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closeWednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
Rihanna deals with emotional demons with 'Rated R’
Stark and somber, Rihanna's Rated R is a riveting portrait of a pop star reassembling her life.
Preston Jones
Somber and unrelentingly stark, Rihanna’s Rated R is a riveting portrait of a pop star reassembling her life.
One of the year’s most anticipated albums, Rated R arrives in the wake of a shocking, ugly domestic violence incident in February involving Rihanna and her ex-boyfriend Chris Brown at the Grammys.
Both parties dealt with fallout from the altercation. Rihanna’s bruised face was plastered all over gossip Web sites and infotainment TV; in June, Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault and is serving five years’ probation.
The pressure exerted on Rihanna to deal creatively with what happened must’ve been enormous, but wisely, she manages to channel her feelings into songs that reflect a mindset and a mood, rather than spending 60 minutes directly bashing Brown.
Walking a line between voyeurism and vindication, Rated R is mesmerizing precisely because it wades into the messy emotions the tabloids only pretend to value: confusion, love, anger, resolve and indifference.
"No pain is forever," barks the 21-year-old vocalist during Hard, investing a clichéd line with pathos. Rihanna fully embraces the darkness with which she’s flirted on her last two albums — anyone viewing the video for Disturbia knew this day was coming — and doesn’t flinch from raw language and unsettling subject matter.
From the opening moments of Mad House, it’s clear we’re a long way from 2005’s sunny reggae-pop smash Pon de Replay. Much of this bracing record definitively distances the Barbados native from the perky-plastic pop pack; the brutal G4L will send casual Rihanna fans scrambling for the hills.
And if that doesn’t do it, lead single Russian Roulette, co-written with Ne-Yo and one of 2009’s most unnerving tracks, will. Serving as a metaphor for her relationship with Brown and, to a greater extent, the necessary artistic risks undertaken with this record, it’s simultaneously terrifying and cathartic.
Elsewhere, Rihanna castigates herself on Stupid in Love, the logical antithesis of Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love; seldom do pop stars so eagerly lay bare all their insecurities and uncertainties. While gripping, it never feels cheap or unseemly — even on Rated R’s lesser cuts (the will.i.am-assisted Photographs lands with a thud), Rihanna seems fully in control.
Now that’s she exorcised some of these demons, what next? Perhaps a rebuttal to Brown’s album Graffiti, which drops in a couple weeks? Possibly. But Rihanna would be ill-served using her talents to spend the rest of her career reliving this horrific chapter of her life.
Hopefully, this collection closes the door, for now, on her relationship with Brown. A rare glimpse of a superstar picking up the pieces, Rated R is an arresting tableau of anguish and determination — grim art achieved at a terrible cost.
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