proud and self-righteous, she can’t even acknowledge when she’s been wronged, because surely she had to have been the center of every incident.  Rihanna wants to take partial credit in her own demise despite the fact she doesn’t need to, because she just wants to take credit period.  She doesn’t want to be the victim of anything out of her control.

Which is why, when she IS, the remainder of the album spins out of control into something tragic.  Here is the pivotal point of the record.  We’re on track 6 now; the direct midpoint.  Everything before this track was our protagonist in the relationship, and everything after this track is our protagonist after it.  And whether she stays in it or not depends on how this one track ends. 

And it ends with a gunshot.

 “Russian Roulette” is one of my favorite tracks off the album, mostly because it’s the one song of her’s wherein one can track her recent improvement as a live vocalist.  Listening to her first few performances of the song and then her SNL and/or AOL Sessions performance show that, with a serious album to promote, Rihanna has also started taking her job seriously too, the job of actually, um, being…good.  I’ve always fancied her distinct, nasal, whiny, yet mostly on-pitch and rather strong groan more than a lot of her detractors, but with this new stage in her career, I’ve watched even her most adamant haters became fans.  With becoming more and more badass comes getting more and more trained, talented, and polished, I guess.  I like her new style, too, but that’s a different topic.

For the remainder of the album, Rihanna fantasizes about different ways of ridding the world of her biggest love and enemy, such as joining a gang, rolling up to his house with the car lights off, and shooting the living daylights out of his heartless body (with an ample gun collection) (“G4L”), and driving through his window in her car, killing him (and herself) instantly with the explosion of a pre-planted bomb (“Firebomb”).  She also flirts with lesbianism, just in case, you know, girls are a bit nicer, but a fascinating language barrier gets in her way (“Te Amo”).  She makes an attempt at taking her sexual reigns back in the album’s most successful single, the Billboard Number 1 “Rude Boy”, but with Rihanna sex now comes a Rihanna contract: she must be in control.  Even when she allows the boy to take over (I guess, in a heterosexual mating situation, that has to happen eventually since he has the device being inserted), it’s still all about what SHE wan-wan-wants.  Her tone seems to suggest that he’s LUCKY that it just so happens they want the same thing at the same time—“Do you like it, boy I wan-wan-want what you wan-wan-want”, through her delivery, translates into something more like “Well, look at you.  Aren’t you glad that I want this too?  Otherwise, you’d be alone tonight.  Now do this for me, I don’t give a shit about you. And if you’re not big enough—get the hell out of my bed, and fast.”  While I rather enjoy my Facebook mother Glozell’s tearful, bipolar interpretation of the lyrics “Love me, love me,” YouTube’s queen of comedy has it all wrong.  Rihanna’s not asking for romantic love; she’s DEMANDING love of the sex; “Love my pussy!”  It takes two to tango, but it really only matters how ONE enjoys the dance, and that one is Rihanna.  After something that unexpectedly took all control away from her, she, at least for now, won’t let anything like that happen again—even if it’s for pleasure, like sex. 

The album ends on the appropriately titled “The Last Song”, a song so well written and introspectively deep that I refuse to even try to analyze it.  The finale rings bells of Janet’s “Velvet Rope”, the “mother album” to “Rated R” in a sense.  Janet went through similar hardships and came out with one of the best albums of all time to show for it.  I’m not quite sure if “Rated R” will ever make that particular list, but it sure is a lot closer than “Good Girl Gone Bad” or, heaven forbid, “Music of the Sun.”

When Rihanna did a few interviews prior to the album’s release and told Dianne Sawyer she still loved Brown, my dad gave his observational prediction they’d get back together eventually.  Later on, when discussing my plans to see Rihanna live, I joked that it may be dangerous since “her album was all about killing him,” to which he predicted, again, she would do eventually.  Not that my dad is an expert on RiRi (as I so clearly am!), but his ability to predict two VERY different options with identical confidence shows the complexity of “Rated R” and, furthermore, Rihanna.  She wants to kill him, she misses him.  She still loves him, she wants to crash a fucking car through his window and send him to hell a little bit early.  She’s “stupid in love”, but also a “gangster for life.”  It’s the kind of confusion that I doubt I’ll ever fully understand, but I admire Rihanna for dealing with in such a beautiful, mature, creative, and artistic way.  She’s created something she should be proud of. 

There’s talk that since the album didn’t sell like they wanted it to, another Rihanna album more along the lines of “Good Girl Gone Bad”, full of potential chart-toppers and ringtone-worthy pop anthems, is in the works for a release as early as the end of this year.  I also know that her tour isn’t selling as well as she would’ve liked, but this is the price for abandoning surefire success for something worthwhile that’ll stand the test of time.  All I know is that I’ve played this album more than anyone should probably play an album and still feel pleased with themselves, and I currently have a ticket to support her world tour.  I hope I’ll be supporting a new phase of her life and career, and not just a temporary stint.  Regardless though, after “Rated R”, I can officially say: Rihanna, I’m down for life.

Starting a blog is obviously going to force me to remember the days of xanga.  Who didn’t have an xanga and who didn’t update it constantly?  I was a hardcore user, to the point that it became not only my public blog, but my private journal at the same time.  So much so, that when I actually wanted to compile a journal, all I did was go through my xanga and print out all the entries I’d written-private and public-and paste them into a book.  It filled up three notebooks. 

There’s something about blogging that I’ve always loved, and starting this one makes me wonder what that thing was.  It also makes me wonder if I’ll keep this one around or if this is just something I decided to do randomly that won’t last.  I’m hoping for the former, but then again, I’m hoping for the former right now.  Perhaps when I get over this little entry, I’ll be eager to avoid blogging all together.

But somehow, I doubt that’s the case.  I’m a writer, for Pete’s sake!  I’m in college for writing, I write all the time, I keep a journal, and NONE of it goes public (besides floating amongst the confines of my college classroom) becaussseeeee I don’t have a blog.  This will remedy that.

Plus, I have too many daily thoughts to NOT have a way to express them.  Furthermore, I’d like to thank Sophie Matano.  I had been thinking of starting one for a while now, and then when I read through her blog (which I found on her twitter), I made the executive decision.  Thanks Sophie.  You’re a trooper with the best hair of all and a pretty-ass face.