Here is my looong, unedited, still-in-process post on Rihanna, "Look, I Overcame!" Gaga Feminism, goth damage, and multi-racial white supremacy. Unlike most people who talk about Rihanna, Breezy, feminism, & race, I will actually discuss her MUSIC--chords, compositional and performance strategies, etc. I'll be talking about this at Wayne State and Luther College, and I look forward to everyone's feedback on the blog.
1. L’affaire Breezy
Critics
and fans filtered their responses to Rihanna’s Unapologetic through
Robyn Fenty’s continued relationship with Chris Brown, who infamously assaulted
her outside the 2009 Grammy Awards ceremony. For example, Spin’s Caryn
Ganz treats Rihanna’s “unapologetic
love of Chris Brown”[i] as
central to the album’s interpretation and cultural significance, LA Times’s
Randall Roberts opens his review with a discussion, not of the lead single, but
of “Nobody’s Business,” her duet with Brown. Dan Martin’s NME review reads the album primarily, and almost
entirely, through the lens this collaboration.[ii]
To his credit, Martin avoids the egregious, paternalist concern-trolling that
motivates many of his peers.[iii]
The New York Times’s rock critic John Caramancia comes across
particularly paternalistically, phrasing his critique of the album as a
reprimand to Rihanna: “To
make public art with the person who physically abused you is immature,
pre-feminist, post-ethics …It doesn’t help at all
that her songs with Mr. Brown — the new one, and the remix of “Birthday Cake,”
from her 2011 album, “Talk That Talk” — are some of her best” (emphasis mine).
MusicOMH’s Philip Matusavage takes the “saving-brown-women-from-brown-men”
paternalism even farther:
“to argue that the unpleasantness at the album’s core doesn’t matter...is to enable the misogyny which fuels this
record, where an overwhelmingly male group of songwriters play up Rihanna as an alluring cipher, flirting with
danger while staring into the void. Whatever Rihanna’s role in this album,
it’s to be hoped that she doesn’t believe most of what she’s singing here. As a record it is not only misguided, it’s
dangerous. We should not shy away from that” (emphasis mine).[iv]
Both
reviewers treat Rihanna as too “immature,” passive, victimized (by Brown, by
her management) or uninformed (“pre-feminist”) to fully understand the
implications of what she’s done on this album. Sure, she may be defiantly
flipping a musical bird, as Caramancia suggests, but that’s still a very adolescent,
unreflective behavior. These portraits of Rihanna-the-manhandled-victim
resonate with the equally racist, misogynist coverage of Billie Holiday.
Perhaps critics like to paint
Rihanna as a victim of Brown and the record industry because they can’t fathom
why she would intentionally augment and invest in the damage he symbolizes.
Roberts’s LA Times review is especially revelatory. The album is
…a little sickening,
because for the first time since the incident, her addressing the complicated
issue feels not like a defense of love
but a marketing maneuver, a way of turning a negative into a positive.
(emphasis mine).
She’s turning a negative (damage) into a positive (profit),
but this profit does not come in the
form of efficiently capitalizable human capital—it augments and amplifies (so-called) sickness, not (so-called)“health”
(‘health’ here is an index of the efficient functioning of hegemonic
institutions, the biopolitically healthy society…which is a racist, misogynist,
ableist society. This sort of “health” is actually really pathological.) We
listeners can’t effectively or efficiently turn her damage in to our own human
capital (except, perhaps, by concern-trolling and treating our attempts
to save this brown woman from her brown man as a badge of our own multi-racial-white-supremacist-patriarchal
cred). The album is “sickening” because it is difficult to capitalize on in any
but anti-social ways, in ways that amplify damage rather than amplify
surplus value. The anti-sociality of this damage, its diminishment rather than
its augmentation of MRWaSP, is what makes it read/feel like illness. It does
not optimize the health of neoliberal, multi-racial white supremacist
patriarchy; or, the opportunity cost to get it to do this is too high. Like a
computational or biological virus, this damage causes its host to run
sub-optimally. This capitalizing on
anti-social damage is what I will later call “melancholy.”
Before
I talk about Rihanna’s gothy bad-girl approach to neoliberal melancholy, I want
to address the album’s actual music, and critics’ responses to it. It’s
important to consider the music not just because Rihanna is, well, a musician,
and we shouldn’t fall in to the bad habit of reducing women artists of color to
their biographies and ignoring their work; the music speaks directly to this
issue of neoliberal melancholia.
