Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 14,581
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Daily Anti praise.
why rihanna's 'anti' was the strange, sad record we needed in 2016
Quote:
A week later, Beyoncé dropped her colossal "Formation," effectively shifting all conversation away from Rihanna's confusing statement. But in the weeks following, "Work" steadily crept its way up the Billboard charts, cinching the top spot for nine weeks. In an unexpected twist of fate, as the year draws to a close, ANTI is topping many of the "best of 2016" lists published by the very media outlets that initially criticized it. "The record I have been the most wrong about after one listen is ANTI," wrote Larry Fitzmaurice of Vice on Twitter, "I thought it was bad after one listen. I have listened to it 600 times since."
At surface level, ANTI had seemed to lack a certain expected structure, and yet its intent only continues to clarify. The narrative of ANTI is a profound one, and like the braille emblazoned on its sleeve, it takes time to be deciphered. Rihanna kicks things off with "Consideration," a schoolyard romp that draws from Ms. Lauryn Hill at her spunkiest. "Please give my reflection a break from the pain it's feeling now," she spouts. Rihanna, for all of her aesthetic reinventions, has been fetishized as our badass stoner friend who maintains a flawless appearance through emotional turmoil. One of the most brilliant photographs from Paolo Roversi's shoot for the record shows Rihanna nonchalantly texting as a bevy of hands install platinum blonde extensions into her natural hair — it feels intrusive, reflective of a market that insists on the flashy construction of the artists who keep our radios pumping. The physical album itself features no photographs of Rihanna, as if to insist that we listen to her gospel as an entity separate from her image.
At a time when listeners insist on instant gratification, lavish conceptual visual treatments and underlying political messages in their pop music, Rihanna gave us nothing of the sort. Instead, she gifted us something much more valuable: an aching outline of the public persona we've helped to construct, as well as the shadows it has produced. ANTI, for all of its initial shortcomings, endures as a stunning encapsulation of how it sounded to be sad in 2016.
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http://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/wh...urce=idtwitter
Moral of the story: don't be a Larry
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Jk.