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Earlier this month, Rihanna’s song “We Found Love” became her 11th single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Barbadian singer has notched 20 top 10 pop hits in less time than any other musician, and among female solo artists, only Madonna and Mariah Carey claim more No. 1 pop singles, period; Rihanna is tied with Whitney Houston, who also had 11.* Some smashes surprise us, but “We Found Love” sounded like a No. 1 from the jump. A churning, pulsating homage to ’90s Europop in the style of Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” or 2 Unlimited’s “Twilight Zone,” its synthesizer melody is big, brightly hued, as insistent as an alarm-clock beep and only slightly less repetitive; the beat is an unrelenting four-four pound; the vocals are airy and longing; the basic structure is a stack of frenzied crescendos with slightly less frenzied crescendos slipped in between.
The number of credited songwriters on previous Rihanna songs has cracked double digits but “We Found Love” was written and produced by just one person, the Scottish dance musician Calvin Harris. Harris, who has enjoyed solo success but nothing on this scale, contributes no vocals to “We Found Love,” but he’s credited nonetheless as a featured guest. This isn’t standard practice in pop music—particularly not with a relative unknown like Harris—but the top-line credit reflects the growing prominence, brand value, and leverage that DJs command in the dance-music-saturated pop present. It also reflects the experience of listening to the song: “We Found Love” lasts three minutes and 33 seconds, and for about one minute and 19 seconds of that time, Rihanna is fully silent. For 37 percent of the song, that is, she gets out of the way, ceding the floor to Harris’s ecstatic throb.
In a sense, getting out of the way is what Rihanna does best. There’s something paradoxical about her: She’s a pop star you almost forget is there. Her presence on songs is, at best, unobtrusive, pliant, less adaptable than compatible, like a chameleon who stays one more or less pleasing color. Extra-musically, she is blurry. Her look changes wholesale from album to album, in an undercooked way that suggests the hiring and firing of stylists rather than, say, some wry, Bowie-style persona shuffle: now she’s a stonewashed-jean Caribbean queen, now an anime fantasy, now a bondage badass, now a Candyland princess, now a ’90s London brat. There’s the nagging impression that her clothes are doing an untenable portion of her identity-building. Rihanna’s biggest headlines came not when she acted out but when she was acted against, viciously, by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown: Rated R, the noisy, brooding 2009 album she released after the attack, carried with it, for the first time in her career, a sense of drama and stakes.
Rihanna’s successes put her in rarefied company, but she is unlike her fellow chart goddesses, not in the thinness of her voice, exactly (Madonna is no great belter, either) but rather in the thinness of her persona. She is not wholly convincing. Pop stars’ songs, however gigantic, typically function as pieces of a bigger puzzle, chapters in an overarching, ever-expanding saga. Mariah, Whitney, Beyoncé, Gaga—these stars feel like stars. Rihanna feels like something else: a one hit-wonder several dozen times over.
Her breakthrough single, “Pon De Replay,” came in 2005. The song went to No. 2, but as pop-career launches go, there was something slight and inauspicious about it. Accentuating her Barbadian lilt in a way she would soon abandon, Rihanna plays a self-canceling role as a facilitator of other people’s fun: She counts, calls out dance moves, and asks the DJ repeatedly to turn up the volume. Built around a clap-happy percussion loop called the Diwali riddim, the single also inaugurated Rihanna’s careerlong habit of arriving behind trends, rather than ahead of them: Wayne Wonder and Lumidee had already had their own hits with the riddim in 2003. Other examples: Rihanna’s “Rockstar 101,” which hopped on the tired “rock star” meme three years after it had peaked with the Shop Boyz’ “Party Like a Rockstar”; “Te Amo,” which debuted on radio with a sultry Spanish hook two months after Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” had staked that turf with more verve; “California King Bed,” which brought overdriven power-ballad schlock to R&B three years after Beyoncé had done it with “If I Were a Boy.” (One big exception: Her 2007 hit “Don’t Stop the Music” got to the eurodance revival early.)
