Rihanna's ANTI album cover.
Photo courtesy of respect-mag.com
The summer of 2005 was a transitional one. Finally, I was no longer an elementary student. I was moving on to something bigger and better: middle school. My friend group was thriving and expanding into a co-ed one, and I was going on my first dates with the cutest boy from Kehrs Mill Elementary who I would have automatic dibs on going into Crestview Middle School. Puberty was right at my toes. And my taste in music was flourishing in a sporadic assortment from User to Nelly Furtado to Fall Out Boy.
The artist who stuck with me, though, was Rihanna. Every night that summer, I'd plug a pair of chunky headphones into my very cool portable CD player, flip the switch to FM, and tune the small dial as closely as possible to Z107.7. At around 10:00 pm, Saint Louis DJ Curt Copeland would start his weeknight show in which he'd spin newly arrived songs from Top 40 artists. I can recall the night he interviewed the then seventeen-year-old Rihanna. As a ten-year-old I was not very interested in hearing something I hadn't already repeatedly heard on the radio 1,500 times, but I gave "Pon De Replay" a chance, and I really enjoyed it. After hearing it once, I was Pon De Replaying her debut single every night at 10 pm for the rest of the summer.
That's why it was to none of my surprise when I overheard Micas, my eighth grade Danish host brother, blasting Rihanna's "Work" from his room a couple weeks ago. Utterly annoyed with the song's almost untranslatable lyrics and its relentless presence at every party, gathering, nightclub and car ride, I rolled my eyes when I heard it. A few minutes later, however, I began to overhear the heavy bass intro to Tame Impala's "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" from their 2015 album Currents. What a change of pace, I thought. I was then shocked to hear it was not Tame Impala's, but rather the now twenty-eight-year-old Rihanna's cover of the Aussie band's recent hit.
The next day I decided to listen to her album ANTI, released in January, on my train ride to class in Copenhagen. From the intense, punchy and penetrating bass line in the album's starter "Consideration," to the exhilarating, hazy sounds of "Needed Me," to the soulful, Erykah Badu-sounding vocals of "Love On The Brain," Rihanna elucidates a dynamic, cover-to-cover range that puts her in a new ball league. Rihanna has successfully adopted sounds from a giant range of artists and reconditioned their feel-good sounds into her own flavor. Her enlightening echoes of alternative artists old and new made me appreciate the "Work" she's put into ANTI a lot more than I had before.