2. Not A Banger
Many
critics interpret the music as melancholic—that is, as failing to
“overcome” and capitalize on damage. For example, Caramancia describes the
album as “bored,” “dull,” and “bland.” The song “’Lost in Paradise’…buzzes and
hums but does not take flight”
(Caramancia; emphasis mine), as though it does not generate enough lift to rise
above the album’s
affective doldrums, “sinking” instead,
as Alex Macpherson writes, “into directionless drift.”[v] The album’s lead single, Diamonds, both
musically and visually evokes directionless drift, a Bermuda triangle of
melancholic “meh”.
Musically,
the song invokes both tonal and EDM-style compositional devices, but uses them
in stunted, under-realized ways.[vi]
The song uses some of the language and conventions of tonal harmony without
itself being a “tonal” piece. There are no cadences, no resolution, no key
changes, etc., so it’s not really tonal. However, it does have a
harmonic structure which is rooted in the semiotics of functional tonality. The
song is basically a loop of G Bb A (Bb) chords. It plays around with the
minor-third relationship between G and Bb, and evokes D as an absent,
spectral/hauntological dominant/major fifth (A is the dominant of D, which is
the dominant of G).[vii]
The song continually circles around the minor third and the
absent/hauntological major fifth—the two main functional relationships in tonal
chord structure. This looping can be heard as melancholic in two ways: first,
as a melancholic failure to get over the lost/lacking D/fifth/dominant; second,
the circling around the minor third creates the effect of a harmonic Bermuda
triangle. The minor third is strongly associated with sad, depressed,
melancholic affect—it’s sad, whereas the leading-tone interval (i.e., the theme
from Jaws) is more scary. Constantly circulating around and returning to
this minor third, the song generates melancholic affects. “Diamonds” uses the
language and semiotics of tonality to produce harmonic melancholy.[viii]
But
the song isn’t really tonal in its background or underlying structure;
the chord changes are more middle-ground effects than fundamental structures.
The underlying foundation has more in common with extra-tonal EDM-pop than with
tonal pop. It’s a modular song, composed of 16-bar phrases arranged into verses
and choruses, with a failed or mis-fired dubstep-y “drop” as its not-climax.
Here’s the structure:
Intro (4 bars)
A (4x4, or 16-bar verse)
B (4x4 or 16-bar chorus)
A1 (4x3, or 12-bar verse)
B – regular chorus
1 4-bar phrase (that
leftover phrase from A1)
B
Many dubstep and EDM-pop
songs use a combination of a soar and a pause-drop to create a musical climax.
Psy’s infamous “Gangnam Style” and Baauer’s even more infamous “Harlem Shake”
both do this: they “soar” up to a peak of rhythmic intensity by increasing the
rate at which a percussion and/or vocal pattern is repeated; they then “pause”
by dropping out (most of) the instrumentals for 1 bar before landing hard on
the downbeat of the following measure. The pause delays “resolution” on that
downbeat, thus exacerbating tension and augmenting the intensity of the “hit”
by creating a “harder they come, the harder they fall” effect. In “Diamonds,”
the extra 4-bar phrase between the last two choruses functions like a pause;
all but the barest accompaniment drops out for four bars, after which it
“drops” on the downbeat of the final chorus. However, there’s no soar up to this
pause-drop. In the same way that the
tonal dominant/fifth (the D chord) is invoked as an absence, the song is
haunted by an absent soar. The song feels directionless because it leaves the out the climaxes (the soars,
the functional harmonic relationship between dominant and tonic) that we expect
to find in the musical/compositional techniques it uses. “Diamonds” is a
conquest narrative that doesn’t conquer (no tonal development and resolution),
and an intensification trajectory that never intensifies (a pause-drop without
a soar).
“Diamonds” fails
to fully exploit and optimize the compositional techniques it adopts. In this
way, it is a failed musical investment. In a
context where success, optimization, investment, and capitalization are ethical
and aesthetic ideals, melancholy consists in failure, sub-peak
performance, divestment, and not profiting. Unlike Ulysses, who conquers the
damage wrought by the Sirens, and (as I will explain briefly just below) unlike
Ludacris, who, in his “Rest of My Life” video, capitalizes on this damage, Rihanna
fails to overcome and profit from her own damage qua “Siren.” The video ends
with Rihanna floating—not even swimming or treading water, just floating
face-up—in the water.[ix]
She is unlike Ulysses because never makes it out of that Bermuda triangle of
melancholy, never returns to solid Caribbean and/or North American ground. She
is unlike Ludacris because she does not build up to a crest (i.e., a musical
soar), as Luda’s video does; instead, she just floats along with the undulating
waves. She’s not living life on the edge; she’s just along for the ride.
