{"id":4587,"date":"2022-11-29T01:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T06:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.streamapse.com\/?p=4587"},"modified":"2024-04-12T16:29:28","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T21:29:28","slug":"rihanna-remains-a-hypnotic-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=4587","title":{"rendered":"Rihanna Remains A Hypnotic Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rihanna spent the first decade of her career uniting pop, rap, R&B, and EDM audiences under her ever-expanding umbrella-ella-ella. But on her eighth album, 2016\u2019s ANTI, Rihanna quit making music for the masses and started making music for herself. Though hardly the wanton act of commercial suicide its title might suggest, nonetheless presents a stark, intimate portrait of RiRi in the raw. Beats twitch and clang where they used to thump, minimalist incantations replace the soaring choruses of old, pop polish gives way to jagged edges, Calvin Harris collabs take a backseat to Tame Impala covers. With its gritty industrial-soot patina and lo-fi patchwork quality, the album is much closer in spirit to the insular indie R&B of left-field mavericks like Solange and Blood Orange than to anything pumping out of the Coachella dance tent.<\/p>\n

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Stream ANTI (Deluxe)<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But by stripping down the production, ANTI brings Rihanna\u2019s most magnetic qualities to the fore, as she infuses the woozy, fever-dream boudoir soul of \u201cKiss It Better\u201d with the righteous indignation of a woman scorned, while investing the sacred gospel sway of \u201cLove on the Brain\u201d with profane, unfiltered expressions of romantic longing. And on her rendition of Tame Impala\u2019s \u201cNew Person, Same OId Mistakes\u201d\u2014essentially a new vocal recording atop the same backing track, rebranded as \u201cSame Ol\u2019 Mistakes\u201d\u2014she drowns herself in Kevin Parker\u2019s psychedelic stew as if self-adminteristing a baptism, reframing the original\u2019s sad-eyed ennui as ecstatic rebirth. Yet even a deliberately transgressive Rihanna record couldn\u2019t help but find its way to the top of the charts: Her dancehall dalliance with Drake on \u201cWork\u201d yielded one of the decade\u2019s most incessant earworms, while providing a ready-made mission statement for an artist intent on maintaining her rarefied pop-icon stature entirely on her own terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rihanna spent the first decade of her career uniting pop, rap, R&B, and EDM audiences under her ever-expanding umbrella-ella-ella. But on her eighth album, 2016\u2019s ANTI, Rihanna quit making music for the masses and started making music for herself. Though hardly the wanton act of commercial suicide its title might suggest, nonetheless presents a stark, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,921],"tags":[909,910,911,912],"class_list":["post-4587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-streamapse-highlights","tag-hypnotic","tag-presence","tag-remains","tag-rihanna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5410,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4587\/revisions\/5410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}