While some women like to at least slightly pretend they would “emancipate themselves” if they “could” from a toxic relationship, some simply like to own up to loving the pain. Especially in song form. For the past decade or so, both Rihanna and Lana Del Rey have been largely responsible for filling that role. And yet, as both women “mature” (theoretically), each one has “calmed down” and explored more spiritual, “good-natured” themes in their songs of late. For Del Rey, this includes falling prey to the middle-age trap of expressing the desire to just settle down and have kids with someone (hopefully not Jack Donoghue or Evan Winiker or some other out-of-left-field rando). This revealed on such Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd tracks as “The Grants” and “Sweet.” Nonetheless, she still struggles with letting go of her younger self’s input on more usual emotional pain-worshipping fare, namely “Candy Necklace.”
As for Rihanna maybe part of the reason she’s taken a hiatus from music (save for her two singles, “Lift Me Up” and “Born Again” for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Soundtrack) is a result of not necessarily wanting to keep talking about how good toxic relationships feel (hear: “Rehab,” “Russian Roulette,” “Love the Way You Lie” and “Love on the Brain,” to name a few). After all, she’s presently in a “healthy” one with A$AP Rocky, spurred by having two children with him. Even so, considering both LDR and RiRi are like a sonic version of the Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What, it’s difficult to branch out from the trope they established for themselves. That’s why Del Rey mostly hasn’t and why Rihanna has opted to become a business mogul—to avoid singing about topics that are perhaps not what people want to hear (i.e., being in love with someone stable and supportive). Because, for as much as she was ridiculed for her relationship with Chris Brown (and going back to him a second time after he physically assaulted her), listeners couldn’t deny their love of lyrics such as, “It’s like I checked into rehab, and baby, you’re my disease.” To be sure, the idea of being unable to kick a toxic addiction in the form of a love interest has been romanticized for centuries (just look at Catherine and Heathcliff). Rihanna has been able to capitalize on that repeatedly, especially after she stopped denying rumors of her romance with Brown, initially saying things like, “We are best friends, honestly, like brother and sister.” Sure, like brother and sister if they were Finneas and Billie. Or Angelina and James. Anyway, this pattern of starting out as “besties” with a guy before finally letting him into her boudoir continued with Drake and A$AP, the former being jettisoned perhaps because he was just too wholesome for Rihanna’s taste.
Focusing on her new family and her various Fenty-related business endeavors has thus made Rihanna lose touch with her songstress “baddie” side, while Del Rey, too, shuffles in the limbo of her early persona and the one in which she tries to become this generation’s Joni (Mitchell) meets Joan (Baez). So, possibly sensing a void once wholly occupied by these two queens of championing “it hurts so bad but feels so good” relationships, Anne-Marie has entered the fray with her latest single, “Unhealthy.” Already coming in hot this year with singles like “Sad Bitch,” “Expectations” and “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” “Unhealthy” marks the fourth single that will appear on her third album of the same name this summer. Not only that, but it somewhat ironically features Miss “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” herself, Shania Twain. And yet, Twain’s notedness for being an “independent woman” took a while to cultivate after releasing “You’re Still the One,” also from her 1997 album, Come On Over.
You might say that it, too, turned out to be a song about toxic love—once Mutt Lange eventually ended up cheating on her with her best friend, Marie-Anne (not Anne-Marie) Thiébaud (truly, the stuff of country song clichés, and also a large part of the plot driving Hope Floats starring Sandra Bullock). Weirder still, though, was Twain ending up with the now ex-husband of Marie-Anne, Frédéric Thiébaud. Meanwhile, Marie-Anne is still with Mutt. So, in the end, it was a happy little “wife swap” story, wasn’t it? The sort of story Del Rey (or Taylor Swift during folklore/evermore period) might talk about on one of her songs. The point is, the fact that Twain makes a cameo on “Unhealthy” just goes to show that, no matter how far a woman comes or how much “growth” she might have experienced, there’s always room to ruminate on the “beauty” of l’amour toxique.
But before Twain’s verse enters the picture, Anne-Marie opens with, “Well, your love is worse, worse than cigarettes/Even if I had twenty in my hands/Oh, babe, your touch, it hurts more than hangovers/No, that bottle don’t hold the same regret.” Yet, despite knowing all these things vis-à-vis how bad this man is for her, she still can’t—nay, doesn’t want to—let go. In other words, “good dick will imprison you.” Or even slightly adequate dick, these days. With an accompanying visualizer for the song that shows Anne-Marie delighting in some junk food before proceeding to treat her ketchup bottle like an unwieldy splooging penis, we can feel her lack of concern for other people’s opinions as she blithely recounts, “And my mother says that you’re bad for me/Guess she never felt the high we’re on right now/And my father says I should run away/But he don’t know that I just don’t know how.”
In certain respects, it channels the simultaneously parallel and antithetical anthem that is Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” during which she chirps, “My mother says, ‘When you gonna live your life right?’ Oh momma dear, we’re not the fortunate ones/And girls, they wanna have fun” and then adds, “The phone rings, in the middle of the night/My father yells, ‘What you gonna do with your life?’/Oh daddy dear, you know you’re still number one/But girls, they wanna have fun.” And the “fun” Anne-Marie wants to have is with this “bad for her” man (cue the Bridget Jones’ Diary line, “Anne-Marie, wanton sex goddess, with a very bad man between her thighs”). Much like Bonnie Parker, who one could easily imagine singing, while bullets rained down on her and Clyde, “‘Cause even if it kills me, I’ll always take your hand/It’s unhealthy, they just don’t understand/And when thеy try to stop me, just know nobody can/You’re still gon’ be my man.”
Anne-Marie dares to release such a single at a time when it’s not exactly chic to continue such LDR and RiRi stylings in music. Which begs the question of how much a sudden aversion toward #MeToo-oriented notions have gradually started to fall back into favor, even by women themselves (Anne-Marie could very well be talking about her own relationship with Slowthai, for all we know). As for Twain, she confirms the delights of toxicity by chiming in, “Oh, this body high gives me sleepless nights/It’s a million times what any drug could give/And my red eyes, they are twice as wide/It might look like pain, but to me, it’s bliss.”
Perhaps not since Britney Spears singing, “With a taste of your lips, I’m on a ride/You’re toxic, I’m slippin’ under” on her 2004 hit called, what else, “Toxic,” has there been so much pleasure expressed over pain. And, considering some of the other song titles on Unhealthy, including “Psycho,” “Obsessed,” “Kills Me to Love You” and “Cuckoo,” this particular single only adds to the “on-brand” motif. One that someone apparently had to pick up the slack for as Del Rey and Rihanna have started to soften.
