"We love the music, which can change styles from album to album, we love the videos, which change their artistic vision from year to year, but most of all, we love the woman, who hasn't changed since day one." "She succeeds by doing something that no one in this music industry does, which is being herself," Drake said. To really love Rihanna, one must respect that we so often find lovable about her - her so-called 'relatability' - is also her work. He mentioned her achievements in music but ultimately asserted that what was "most impressive" was Rihanna the person. His speech is memorable for his cute, unsurprising and ultimately distracting faux-confession: "She's someone I've been in love with since I was 22 years old." Equally instructive, though, are the parts of Drake's speech that were about Rihanna and not Drake. When Rihanna received the Video Vanguard Award at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, Drake introduced her. It's still worth asking, however, how we as an audience can adequately love Rihanna the person. Rihanna is the most important pop artist of the century because of these contributions to music - and her music is beloved. If she's not seen as taking musical risks, it's only because so many of them paid off. Rihanna shaped the texture and taste of the air by consistently doing what pop, at its very best, is supposed to do: taking disparate genres - rock, EDM, dancehall, trap and even dubstep - and turning them into something that makes sense to us, to everyone. So it's not enough to say Rihanna is the air. 1 songs on Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart as ANTI, the album Rihanna released in 2016 after an unprecedented (for her) hiatus.įor most of my life, there has been a Rihanna single - or multiple Rihanna singles, or multiple songs defined by a Rihanna hook - playing prominently on Top 40 radio. Of the 61 Rihanna songs on the Billboard Hot 100, 14 of them were No. She released a full-length studio album every single year between 20, save for a one-year break in 2008. What does it mean to think of Rihanna, global superstar, as unheard? Her music has soundtracked most of this century, and that kind of ubiquity is easily taken for granted, like air. Rihanna at the album artwork reveal for ANTI in 2015.Ĭhristopher Polk/Getty Images for WESTBURY ROAD ENTERTAINMENT LLC
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