Music will always be a packaged item. I think it’s interesting to remember, or consider that, sometimes. No matter what effect it has to you, how it sounds or what it means, there will always remain the outer shell of red tape — how it’s produced, who’s funding it, what the company holds as its mission statement, and then, the receptiveness and keenness of its audience, in digesting it in the proper way. Producing something packaged that comes to life in a meaningful way — that certainly is a challenge and a precious endeavor.
But then, sometimes an artist comes along with the vision, voice, charisma and vivacity of Rihanna, a Barbadian diva who put out about eight albums on Def Jam and Roc Nation, to then call it quits on music and focus on modeling. This chick is so big I couldn’t even FIND a Wikipedia page on her musical career within my Google search — I had to go straight to the website and search there. Actually, interestingly, Roc Nation is Jay-Z’s label, and she only put out a couple albums on there (one with dual publication on Roc and Def Jam) before retiring. No word has surfaced yet about anything that would have directly led her to want to walk away from music and Anti, her last album, from 2016, was a resounding success, of course.
“Work” is one big joint from Anti and the lyrics seem to handle the concept of needing to focus on your ambition and not having outside flak or unwanted attention from men. Right off the bat, in the first verse, she sings “Dry / Me ah (sic) desert him / No time to have you lurking”, giving the sense of the view of men as predators or unwanted presences, like demons, in a sense. “Work” is a tense number, and, ultimately, a really original and memorable one, one, as well, that replaces the lazy sleaze and desultoriness of The Weeknd with rhythmic intensity and some “sharp as a tack” humanistic analyses, to quote the rock band CAKE.
Without question, that’s a track I find really interesting off of Anti, another being “Love on the Brain.” By comparison, in terms of musical quality, “Love on the Brain” probably cedes to “Work” in that it’s undeniably more retro. In fact, it probably would have even been retro as issued by En Vogue, whose “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” bears more than a few comparisons.
Rihanna is doing something, however, on “Love on the Brain,” which I think bears mentioning, and which really even put me off, in a sense. She’s unabashedly, shamelessly and indulgently BEING A WOMAN — a dirty woman, a woman who’s human, intensely desirous, no longer the packaged little canary or model of moral purity we’re sometimes brandished in our culture. She dabbles in vulgarity, verbally, in her pleas for sexual rapture, rejoicing that her subject element “beats me black and blue”, all leading to the shocking denouement of “No matter what I do / I’m no good without you / And I can’t get enough / Must be love on the brain”. Rihanna, before our very ears, is deconstructing a woman’s identity, illustrating to us the ugliness of desire, and, skillfully, doing so while also always sounding really sexy, overdoing it like her fellow American diva Hope Sandoval on Mazzy Star’s sublime “Halah.” The convincing force of her obliteration of morality and, even, really, beauty itself, is given unsettling force, then, by just how GOOD the song sounds, and her voice, reinforcing the concept of good songs actually more aptly grafting semantic discourses, like Michael Stipe’s declaration of “Watch the road and memorize / This life could pass before my eyes” over the casual, blank former missive of “Dreams / They complicate my life”. Eventually, he woke up and observed a power bigger than him, like the desire and subservience that bites on Rihanna like a venomous viper, on this track — a track which it seems, at least up to this point, no act could follow.
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