Rihanna’s early singles are diminished by the feeling that she isn’t quite up to the material. She is incapable not only of the ferocity and lusciousness of a Mary J. Blige or a Beyoncé, but also of the icy gravitas of an Aaliyah or a Ciara. The lyrics to 2008’s “Take a Bow” describe the humiliation and dismissal of a no-good lover, but while Rihanna attempts a magnanimous sangfroid, she just comes off kind of sleepy. (Compare the song with Beyonce’s 2006 single “Irreplaceable,” which works similar ground with delicious, breezy disdain—now that’s an ass-handing.) Rihanna is unequal to the lyrical fury of “Breaking Dishes,” goofily playacting at a tantrum. On “S.O.S.” she describes an orgasmic loss of self-control without a trace of it in her delivery; the locomoting force getting us from one end of the song to the other is the prominent Soft Cell sample, not her. The automotive-themed “Shut Up and Drive” features a litany of groaners about handling her curves and piloting her “fine-tuned supersonic speed machine”—ridiculousness even R. Kelly might pass on, and Rihanna is no R. Kelly. “My engine’s ready to explode-ode-ode,” she sings on the pre-chorus, her voice, to the contrary, faint and fading. She is better when the mood is looser: Two of my favorite Rihanna songs are the horny, aggressive “Rude Boy,” from 2009 and the horny, melancholic “What’s My Name,” from 2010, both of which nod towards vaguely Caribbean rhythms and feature spry, playful vocals.
When I hear Rihanna’s greatest song, “Umbrella,” I sometimes wonder about the version another performer might have delivered. The song was first offered to Britney Spears, who passed, and it appeared destined for Mary J. Blige until Rihanna’s A&R team frantically convinced its writers, Terius “The-Dream” Nash and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, to sell it to Rihanna instead, promising to throw the label’s full weight behind the rollout of the song. The instrumental is hefty, built around crushing synthesizers and fat rock drums, and in this context Rihanna’s blankness registers, appealingly, as Borg-ish restraint—Blige, by contrast, might have brought an excess of emotion and athleticism, crowding the music and gilding the lily in a way that Rihanna doesn’t, and can’t.
What Rihanna brings to “Umbrella” is ineffable. Listen to the original demo, sung by Nash, and you see how closely she sticks to his script. There is a pained catch in her voice when she sings the word “magazines” that always struck me as a winning little flourish; it is there, as is every other last tic, in Nash’s guide track. Rihanna leans into the vocal harder on the finished song, but none of her choices are what you’d call surprising. Listen, on the other hand, to Nash’s demo for the song “1+1,” which he sold to Beyoncé, and then listen to Beyoncé’s rendition: It’s the difference between thinking about a skyscraper and standing on top of one. Beyoncé’s vocal shimmers, quavers, growls, slides deftly off beat, subtly teases the melody. (If it’s unfair to compare pretty much anyone to Beyoncé, one can consult “Saxon,” the demented demo that Nicki Minaj, who isn’t even primarily a singer, made for anever-recorded Rihanna song—it’s impossible to imagine how Rihanna could have improved upon it.)
Which raises the question of why Rihanna has scored so many hits, despite her shortcomings. Part of it is a matter of sheer volume; she has released an album every year since 2005, except for 2008, and her label devotes tremendous resources to her success: 2010’s Loud was the result of a multiweek, multistudio songwriting “camp,” in which A-list producers and lyricists were teamed up and paid to bang out potential hit after potential hit, with Rihanna holding right of first refusal over the output. This right would be worthless, of course, if she didn’t have a great ear for songs, and she does. Moreover, there is a suppleness to Rihanna’s blankness that allows her to ride shifting commercial tides with more ease and flexibility than a Beyoncé, whose aesthetic choices are held to higher standards of plausibility. (It bears noting that Beyoncé has released only four albums, but that these have sold 75 million copies worldwide; Rihanna has sold 20 million copies of her five.)
On “Don’t Stop the Music” and “Only Girl (in the World)” Rihanna returned with greater flair to the dance floor anonymity of her first single. “Only Girl,” from last year’s Loud, is a superior song, her voice skipping like a polished stone across bubbling currents of eurocheese on the verses, somersaulting into a genuine fury on the chorus, and setting the stage for “We Found Love.” With the new song, Rihanna has gone all in on the Ibiza trend. Dance music of this sort, oriented around cathedral-size clubs and face-dissolving drugs, requires that the star providing vocals subjugate herself to the sound, allow it to steamroll over her and any of the subjectivities that, in a typical pop-song dynamic, draw us closer to her, make us care about her, and so on (which is one of the big reasons why we don’t care at all about Judith Pronk, the woman who sang on “Better Off Alone”). There is something Faustian about the transaction: Your voice will be inescapable, but it could be anyone’s. In the “We Found Love” video, Rihanna acts opposite a male model whom many viewers have identified as a Chris Brown stand-in; the two play punkish U.K. kids, doing too many drugs and going to too many raves and, for some reason, sitting together fully clothed in a bathtub. The video starts with about a minute of Rihanna doing a strange English-Scottish accent and reciting a monologue about—well, I’m not sure. Every time I’ve watched it I’ve skipped ahead to the synthesizers.
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