Rihanna - ANTI (January (???) 2016)

i always enjoy "consideration" when i put it on but i can never remember any of it afterwards!

I love "Kiss It Better" and will prefer to hear it 1000x times a day over the menace called "Work."

huh, "consideration" was the first track I really connected with, though its p structurally loose so I can see it feeling evasive. I like that it's a duet, plus it has a kind of Broadway meets Kingston feel to it.

is "work" a menace because it's an earworm or cuz of Drake? regarding the latter, I like to imagine that "who am I to hold your past against you?" is directed at him. he also comes bearing the good news that there's a campaign to end him

(a) the gibberish is an annoyance
(b) Drake

"Needed Me" sounded amazing on Hot 97 today. I hope they stick with it for the next radio hit.

i always enjoy "consideration" when i put it on but i can never remember any of it afterwards!

had the exact opposite effect on me.

"needed me" starting to get radio play over here too. it's been charting really well based almost solely on heavy streaming activity so it would appear the demand is there.

nah "Needed Me" and "Kiss" were both released as singles simultaneously

or you mean the streaming before the single release, yeah it was already doing pretty well.

I get consideration in my head all the time. I love the vocal line even though/because it reminds me of wendy vainity's "I am a cat" video

love this album, way more than i would have ever imagined. didn't trust my judgment at first, maybe i just really want to fuck rihanna right now, and was reassured by the xgau review until i read it and it was clear he just really wants to fuck rihanna right now. other than rated r i haven't heard any other entire rihanna albums, her pace kinda screams 'hits and filler' to me and i could get the hits from radio. what else do i need to check out?

rated r is her only album qua album masterpiece (and is weirdly the album anti feels like it's trying to replicate, but not as well)

i would probably argue for music of the sun as her second best album

I don't think anti is trying to replicate it but it's trying very hard to be a career changer - like rated r was. Only then she had some very good reasons for wanting to change her image/persona whereas this time it feels slightly forced?

Unapologetic is her best followed by Good Girl Gone Bad imo

Rated R, Good Girl Gone Bad, Loud and Unapologetic are all good albums, which is partly why the narrative about ANTi being her first ALBUM is so frustrating.

AOTY

it's a really good album!

i probably like Talk That Talk and Unapologetic best. Rated R and Good Girl Gone Bad are among the stronger ones but have stuff i don't like at all. Anti somewhere below those.

Anti has like 5 great songs and then stuff that doesn't work so much for me, about typical

anti may not be rihanna's first good album but it is her first *cohesive* album in quite some time

i was going to say it's certainly the one with the least "stuff that doesn't work so much for me" since rated r, but then i realised i never actually listened to unapologetic in full

have come to think of the first four tracks together representing the best and most true capsule suite of the full rihanna experience. impulsive/ thoughtful, messy/self-aware-calculated, sentimental/real, cheap/lavish, trite/evocative, and all of it sort of touching in its signature way ("i come fluttering in from neverland" perfect, she knows herself better than we do)

can be expanded to first six if cynical meta if necc cos 'desperado' is default ri album trash and 'woo' is cool junk

i still don't really bother sticking around for the rest, seems reiterative, duration of marination is a personal pref but doesnt add more flava

(westwood did teach me that 'sex with me' is the spring jammy jam though, pure temptay-shuun)

xgau rvw is great btw fuck the haters

ah, for me the second half(let's say from "needed me" to the end) is the best (although "consideration" and "kiss it better" are among my favourite tracks here).
I love the one-two punch "love on the brain"/"higher".
I have the impression her singing is more varied than before.
good album overall.

xp
Rihanna as Peter Pan to a culture of Wendys is so good: "I have to do things my own way darling"

p sure any configuration of her and us as peter, tink and/or wendy is arguable tbh

"Sex with you" is my favorite on the album tbh

to echo billstevjim it is indeed beautiful and does indeed rule, i couldn't love this more. can't recall a mainstream pop album i've liked as much since maybe Futuresex/Lovesounds. seems she's doing almost the entire thing on the tour dates too, or like 9 tracks at least each night.

