Macca’s acoustic guitar drives the appealingly rough-edged and stripped-back FourFiveSeconds along, but it’s Rihanna’s vocal that makes the song come alive. The unexpected sound of Rihanna collaborating not merely with Kanye West but Paul McCartney. If not quite as spectacular as Man Down, You Da One’s attempt to meld dancehall and fluorescent 21st-century pop is still impressive, not least in the way it stirs dubstep into the sonic mix: the bass-heavy drop before the final chorus is genuinely exciting, shifting the mood of the track. Kiss It Better was nominated for best R&B song at the Grammys, but in truth it’s a diversion into potent power balladry – laden with distorted guitar, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Cher singing it on the deck of a warship – albeit one given a hint of left-field weirdness by the primitive drum machine ticking away in the background. After leaving Def Jam in 2014 for a spot with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, she took greater creative control for 2016’s ANTI, her most diverse album yet.Rihanna in 2019. The tracks were inescapable-“Umbrella”, “Don’t Stop the Music”, “Rude Boy”, “Work”-but also had genuine personality, not to mention a carnal sense of expressiveness that set her apart: Rihanna’s changes didn’t seem like the product of high-concept self-reinvention so much as gut feeling. By 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad, she’d expanded the sunny Caribbean pop of her early work for sleek hybrids of hip-hop, R&B, club music and rock. Her 2005 debut, Music of the Sun, went Gold when she was just 17. She was making things up as she went along, but when she went, she went full-steam ahead.īorn in Barbados in 1988, she left high school to pursue music.

Describing the chameleonic nature of her clothing line, Fenty-the first female-created brand for LVMH, not to mention its first luxury label run by a black woman-Rihanna said the line didn’t have any fixed look, in part because her own was always changing. Though her biggest tracks have tended toward some variety of dance pop (mixed with reggae, EDM, dancehall, R&B and so on), a closer listen reveals an artist willing to try just about anything-and the uncanny grace to sound good doing it. Fast-forward to the present day and there remains something effortless about Rihanna, a sense of confidence that transcends any one narrative or style.

Most of all, she had ideas and seemed comfortable expressing them.

She took a leading role in group activities. A report card for Robyn Rihanna Fenty, first issued by a school back in Barbados’ Saint Michael parish and later reprinted in a giant coffee-table book called RIHANNA, stated, in part, that the young Fenty was positive, sure of herself.

Rihanna umbrella remix