Top photo from Rihanna's "Diamonds" video; bottom photo from Ludacris's "Rest of My Life" video.
This intentional failure reflected in her vocal
performance. For example, Macpherson accuses Rihanna of failing to sufficiently invest in her
emotional pain and trauma: “frequently, Rihanna seems as if she can barely be arsed to
connect to the songs emotionally, opting instead to blare out ragged, aimless
vocal performances. (“Just going through the motions / I can’t even get the
emotions to come out,” she intones on ‘What Now’: too bloody right).” According
to these critics, Rihanna fails to sufficiently invest in the
emotional/affective intensity of her record. In a musical economy that values
the “work hard/play hard” ethos (both Ne-Yo and Wiz Kalifah have songs based on
this premise), Rihanna does neither. Her musical performance is just “meh.”
The musical performance—both Rihanna’s vocal
delivery, and the songwriting—doesn’t overcome damage in a way that amplifies
listeners’ affective experience of privilege. She doesn’t broadcast the
overcoming or the “winning” that we then receive and rehearse as our own. As
Jessia Hopper puts it in her Pitchfork review:
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.
Rihanna does not turn her damage into the best of all
possible success stories (she does capitalize on it, as I will argue later,
just not in the ‘right’ way, i.e., in a way that amplifies listeners’
experience of privilege)—that’s the “tidy narrative we’d like.” Crucially,
Hopper connects Rihanna’s failure to capitalize on her damage to the music’s
failure to take flight into a triumphant “club stomp.” Basically, Hopper wishes
Rihanna had made another club banger like her Calvin Harris collaboration “We
Found Love.” This track is built around two utterly massive soars, and the
lyrics and video are about a “hopeless place”—e.g., abject and disgusting
council flats, an abusive relationship—becomes a place where “we found love.”
“We Found Love” starts in the same “hopeless place” that the lead single from Unapologetic:
the opening line to “We Found” is “Yellow diamonds in the sky…,” while
“Diamonds”’s lyrics urge us to “shine bright…like diamonds in the sky.” The
difference between the two tracks is musical: the former is a veritable club
banger with a proper Calvin-Harris-produced soar, the latter is, well, pretty
flat and boring. The music in “We Found” performs the musical overcoming
that is absent in “Diamonds.”
This
Pitchfork review suggests that we could forget her politics if only she
made a banger. She could evoke all sorts of awful damage—her relationship with
Brown, domestic abuse, poverty, racism, etc.—as long as she capitalizes on it
in the right way—i.e., as long as she overcomes it. This resilience would put
her damage in service of MRWaSP. Rihanna’s performance on Unapologetic
is read as melancholic and insufficiently resilient because the investments she
does make are not profitable enough, not profitable in the right ways. Rihanna
does not evoke or perform her damage—her attachment to blackness and black
masculinity, for example—in a way that supports MRWaSP. The album is read as an
investment in Chris Brown, i.e., in stereotypical thug-like black
masculinities, masculinities that cannot be leveraged by MRWaSP.
c. Anti-Social Damage
In
MRWaSP, blackness is not so much an “otherness machine” (as Appiah puts it), as
an affective amplifier. Some styles
of blackness are included within white supremacy’s privileged mainstream, so
they don’t generate “otherness” as efficiently as new signifiers of queerly
racialized “terrorist” identities do. So blackness—middle-class,
homonational—is still instrumental, but it’s a different type of instrument. It
“works hard/plays hard”, amplifying the intensity of whites’ affective
comportments; black culture workers are like sous chefs, making white affective
economies work more efficiently for whites/white supremacy. With their “work
hard/play hard” and “living life on the edge” tropes, black artists like
Ludacris on “Rest of My Life” amplify whites’ affective experience of
“winning”—i.e., of privilege.
Unapologetic amplifies the “wrong” affects: not winning and
resilience, but melancholy. Like resilience discourse, melancholy intensifies
damage as a site of pleasure and identity-construction, but amplifies this
damage-capital beyond an efficient, acceptable opportunity cost. If MRWaSP
tried to recycle this noise into signal, it wouldn’t return a high enough
profit margin. This sub-optimal profitability is what makes Unapologetic’s
pleasures and identities anti-social. Rihanna’s Unapologetic might
generate surplus value, but it is never the “right” kind; her social/soft
capital does not optimize neoliberal hegemony (rather, it under- or over-drives
it). When hegemonic sociality is predicated on damage, Rihanna makes
anti-social damage. Anti-social pleasures and identities do not contribute to
the optimization of “society,” i.e., MRWaSP. They are damaged in old-school
goth ways, in ways that induce loss of fidelity, inefficiency, and waste. “Melancholy,” then, is my term for
anti-social damage, damage that is not (sufficiently) capitalizable, or not
capitalizable in the right ways/to the right ends.
