Dancing is idiotic. Not actual dancing, 50s waltz stuff can be cool, I mean clubbing. It’s ***ing strange, people hear a song that they half-like and go crazy. What on earth is it like I wonder, when these sorts of songs, and Rihanna makes half of them, come on at work? Or on a bus? Maybe it’s extraordinary willpower and everyone secretly wants to be dancing all the time. No, Rihanna fans, being Rihanna fans, are morons. They couldn’t command that sort of willpower, they’d dance if they wanted to. What is it then? Maybe it’s the shared experience of everyone enjoying a song together, but then what about all the times the same people are there and the same song is playing but, thankfully, everyone’s sitting there straight-faced and motionless? Don’t get me started on the ‘We’re in the moment!’ thing, it’s not really exhilaration if you can muster and discharge it on a whim, is it?
I had to go clubbing with Raymond, a spikey-haired, vest-wearing Criminology grad and his ball-and-chain. She told me she liked Rihanna, I told her Rihanna would be excited should they ever meet. She said “No, that’s chains and whips”. Rhianne, if you can believe that, is that terrible sort of person that starts sentences with “Me thinks”.
We need to stop thinking that music’s made important by the people who listen to it. Yeah, ***loads of people listen to Rihanna. She’s still terrible. In fact, if an artist has loads of fans it might go a way to proving they’re terrible. Most people are idiots, after all. Here’s how we should group music; it’s either ‘Good Good’ – Bowie or something. ‘Bad Good’ – does what it wants to but isn’t going to change any lives, Britney Spears. Rihanna is ‘Bad Bad’. There is no ‘Bad Good’, what would be the point in that? (What’s the point in any of this?! Hehe) Where does she fit in? It must be that people think Rihanna is ‘Good Good’, and if we’ve lost our filter to such an extent then God help us. ‘Unapologetic’ is soul-crushing.
She can’t sing. Half of ‘Unapologetic’ is whiny and the other is spent doing her sickly robot yodelling thing, see ‘Phresh Out The Runway’ and ‘Pour It Up’, or don’t. As the former came on and Raymond and Rhianne insisted we dance and it made me want to saw someone’s legs off. I’m a soon-to-be serial killer. ‘Diamonds’ will kill you. It’s not too bad for a bit. It’s unwaveringly mediocre, reassuringly predictable and easy. It’s all starting to make sense now. Maybe everything’s going to be OK. But ah, is she really singing “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky”? She is, and it’s nothing like the snappy, heartfelt thing she’s going for, it’s cringey wailing over a synth-wall of nothingness. Not even nothingness, that’d be artsy. It’s a synth-wall of the most moderate, perfectly boring nothingness. ‘Loveeee Song’ isn’t too bad. It’s vanilla, smattered with sinuous cracklings and patterings. It’s 13 minutes long though. Who the *** takes this seriously?
‘Unapologetic’ tries to drag you into a colossal, fiery intergalactic romance. A cosmic orgy. The reality is a couple of detestable losers, playing with figurines, making their own laser sounds. ‘Right Now’ is like this and ‘Get it Over With’ isn’t far off, it’s a battle between a gruff churning noise and futuristic sparkling and I don’t care who wins, both are boring. ‘No Love Allowed’ isn’t terrible. It’s an uplifting pop-reggae jam with some excellent thrumming, guided by some merry and contemplative synth twinkles and spasms. Could I have been wrong about her for the past 48 minutes? Oh, no, wait, she’s putting on an accent and it’s terrible. Still, I’m already the miserable one, sitting in the corner refusing to dance. Maybe I could pretend to like this one, if I had to.
I can’t stand this album and I can’t stand Rhianne. If all this time spent making people who don’t want to dance, dance was spent, I don’t know, learning how to dance, then they’d solve their own problem. I just don’t want to share a dancefloor with these creatures. ‘Phresh Out The Runway’ is a ‘club banger’, that’s what Rhianne said. I’m not sure I could hate the two of them any more. Still, my self-esteem needs people screaming Rihanna lyrics in clubs. Too much of me is hating them, I don’t know what I’d do – who I’d be! - if she stopped making crap.
