Paper #2

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Rihanna – Good Girl Gone Really Bad

Each generation’s music industry is a vivid reflection of its unique youth culture.

Particularly teenage girls seek role models to emulate as they experience a period of self-growth

and identity. Music is a major factor that contributes to shaping customs and instilling

ideological norms that they would follow. Each era creates top artists who target such audiences:

Madonna in the 1980s and Britney in the 1990s. Their equivalent in this decade is Rihanna, an

artist from Barbados who began her career at only 17-years old. Like every other mainstream

female artist, she advocates for girls with a sense of freedom and independence. Though this has

been the underlining message behind her music, the implications her lyrics, music videos, and

sense of style portray have changed over the course of her career due to a domestic violence

incident. The incident questioned her legitimacy as a strong independent role model for girls and

put her personal life on the spotlight. In the earlier years of her career, Rihanna sang about the

sensation of love and the excitement of dancing, but after feeling vulnerable from the incident,

she has began to promote women empowerment, using sexual dominance as her main tool.

Although her goal seems beneficiary to women, wouldn’t simplifying women to only a sexual

context automatically degrade them as objects of pleasure, and thus undermine their sense of

individuality?<p>

To fully understand the change in her message to young girls, it is important to analyze

her starting-off stage. Her first song “Pon de Replay” was released in late 2005 and launched her

career as it hit the Billboard’s top 100 chart. The song encouraged young girls her age to live life

to the fullest by partying, and even created a signature dance move to correlate with the beat of

the song. The next song “S.O.S”, released in the album <i>A Girl Like Me</i> in April 2006,

refers to her seeking help from the wondrous spell that love has casted on her. She sings, “boy,

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I’m your tiny dancer”, depicting how she has made herself a personalized object only to the man

she loves, and so pleads for him to “take [her] home tonight”. Through these songs, she is

basically showing girls how they should serve their men who they have so helplessly and

frivolously fallen in love with.<p>

Her next album <i>Good Girl Gone Bad</i>, released in May 2007, took her music

career to a higher level, both financially, as she made more top 100 hit songs, and socially, as her

popularity grew worldwide. In the song “Umbrella”, her top-grossing song by far, her image

completely changed from sweet-innocent girl with crushes to strong-sassy woman in love. She

changed her fun long curly hair to a sophisticated short bob and transformed her wardrobe from

wearing tank tops and sneakers to mini-dresses and stilettos. In the lyrics, she tells her man that

she’ll save him from the rain of troubles through the protections of her umbrella. She submits

herself to her man by claiming, “I’ll be all you need and more” and promises a long-term

relationship by telling him, “Told you I'll be here forever / Said I'll always be a friend / Took

an oath I'm a stick it out till the end.” The songs in this album portray how love is a

commitment, which can potentially have a negative impact on young girls who would then

start allowing themselves to be vulnerable in relationships.<p>

Possibly, Rihanna was influenced by the messages of her own songs as her relationship

with R&B singer Chris Brown became serious. The two were a famous couple until the domestic

violence incident in February 2009. Chris Brown was charged with physically abusing Rihanna

during a heated argument. The paparazzi pounced on the story and rumors began to spread,

ruining Rihanna’s public image in the eyes of her fans. A few days later, an image was leaked to

the internet from the police report, showing a close up picture of Rihanna’s bruised face with her

eyes closed. The picture showed Rihanna as highly insecure and victimized by a horrible crime

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from the man she loved. It displayed her embarrassing weakness, thus questioning her entire

career as a secure woman who a lot of young girls looked up to.<p>

After months of silence, Rihanna made her debut back by releasing her album <i>Rated

R</i> in November 2009. As her album title suggests, her image now became tougher, raw, and

more violent as she tried to prove herself as a strong woman in control of her life and

relationships. She now changed her hairstyle to a mohawk to deviate from the girly image she

had before and shaved one side of her head to represent a new beginning. The tour following the

release of this album was entitled <i>Last Girl On Earth</i>, as if to indicate she is the only

tough girl left in the world. Her wardrobe became tighter and more revealing, wearing outfits

from black latex to nude bodysuits. In the 2011 Grammys performance, she wore a metal gem-

studded underwear, indicating that what is underneath there is locked away and precious so that

it doesn’t make her seem accessible to just any ordinary man. Her dances on stage became more

provocative as she grinds and sways her butt against the microphone stand mimicking a stripper

pole. Her songs reflected army and master-slave scenarios, especially in the sexual context, as

she tried to regain her title after feeling inferior from a physical abuse. Her first song “Russian