I unabashedly love this album. Incredible songwriting, gorgeous production, really inventive, ballsy vocal performances.

Reminds me a lot of Channel Orange in its varied aesthetics, dream logic and vignette-esque storytelling. Also it's an album that feels oblique and impressionistic at first, but reveals itself to be incredibly openhearted after multiple listens. It's incredible.

Shame about this album's bungled release, though. The narrative around it should have been "holy shit this album is incredible," instead it was "lol Tidal."

agree on all counts

interesting that "needed me" is really taking off while "kiss it better" is looking like a pretty big flop

I feel like history will vindicate "Kiss It Better." Already acts are covering it (Miguel and Father John Misty, which yeah, I know), and that helps canonize a song. Shame it's not the hit it deserves to be, but I've gotta believe it'll eventually be recognized as something really special.

i don't really get the praise for this album, if anything there's a bigger quality gap between the singles and the rest than on a lot of her other albums

love on the brain tho

i don't really get the praise for this album, if anything there's a bigger quality gap between the singles and the rest than on a lot of her other albums

― a goon shaped tool (some dude), Tuesday, May 10, 2016

my man

it's her best singles run since GGGB tho...

i don't really get the praise for this album, if anything there's a bigger quality gap between the singles and the rest than on a lot of her other albums

― a goon shaped tool (some dude), Tuesday, May 10, 2016

i don't even agree with this statement but anyway it was a full three months between when the album dropped and when "kiss it better" & "needed me" became singles so you really got to live with those as "part of the album" so to speak

Yeah if anything I feel like there's less of a distinction between her singles and the album cuts, both in terms of tone and quality, than there usually is on her albums. To me it holds together amazingly well.

I'd agree that it's not a self-evidently Great Album the way maybe Beyonce's last few have been. It took a while to grow on me, but the songwriting is super strong throughout, so I just kept finding new material to connect with. I have a soft spot for albums that reveal themselves slowly like that.

Even the singles were slow-growers. "Work" was dismissed as lightweight at first, and maybe as a sign of an impending flop, but it stands up to a thousand repetitions. And not too many people singled out "Kiss It Better" as an obvious single, even though it feels like one in hindsight.

"Sex with me" deserves more acclaim& attention

this album def has its moments (not nec the singles) but it's no more satisfying an album-qua-album as anything else she's done since rated r, and the idea that it's some huge volte face away from a commercial sound to ~greater artistry is a bit ridiculous

And not too many people singled out "Kiss It Better" as an obvious single, even though it feels like one in hindsight.

I too love this album and mostly agree with your posts about it ITT, but I'm not sure this is quite right. For the post-BBHMM months of 2015 when we were in ANTi purgatory, "Kiss It Better" was hailed as THE song that was going to save the campaign. ATRL poster types were wetting themselves over a 10 second snapchat video of it being played back in the studio for months.

and xp idk about "~greater artistry", but I do think a lot of this - "Woo", "Higher", "James Joint", the tame impala cover - scans to me as fairly uncommercial.

Maybe I need to recalibrate my idea of commerciality but "This Is What You Came For" seems much more geared toward that than the album.

she's always had deep cuts that didn't sound especially commercial ("phresh out the runway", "love without tragedy/mother mary" etc etc) but i guess i disagree that anything about anti showcases a deeper side of rihanna as an artist, or that the album represents turning her back on pop. and "woo" and "higher" sound uncommercial because they're terrible, not because they're interesting or experimental

"Kiss It Better" was hailed as THE song that was going to save the campaign

but only by the kind of ppl who would base this off a 10-second snapchat snippet! most of the world didn't even know the song existed

well, sure, but most of the world probably doesn't have an opinion about rihanna album campaigns and what should and shouldn't be a single either

also i just researched matters more thoroughly and discovered that in fact rihanna posted about this song to instagram in 2014 and 175,000 people liked her post https://www.instagram.com/p/wZn2FQBMxx/

What are the odds of this getting a vinyl release?

Not good? Would be a first for Riri I think

this performance is fuckin great http://www.gossipcop.com/rihanna-love-on-the-brain-billboard-music-awards-video-bbmas-performance-watch/