Where do you go when there’s nowhere left to conquer? It’s a conundrum that not many face, but Rihanna, who had released chart-dominating albums like clockwork each November for nearly a decade, seemingly did. Her eighth album was repeatedly postponed and delayed, names and tracklistings changed, before ANTI was finally revealed, more than three years after its predecessor Unapologetic – its own title predicting its somewhat anticlimactic release.
Since it became available for download last week, music writers have pondered over its relative success. A last-minute leak led to a Samsung sponsorship deal allowing copies to be given away for free: with over 1m free downloads, but fewer than 1,000 copies actually sold, commentators are left confused: is it a hit? Is it a flop?
Simultaneously, a critical narrative has emerged that declares ANTI Rihanna’s first real attempt at artistic credibility – perhaps unconcerned with commercial success, anyway: a deliberate move away from populist club bangers in the hope that Rihanna will finally be seen as an artist, not an entertainer.
Many have noted how every original track lists Rihanna as a co-writer (compared with none on 2010’s Loud), and highlighted the album’s title and lyrics like “I got to do things my own way darling . . . Why you ain’t ever let me grow?” as proof of Rihanna’s new direction. Some critics have noted this with good faith, others mild curiosity, others a mocking smile. As the Guardian‘s Alexis Petridis generously puts it:
The sense that Rihanna might have developed a case of the “Serious Artists” is compounded by the artwork, which comes complete with an excruciating little poem, written in braille so that the visually impaired can be mortified by it as well. “I sometimes fear that I am misunderstood,” it opens, before suggesting that “what I chose to say is of so much substance that people won’t understand the depth of my message”, which is certainly one way of interpreting her oeuvre to date, including Cheers (Drink to That), S&M and, indeed, Cockiness (Love It). “She may be the queen of hearts, but I’m gonna be the queen of your body parts,” she sang on the latter, demonstrating her unfathomable depth.
Whether or not you find the lines hidden in ANTI’s album artwork “poetic”, the phrase “of so much substance” seems an apt one when you consider the possibilities of the word “substance” to mean narcotics, wealth and possessions. Videos like “Pour it Up” and her well-documented luxurious lifestyle mean Rihanna is associated with a vulgar excess of these things, and therefore – by perverse but prevalent logic – a lack of spiritual substance.
And whether or not you find the songs Petridis lists lyrical triumphs, as the critical history of popular music shows, songs about drugs, sex, alcohol and desire can be declared trivial or profound simply depending on the race, gender and class of who’s singing them. Just maybe, Rihanna knows this.
Lyrically, ANTI is an album riddled with contradiction and self-doubt, often predicting this muddled reaction. It’s certainly true that the album spends time thinking about artistic credibility, but it often seems resigned to the idea that audiences will never pay Rihanna her due: “Will you ever respect me? No.”
Her cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” (a telling choice of artist, with their white boy indie caché) actively anticipates criticism: “I can just hear them now / ‘How could you let us down?’” Impala’s Kevin Parker has said the song is “actually telling someone, ‘I know what you think I’m doing is fake. I know you think it’s like a sellout move. You think that this isn’t real, but hey, you know what? […] Maybe I’m allowed to like things that you think are disposable.’”
In the context of an off-piste album from a hugely mainstream artist, Rihanna inverts issues of “selling out”, but continues to play with the question of what kind of success is expected of her, and how sincere an artist she can ever be seen as: “I know that you think it’s fake / Maybe fake’s what I like / The point is, I have the right.”
It’s a particularly playful point to make by covering an existing song, not writing her own – while many critics will be able to gesture towards the fact that she didn’t write the song to disprove her own point, covering is simultaneously a powerful way for her to suggest that, despite surface differences, her “story ain’t so different” from those of alternative artists.
These ideas bleed into her imagery. “Consideration”,sung in a thick Bajan accent, has a kind of fairytale aesthetic that is constantly subverted. When Rihanna sings, “I come fluttering in from Neverland,” and “I come riding in on a pale white horse,” she is acknowledging that she is not a Tinkerbell or princess, or a blue-eyed singer/songwriter musing on castles and Prince Charmings.
There’s an irony to her comparison of her musical talents to alchemy: a metaphor traditionally cloaked in elevated language, Rihanna simply sings, “Let me cover your shit in glitter / I could make it gold”. It’s a conflict that appears again in “Needed Me”, in one of the album’s most biting lyrics, “Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage? Fuck your white horse and your carriage.”
Traditional ideas of romance and poetry are supposedly not hers to play with, so she subverts them with renewed emphasis. “Consideration”’s fixation with fairytales, windows and mirrors almost posits this Rihanna as a kind of modern-day Lady of Shalott, fearing that an attempt to create real art would leave her isolated and irrelevant. (Fears of self-isolation continue throughout the record on songs like “Desperado” and “Needed Me”.)
Ultimately, listening to ANTI leaves the listener wondering if this indecision is productive in itself. The album’s penultimate track, and the most urgent song on the record, is “Higher” – two minutes of raw, throaty desire. The song feels like a voicemail recorded and deleted, swinging between earnestness and self-consciousness (“I’m sorry ‘bout the other night”, “I hope I ain’t calling you too late”). It hovers in the space between a traditional Rihanna ballad like “Stay”, and something more animal and unpredictable. “I just really need your ass with me,” she slurs, admitting, “I know I could be more creative / And come up with poetic lines.”
The song’s simultaneous climax and anti-climax comes in the lines:
“I wanna go back to the old way
“But I’m drunk instead, with a full ash tray
“With a little bit too much to say”
It’s not quite a sincere request for companionship, somehow resigned to isolation. The absence of the lover results in an overabundance of everything else: a perpetually refilled glass, a full ashtray, a filling voicemail box, a mind overrun with thoughts. This last line feels significant on another level, as though Rihanna knows that, as a particular brand of pop star, she’s only meant to indulge in weed and rum, not extraneous thoughts and meta-commentary about art. The song ends before you feel like it should, leaving the listener like the protagonist: high, frustrated, and without resolution.
ANTI is an album that, both in its content and its reception, raises more questions than it answers, but leaves you feeling that the struggle with these questions is what ultimately produces such a curious, intoxicating record.
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