Roulette” is thought to be directed to Chris Brown, talking about how she loved a man so

unconditionally, that it caused her to play, metaphorically speaking, a life-threatening game. In

the song she softly sings, “You can see my heart beating / Oh, you can see it through my

chest / Said I'm terrified, but I'm not leaving / Know that I must pass this test / So just pull

the trigger.” The song’s lyrics demonizes Chris Brown, and any other abusive man, on their

lack of sensibility when they can see a woman’s heart beating from fear, but nonetheless

they still pull the trigger of physical abuse. Using this song as her gateway, Rihanna

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initiated to build a new image for herself that replaced her conception of men being love

partners with the belief that men are inferior to tough women. <p>

The next song released, “Rude Boy”, caught her audience by surprise since it portrayed

the young Rihanna as never before. In the song, she’s demanding a man to give her sex without

disappointment, asking him “can you get it up” and “is you big enough?”, clearly referring to a

man’s penis. She even yells “I want want want, what you want want want”, conveying that sex is

all that is on her mind and on his mind, so let’s just to the act regardless of love. She depicts

herself as the man in the relationship by being the one in power and objectifying the opposite

gender since all she is concerned with is whether or not he can satisfy her. In the music video,

she’s shown as wild, biting on a snake resembling a penis, and riding a lion, showing how she is

able in control the king of the jungle. She repeats “giddyup” and sneers, showing true animalistic

desire for sex. The multiple colors and mirror-imaging in the music video hypnotize the viewer

into being part of the world of animalistic sex where women are in control. <p>

Her song “Hard”, again reflects her new image as the top dog who doesn’t take offense

from anyone. She addresses her critics in the lyrics by saying “where the girls talking trash” and

“where the bloggers at”, confronting them to face her after spreading rumors about her

inferiority. In the music video, she waves around a flag with an R, showing how she has

conquered back her identity and is no longer a loser victim to the domestic violence. She is

shown as commander of a group of male soldiers, illustrating her as an army strong woman who

can control men. It almost seems as if she is trying extra hard to depict herself as an independent

woman since she has multiple indicators in her songs that reemphasize her tough identity, and

encourages her young audience to do the same.<p>

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Her latest album <i>Loud</i>, released in November 2010, reinforces her image as a

fierce woman. In the song “Only Girl”, she demands her man to “make [her] feel like [she’s] the

only girl in the world”, and make her the only thing that’s important in his life. She demands to

be “the only one in command” and so asks her man to “take [her] for a ride”, a phrase which

refers to having sex. The song “What’s My Name”, reinforces her position in command as she

literally asks for acknowledgement of her high authority. She feels unique and special, somewhat

in an egotistical way, and wants her audience to feel the same. In her earlier songs, she would

make the man feel special, but now she wants the man to make her feel special, in turn reversing

the gender roles to make men subordinate.<p>

In the song “S&M”, she shows how she is free to experiment and do whatever she wants.

S&M stands for sadism and masochism, which is the pleasure received from inflicting pain on

others and feeling pain oneself. She reasons her addiction to sexual pain by saying it “feels so

good being bad”. She illustrates raw and dirty images, claiming, “whips and chains excite [her]”.

In the music video, she is cling wrapped to a wall for display while the press takes pictures, but

by the end of the video she regains control over the press and literally whips them back to place

and walks them as if they were dogs (her bitches). Images of her tied up reflect porn-like

symbols of pain-inducing sex addictions. Altogether, the song shows the raw messy side that

women can become, and therefore show her young audience to not be afraid to experiment

sexually, even if it means one is being “sexually abused”. It’s extremely ironic since one would

think Rihanna would be sensitive to abusive acts given her domestic violence past, but

nonetheless she uses raw sex as a means to supposedly empower women. <p>

Rihanna went from sweet-love-struck girl to obnoxious-loud-animalistic-sex-addicted-

carless-bitch in reaction to her traumatizing domestic violence experience. Though she tried to

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regain her music career by making women immutable from men’s influence, she in fact does the

complete opposite since she only further objectifies herself by being a sex doll. She degrades

herself even further in the process of trying to regain her identity after feeling inferior. She uses

the act of sex to show her control over men, but she does it to such a degree that it counteracts

and makes her seem like a sex symbol meant to be “sexually abused”. Rihanna switched her

promoting relationships for love to relationships for only sexual pleasure so as to avoid

vulnerability. Her young female audience is instilled with the idea that love will make them

defenseless (literally), so instead they can feel recognition through being sexier and demanding

only sex from men because that is all they are good for.<p>