Rihanna: ‘ANTI’ Review
9.0
GENRE: Pop/R&B
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2016Legend has it that beyond Amazon Prime runway shows and make-up tutorial videos on Instagram, there lies a realm called Navy where an ancient tale is kept locked away. According to this tale, a Rihanna album was expected every year like Christmas, and such an album would provide radio-friendly club anthems so the people could survive throughout the following year. One day, the realm’s inhabitants entered a great famine, in which no new album came out for three long years. Then, one day, after weeks of cryptic promotional videos and a confusing rollout, ANTI, Rihanna’s eighth studio album, was officially out. Questions flew around from every direction like stray arrows. Rihanna gave zero fucks.
ANTI’s idiosyncratic and slyly psychedelic narrative divided critics and put some listeners on edge, especially those waiting for the EDM-infused, ready-to-hear formulated pop tracks so innate to Rihanna’s career. The record’s irreverent aura was as enthralling as it was frightening, causing confusion over the singer’s intentions: none of the three stand-alone singles released in 2015 was included on the album. The rollout was, at its best, perplexing with the excuse of being conceptual. In hindsight, such complex promotion was indicative of the intricate work the singer was putting into the record, but how could we have known that much? The final product sounded as if things got out of hand and became too powerful to be controlled, like an unhinged piece of art which a painter can’t fully walk you through the steps of its conception.
The one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that ANTI was a multidimensional record. The coolness conveyed in the tropical lead single “Work” diverged from the rawness shown by the high-pitched vocals on “Higher.” Alternately, the emotion the singer exuded in the tear-inducing piano ballad “Close To You,” the closing track, was as sincere as the emancipated attitude she showed in “Needed Me,” an electro-R&B song with trap beats. Thematically, ANTI is intrinsic to Rihanna’s multifaceted public persona: daring, relaxed, bold, cool, in love, out of love. All at once. Musically, the album sits a few shelves above her previous records, all with creating processes that seemed to have one goal: music made with KTU listeners in mind. On the other hand, ANTI makes you imagine Rihanna sitting in the studio with a joint in hand, recording a bunch of material, scrapping it, and doing it all again the next day. Apparently, that’s precisely what she did for three years.
The exploration of different genres on the record doesn’t sound like bottled-up Roc Nation meeting notes. The record engages you, but not to a level of preoccupation where you have to pay extreme attention. An intrinsic mix of R&B, pop, indie rock, hip-hop, and psychedelia, it’s hard to fit the album into a specific category, with Rihanna gliding through these genres as flawlessly as only she and Beyoncé (as proved a few months later with Lemonade) can do. Her raspy, solid voice is there but more vulnerable this time, sounding even tenuous in some of the songs. This new level of relaxed sassiness is felt right off the bat on “Consideration,” the opening track with an uncredited feature from SZA, then an emerging R&B promise.
The genre-hopping continues throughout the second half of the album with “Same Ol’ Mistakes,” an instrumentally-identical cover of Tame Impala’s 2015 “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” The song provides a portal into Rihanna’s personal playlist that year, considering that the original had been released less than six months before. She must have been so obsessed with the track that decided to sing along to it in the studio and included it on the album. Tame Impala’s frontman Kevin Parker was cool about it. That’s showbiz when it comes to Rihanna, it seems. An immediate classic—and I use these words with complete awareness of their meaning—“Love On The Brain” was pulled out of the same sea that today’s Silk Sonic draws inspiration from, albeit more explicitly so. This is pure assumption and highly debatable, but I doubt that even Rihanna knew she could flex her vocal cords the way she did here.
We never felt tired of Rihanna’s cultural ubiquity, but her album-cycle disruption proved necessary for her artistic development. With ANTI, the singer tore out the pages of the rule book and set them on fire. The album was an act of rebellion, a polite middle finger to everyone who thought she should fit into a specific box. She reconstructed the public’s perception of her as a builder who destroys a beautiful house just to build a similarly beautiful house in its place. ANTI was released more than six years ago, and since then, the singer has acted in movies and built the fashion powerhouses Fenty Beauty and SavageXFenty, recently figuring in the Forbes 2022 list of self-made billionaires. She has mocked fans who keep asking for music, lied about release dates, and dodged new-album-related skewed questions from journalists. Even though her business ventures have paid off, we keep clinging to the belief that she will be back to music soon. When and if she is going to top ANTI, if that’s even possible, and whether she will try to, we will someday find out.
Listen to ANTI:
