While “Pon De Replay” might have been one of the summer anthems of 2005, it was the sort of Sean Paul-reminiscent track that could have easily belonged to the likes of a one hit wonder pop ingenue. Filled with the Barbadian rhythms that Rihanna would come to perfect on subsequent singles of A Girl Like Me (her sophomore album), like “S.O.S.” and “Break it Off,” “Pon de Replay” had the potential to be just another drop in the bucket of a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation. And yet, it was precisely because Rihanna came into the industry with a touch of, for lack of a better word, blandness, that she was able to gradually and insidiously unveil her ultimate and perhaps final persona: @badgalriri (an Instagram handle that has never been so all-encapsulating).
With 2006’s A Girl Like Me, Rihanna continued to lure music industry behemoths into a false sense of security with her innocente R&B stylings, as “Unfaithful” led the barrage of singles highlighting the type of girl who felt constant remorse over hurting a guy (obviously, in years following, this song comes across as laughable when heard uttered from the boca of Rihanna, who is the sort of empowered bad bitch who cares not for your feelings so much as her own happiness and aspirational fulfillment–in this way, she truly is the spokesperson for millennials). “P.S. (I’m Still Not Over You)”–which sounds like a rejected song title from the …Baby One More Time album–is another shining example of how Rihanna crept into the music scene under the guise of being the “little doll” that executives would want to help promote.
Announcing the change in her persona not so subtly with the 2007 album Good Girl Gone Bad, it wasn’t until 2009’s Rated R that Rihanna went full-tilt with the no fucks given incarnation that we wouldn’t have any other way at this point. In particular, “Hard,” the double entendre single that asserted just how hard she was, saw the most palpable shift yet in Rihanna’s direction. Paired with fellow homages to cockiness (as she would later call one of her songs), “Russian Roulette” and “Rude Boy” were additional prime offerings in the case called “Rihanna’s Non-Gender Related Transition.”
2010’s Loud was the perfection of what she had been trying to achieve, aura-wise, on Rated R, with “S&M,” “What’s My Name?” and “Man Down” synthesizing her persona of “good” and “bad” to perfect fruition. And, at this point establishing her one record a year pattern, Rihanna was an unstoppable force of hit-making, which persisted with what is arguably still her best album, 2011’s Talk That Talk. Again mixing together elements of impishness with semi-regret, basically every song from it became a single, with the Calvin Harris collaboration, “We Found Love,” at the helm of it all.
Behind the scenes of all this success, of course, the Chris Brown beating had already taken place in 2009, yet Rihanna would eventually take him back, going on to record a song with him on 2012’s Unapologetic (another still more hardened edge shining through on this record as well). The song, “Nobody’s Business,” sampled from Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” was pretty uncomfortable for its insistence that, basically, it was nobody’s business if Rihanna wanted to get the shit smacked out of her. But then, of course, she moved on to prime Travis Scott for Kylie Jenner before finally throwing Drake a bone after his years of pining.
Ah, but we can’t talk about the evolution of Rihanna into @badgalriri without talking about the song and video for “Bitch Better Have My Money,” which finds Rihanna lusting for blood in a very literal way, unconcerned with who she has to fuck with to get it. Setting the tone for a new era of Kill Bill vengeance (one in which the woman was actually in control instead of being manipulated by a director to destroy her body for a scene), “Bitch Better Have My Money” continued to forge the path that The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” video did (maybe it’s just something about having “bitch” in the title of one’s song) in terms of putting women on a level playing field with violence and debauchery. As a sort of teaser single for the 2016 album to come, ANTI‘s release seemed initially to be met with little fanfare, briefly eclipsed by Beyonce’s Lemonade before rekindling interest with singles like “Needed Me” and “Love on the Brain.” The former track ultimately spawned the meme perhaps most telling of her ability to speak for all women as follows:
And so, with Rihanna’s February 20th birthday marking her thirtieth year, her fandom can only watch with hope and wonder as she persists in proving that, like Madonna, you can be “bad” at any age, quite literally letting it all hang out as you traipse the globe with your significant other du moment and daily cease to care about outside critiques and commentaries. All it took was about ten years of not so subtly building up to this peak of indifference, ergo the sum total of the @badgalriri “character.”
