If there was one thing that defined my reputation in the 2010s, it was the fact that I felt too old for pop culture. I’m talking about the feeling like every week brought with it a new dance, or the rise of Soundcloud rap that I still don’t fully understand. Most of all, I just didn’t care about the Top 40 like I used to, and whatever little would eek through kept such a distance from my personal interest that I never felt a connection to the sound. This was all music geared at young kids, and I was too old to even give Pitbull a passing glance. He could go entertain those kids watching Aquaman (2018), but I would be off enjoying what I liked.
I will fully admit that there’s something foolish about this even as it feels inevitable. When we think of old people, we think of them being clueless like the conservative buzz-cuts hating that rock ‘n roll. They’re not cool. They may have been one day, but not anymore. They have their little toys that they can play with, but the kids can still throw their partner into the air and twirl without the worry about permanent hip damage. I’m not quite there yet, but it’s how I felt in my 20s, where culture at times felt like it was behind a glass and at most would tap its finger on it to wave at me to join. I would refuse, believing that completing a Sudoku was a better use of my time.
One of my goals with The Memory Tourist is to course-correct this mentality. While I may never get the appeal of Imagine Dragons, I can at least try to interact with the zeitgeist and find something that resonates with me. Monday Melodies exists as that kind of crap-shoot where whatever album interests me that week will be put on the spindle and I will give it a listen. Some of them are old favorites, but I am trying to expand my tastes little by little if just to become a more interesting writer.
I chose to explore Rihanna’s “Anti” because of a podcast that I listened to last December. On Hit Parade, host Chris Molanphy tried to determine what pop music meant in the 2010s. Who was the definitive artist that when we looked back would be omnipresent? Considering how many had been absent for different stretches of the time, he eventually landed on Rihanna because she fit the definition. Almost every year in that decade had one noteworthy hit from her. She rose to a status that would arguably make her an edgier version of Beyonce. She had a cult status on par with the Beyhive, nicknaming herself RiRi and not being afraid to release songs like “Bitch Better Have My Money.” She was a new pop star, and I’m willing to guess that the 2020s will find her going even further up the scale.
But what was so special about Rihanna? I guess I understood it when listening to the radio singles like “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place.” She definitely had a unique island flavor, managing to make pop more dancehall oriented. However, I hadn’t really confronted her music in an era where her album had over 270 million streams on Spotify. “Work” escaped me entirely and I wondered how an album where I knew zero percent of the music actually came to be considered one of the best records of the decade. If it’s not that, then it’s definitely Rihanna’s most acclaimed work to date, having inspired future albums by everyone from Lorde to Marilyn Manson.
So, what does a record that has that range sound like? In some respects, it’s kind of amazing that a record like this qualifies as pop. I misjudged the general public’s desire to have music that is this angry and lively, willing to find Rihanna at a vulnerable place in her life as she lets a guitar cry behind her. So much of the music feels like a reinvention of Top 40, where everything exists as one, floating through the record in a harmonic dissonance.
This is the new order and one that doesn’t feel as immediately obvious. When critics suggested that the singles from this new album weren’t as catchy as her older work, she merely responded with a “No.” In that blunt statement, she revealed everything that you needed to know. Yes, this record wasn’t going to be a rehash of what we knew. She was going to make something even grander, more interesting in its experimentation. Even the slapdash nature of the cover felt like a punk rock rebellion. If a track needed to have a glitchy dub, then it would have a glitchy dub. If there was going to be a rock guitar as her cries ached with deeper sorrow, then they would.
But what was it about this record that cemented Rihanna as pop royalty? You look at Beyonce or Taylor Swift and you find artists so precise with their image. They need to make sure that every note is in the right place for an amphitheater of fans to sing along with. Sure, songs like “Work” had that in bulk, but it wasn’t coming in the same verse-chorus-verse format. It was a psychedelic trip, making it all a meditative look into a performer who wanted to be so much more than conventions allowed her to be.
I think we love her now because she has joined artists like Childish Gambino in keeping the audience guessing. Every song creates a new experience and since most of these aren’t on the radio anyways, they can be as malleable as they want to be. We’re entering a new era where we’re not slaves to a radio play. We can now go to Tidal or Spotify and fulfill our own niche tastes at any hour of the day. Rihanna knows this well, and that may be why her record appealed to that market. It was pop without the conventions.
That may be why my initial listen to it isn’t as fulfilling as I was expecting. I am more in awe of the craft that she put into the sound. Her Barbados instincts make songs like “Work” into these dizzying numbers that manage to sound drunk and infectious. I love how she manages to not let one sound define the album, instead fusing it together in a quest to make the genre more exciting and vital. As someone who has the chance to make music a more exciting place, I am glad to listen to this record and find myself constantly being impressed with the production quality, her voice managing to travel through a spectrum of harmonies that are at best unconventional.
Even the fact that the album begins with this dazed quality on “Consideration” and builds to something more classical feels like some deeper meaning that a relisten will reveal. What makes her ability to drop dancehall and rock next to something that sounds like a Ronettes b-side impressive is that it all feels like one voice. This is world music through the guise of a woman unashamed of her personal independence. She can drink, have sex, and talk back at men she disagrees with while standing proud. It also helps that she’s just that gifted of a singer.
When listening to this album, I think more about how things have changed since “Anti” in 2016. As I mentioned, I’m not as familiar with pop music. For all I know there were other artists who are more accredited to this shifting trend, but nowadays we’re entering an anti-pop star (no pun intended) phase, where a song doesn’t have to fit what we know. It just needs a hook somewhere coming from a defiant voice.
Some of them are more subliminal like Lorde’s “Melodrama,” which finds the frame of the music growing mad. With the angst in her voice, you hear horns appearing and her voice screeching as if trapped in a box. However, if there’s anything to suggest the shift more successfully in the past four years, I turn to Billie Eilish whose song “Bad Guy” is sung in such a lo-fi production that you may need to crank it up just to make out the lyrics. It also ends with a breakdown reminiscent of “Anti,” where the melody drops out entirely as she sings about depression.
We’re living in a more transparent time, and I am just now starting to realize how much of the road to the modern era that I ignored. Whereas I do like this new form of personal, experimental Top 40, I never thought it would stem from Rihanna writing pop songs like “Higher” where she seems intoxicated and about to lose control of her voice. It’s fascinating because it forces you to engage with the sound and understand your own interpretive feelings about what that shriek means. Even then, I imagine that her “cleaner” songs have inspired the balladeers out there in less obvious ways.
I’ll admit that I probably should’ve done better preparation when approaching this album. So much of it overwhelms you on a first listen that you’re questioning one detail as the next hits. You are in awe of how she could be this confident in her own deconstruction, managing to find something purer about the pop sound in the process. I don’t know that it immediately makes me love her sound, but I definitely come away with a deeper appreciation for her place in the landscape.
It’s the type of album that immediately makes me curious to see what she does next. I understand those who grow impatient waiting for her next album, but I get her reluctance. How do you follow something up that was so clearly personal and self-indulgent that it excised all of your musical demons in beautiful fashion? At the rate that things are going, I imagine that it’s going to be an even more deranged magnum opus, possibly taking over the world on an even grander scale. Unlike last time, I’ll be around to give it a fair shake when it comes out. I just hope the rest of pop could be this fun and thought-provoking.
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