Reviewers
criticize Rihanna’s continued attachments to what she ought to
overcome—non-bourgeoise black masculinities. Critics locate this attachment in
the album’s implicit and explicit evocations of Chris Brown, who, as I
discussed earlier, is read as a symbol of violent, misogynist, “unreconstructed”
and “primitive” unruliness. They also, and perhaps more interestingly,
locate this attachment in Rihanna’s own performance of black masculinity. They
attribute Breezy-style (i.e., unprofitable) black masculine unruliness to
Rihanna herself. For example, Caramancia opens his review with the observation
that:
The 13th word of the first
verse of the first song on “Unapologetic,” the seventh album by Rihanna, is a
curse, and she relishes it, hitting the syllables
hard, spitting them out sharply as if she hoped they might wound someone.
The song, “Phresh Out the Runway,” is a chaotically dense spray of boasts over
a muscular, scraping beat. Rihanna
sounds indignant and impressed with herself, proclaiming, “Walk up in this bitch like I own the ho”[x]
(emphasis mine).
Leading off with the hard macho
brutality of her vocal performance, and the “brutish and bruised” character of
the “music,” Caramancia’s review highlights Rihanna’s kinging on
thug/non-bourgeois black masculinity. She intensifies her attachment to
unprofitably unruly black masculinity by adopting, embodying, and performing it
herself.
Rihanna’s
kinging is most evident in “Pour It Up,” a gothy trap-y song[xi]
in which she adopts a really macho
persona (this could easily be a Drake or Kendrick Lamar track); unlike Minaj’s
Zolanski, this macho alter-ego isn’t played for laughs. In her kinging, Rihanna performs entrepreneurial
unruliness: she’s not talking about gang warfare, getting shot 9 times, etc., but
about profligate spending and investing
in her image as a someone who spends a lot of money on strippers and partying.
The identity she crafts in this video is not that different than the one Luda
performs in ROML—her strippers and booze is not that different than his “women,
weed, and alcohol.” However, something
causes her performance to be read as un-resilient and noisy, and his as
resilient and profitable.
I
think the different interpretations of Rihanna’s and Luda’s performance of
black masculinity lie in the perceived profitability of their respective
investment strategies. In “Pour It Up,” money is everywhere (“all I see is
signs/all I see is dolla signs”), but it is for spending, not investing. Like
every good neoliberal, she sees everything in terms of an economic
rationality—the fungiblity of signs. And, like any good neoliberal, she uses
M-M intensification (as opposed to M-C-M commodification) to amplify the value
of these signs. She uses “dolla signs” to invest in her human capital/soft
capital as a performer: she makes it rain in a strip club—that is, she throws a
wad of cash into the air so it flutters down to the floor like precipitation. This
is a performance of a specific type of non-bourgeois black masculinity—one that
is supposedly ignorant in his regressive misogyny. This explicit traffic in
women (strippers) doesn’t square with bourgeois imperatives to “respect” women,
to desire accomplished, “respectable” women who are “ladies in the street but
freaks in the bed”, as Luda has said. Roberts
LA Times review directly addresses this image: “The opening line -- “Throw it up, watch it all fall
out” -- seems like an ode to getting sick,
in fact, until it becomes clear that Rihanna is singing about money, strip
clubs, doing shots of tequila and “making it rain” with bills.” Roberts
perceives this gesture as a waste of capital, and not as an investment in
RiRi’s own human capital…she’s investing
in the “wrong” human capital. The performance of “making it rain” is an investment in a black masculine
hip-hop identity…this is just not the human capital “good white liberals” want
to see Rihanna invest in, because it’s not what they want to invest in. They
don’t want misogynist rappers who ogle female strippers, they want Frank
Ocean—their liking of him boosts their homonational cred—or Drake—they can
directly identify with his middle-class anxiety and sometimes not-so-misogynist
lyrics. RiRi’s performance of black masculinity does generate social capital,
just not the kind that integrates seamlessly into the MRWaSP supply chain. Thug black masculinity is unruly/noisy, and this
unruliness/noisiness is recyclable into signal, but at too high an
opportunity cost. RIhanna’s narrator
in “Pour It Up” performs a too-noisy, too-unruly, perhaps even queerly
entrepreneurial subject, one who invests in the wrong human capital. That’s
what’s sickening….her performance
renders the MRWaSP entrepreneurial/resilient subject nauseous (in the Sartrean sense)—not b/c of lack of foundation, as
in existentialism, but b/c of lack of (sufficient) return on investment…which
is the neoliberal equivalent to lack of foundation.
