Let's have a thread for Rihanna's LOUD

"It was amazing."

"get it over with" is amazing

I actually really like this new album. The ballads are surprisingly strong especially Stay, What Now and Mother Mary. The production is pretty great too.

yeah i only like a handful of songs but a lot of them fail in interesting ways, like "what now"

i adore "love without tragedy" so much that when it turns into "mother mary" it's a bit of an anticlimax

"phresh out the runway" and "pour it up" are my keepers though

yeah "pour it up" is fantastic. i actually like "right now" a lot

right now lyrics sound kind of stupid to me. if i have to hear one more song about how we're young right now or how we have to live our lives like we're dying i'm gonna vom

what now i think i liked though

the platitudinousness is kinda what's appealing about 'right now', undemanding in a sea of ugly lies

(uglier, at least)

i don't think platitudes are really what rihanna's missing right now.

if it's nobody's business how about not posting a photo of chris brown topless in your bed on your fucking instagram

I believe Pitchfork didn't enjoy this too much.

confused about this part:

Unapologetic courts this confusion. We see the singer as self-possessed ("Good Girl Gone Bad"), a superstar isolated by her fame ("A Girl Like Me") who is full of sexual brio ("Rude Boy").

none of these songs are on the album afaik???

There's a lot of confusion in there. However, comparing Future's contribution to "a dog vomiting" was the thing that really got me mad.

In context, she's saying these previously released songs paint a powerful image that's already difficult to disentangle from Rihanna's personal life and Unapologetic doubles down on this blurring between fact and fiction by explicitly evoking and heavily trading upon the battery incident that has become the defining fact about "the real Rihanna".

i thought that it was a bit confusing too

i don't really rate "loveeeeee song" at all, i'd agree that future is a bit OTT on it

"A bit OTT" is what Future does in general, though? "A dog vomiting" is just insulting. I definitely find a lot of the posturing on the album to be questionable to say the least. But Hopper goes out of her way to say that the album sounds like shit and it doesn't.

nah on loveeeee song it really does sound like he's in the process of getting sick

heaven forfend we insult future

Future is God. Pluto 3D is his second coming. Sulphurous pits await those who dare to compare His works to a dog's vomit.

I'm only half-joking.

tellin jokes, tellin not-jokes at the same damn time

Setting aside whether you or I like the album better than she does, I liked Hopper's review just fine. I always find it interesting when pop stars straddle the personal and the impersonal, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This review falls on the "not" side, which I understand if the results are indeed a mish-mash of confessional, confrontational and dutifully by the numbers. Read like she mostly said Rihanna herself sounded like shit.

Is " I pray that love don't strike twice" a literal-minded reference to getting beat up by Chris Brown? If so, that's brazen.

Is " I pray that love don't strike twice" a literal-minded reference to getting beat up by Chris Brown? If so, that's brazen.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, November 26, 2012 7:54 PM (58 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that one is taking it a bit too far. In general, I'm open for a review such as the one Hopper was going for. I just think she's too imprecise here, the nuances get lost. She just kinda comes storming out the gate, bat in hand, from her first sentence on and doesn't stop beating at it until she thinks the critter's dead.

imprecise how? if anything, she seems to go out of her way to specifically call out everything she disliked about the album, down to the summation

She just kinda comes storming out the gate, bat in hand, from her first sentence on and doesn't stop beating at it until she thinks the critter's dead.

Yep, pretty much like everything else Jessica Hopper ever writes.

Imprecise in that she has an ax to grind and everything on the album ends up chop suey. There are some interesting analyses to be made with this album but all her conclusions seem foredrawn. She just carves her way through all of the offending quotes without stopping to think.

but her takeaway seems to be "if this album didn't sound like shit, it might be worth analyzing"; given that conclusion, she appears to be making exactly the right supporting argument?

That's not what I get from this. Her critique of the sound is pretty shallow imo - she puts nearly all her energy into the "contents". At the very least this is an interesting album sonically from a pop diva - very different from her last. To me, Rihanna's main narrative for a while now has been/is that she's desperately trying to avoid ending up as "the victim" in the Story of Rihanna and CB, and rather than making a sensible analysis of how her manouevers are deeply problematic in this regard, Hopper seems intent on putting her back in that role, as the victim.

She is the victim? Or does that make her a strong woman for taking back a former abuser?

she gives some background to the album, talks about the "problematic" duet and says it's one of the best songs on the album, spends two paragraphs talking about how most of the songs at the end sound like shit, then talks about how weird and tortured the songs at the end are, wrapping up with:

On one hand, it's tempting to give Rihanna props for broadcasting her all-too-real shortcomings. She's quite a distance from the tidy narrative we'd like, the one where she's learned from her pain and is back to doing diva triumph club stomp in the shadow of Beyoncé. Unapologetic rubs our faces in the inconvenient, messy truth of Rihanna's life which, even if it were done well, would be hard to celebrate as a success. But the measurable failure is the album's music. On a track-by-track basis, the songs make for dull labor, not worth our time and not befitting Rihanna's talent.

The "and it sounds like shit too"- trope is embraced by moralist critics everywhere, always. People said that about Efil4zaggin and they said it about Naked Lunch. Unapologetic obv isn't that good, but the principle remains. It's the sound of the critic washing her hands.

heaven forfend we insult future

― THAT IS ONE BIG PIZZA (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Monday, November 26, 2012 1:48 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf that song is completely awesome

xpost That's fair, to a degree. If it "sounded good," would the review have moved beyond the Chris Brown stuff?

I think it sounds good. Not AOTY good, and not stuffed with hot singles, but it's an interesting album sonically. Even stuff like Jump, with its Power Ballad goes brostep goes genderbending pony interpolation, which admittedly is a huge mess, is very interesting.

im not familiar enough w/ the album to say whether or not she was letting her overarching problems w/ it blind her to what may have been a more complicated record in the interest of a pan but i definitely felt that way about how she described the track with Future which is think is a much more impressive track than shes giving it credit for. ppl who dont get Future are like ppl who hate cilantro

too much cilantro is a bad thing

that edit you posted on tumblr of the future song is >>> the original tho

There can never be enough Future.

too much cilantro is a bad thing

― J0rdan S., Monday, November 26, 2012 2:54 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

luckily this song is balanced w/ nicely subtle production & a really genuinely interesting performance from rihanna

it helps that it works as a song independently of the CB/R narrative imo

D-40 OTM

the one track off this album that i super fuck with is "numb," eminem's butt police line included

included?

damn

i dont like all Future songs or something. But I think the rihanna track ranks w/ his best of the year certainly.

the best thing about "numb" is that it barely even feels like a song

it's like a really good random soundcloud production

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Reviewing the artist vs. reviewing the album = go to therapy my dudes!

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