Unapologetic Rihanna is anti-social because she
refuses to cut the “color line” in MRWaSP terms. She does not abandon “thug”
black masculinity, and she does not capitalize on her overcoming of her
attachments to specific constructs of black masculinity. Her overcoming of once-romanticized, now passé “thug life”
stereotypes (i.e., violent, misogynist, working-class masculinities as embodied
by the ‘angry’ and ‘unruly’ Chris Brown) would, normally, be an amplifier for
mainstream society’s “overcoming” of classic white supremacy by/into
“post-racial” MRWaSP. If anything, she
attempts to capitalize on her continued attachment to what we otherwise demand
she overcome. This capitalizing generates a whole hell of a lot of noise,
and is thus not the most efficient way to extract value from this
experience/affective orientation. (It certainly does generate value—think of
all the back-and-forth on social media: somebody profits from that—it’s just
not the most efficient way to go
about this value-production.)
Rihanna’s
investment strategy is anti-social—she does not invest in blackness in ways
that optimize MRWaSP—so her performance of black masculinity gets read in terms
of a particularly unruly, anti-social stereotype. The “thug” is unruly in
MRWaSP because his socioeconomic class (so, both his finances and his
habits/attitudes/values—his “culture” in the sense of “cultural racism”)
prevents him from achieving the highest levels of “success”—i.e., ascension to
the peak of privilege in MRWaSP. His damage is not fully recuperable; he’s
still too noisy, and thus she’s too noisy. Because she doesn’t broadcast her
overcoming/resilience, Rihanna is a “bad girl.”
d. Bad-Girl Melancholy
It's difficult to understand why Rihanna expects her
fans to hang in this dark space with her (and Chris Brown). The album is
unapologetic but it's also airless, nearly hookless, and exudes a deep melancholy. Given these qualities, it's hard not to
wonder where else the album might have gone. Would it fare better if the topics
were the same, but set to songs as combustible as "Don't Stop the
Music"? If her pain and shame and can't-quit-you-babe motif was delivered
with some humor? If she kept her personal drama to herself and sang about
rolling fat joints on her bodyguard's head and did more duetting with the dude
from Coldplay?[xii]
Resilience
is an index of one’s moral personhood: “good” girls overcome, and “bad” girls
give in, like they always do (e.g., to temptation). As Neocleous argues, “good
subjects will ‘survive and thrive in any situation’, they will…‘overcome life’s
hurdles’…and just ‘bounce back’ from whatever life throws.” Racialized good/bad girl dichotomies are cut on a
resilience/overcoming-vs-melancholy axis. Thus, in MRWaSP, resilience
distributes racial privilege: black women who “overcome” are granted some of
the privileges of whiteness, while women who fail to overcome are racially
darkened…this racial de- or non-whitening is the direct consequence of
sub-optimal human capitalization. In order to maintain white privilege, you
have to keep optimizing your human capital. If you can’t keep up, you’ll fall
behind, ever closer to precarity, which is racially non-white. Good girls are
resilient overcomers, and bad girls are melancholics.
Kelly
Clarkson and Taylor Swift have their own brands of good-girl resilience:
Clarkson comes off as a bit more bruised and experienced, probably because she
is older and more seasoned (and, notably, reads somewhat less bourgeois than
Swift). Her catalog is filled with resilience narratives: “Stronger” quotes
that infamous Nietzsche line “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and
her biggest recent hit, “Since U Been Gone,” is all about her post-breakup
resilience. Swift also trades in post-breakup resilience. Her 2012 hit “We Are
Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a sarcastic middle-finger to an ex-lover.
“I Knew You Were Trouble” details the narrator’s process of rationalizing and
working through her breakup pain. Its video closes with the line “I don’t know
if you know who you are till you loose who you are.” In order to be a
neoliberal good girl, you have to bounce back from loss. Failing to bounce back
is a failure in subject-formation. Non- or failed resilience is pathological,
and thus, melancholic.
Classical
melancholia’s pathology is indexed to classically liberal models of
subjectivity: the melancholic is one who can’t resolve or get over a loss. Melancholia is a failure to progress
toward and attain a goal, such as wholeness, completeness, self-sufficiency.
Neoliberalism normalizes ateleological open-endedness. In a context where
“normal” subjects are flexible (open-ended) and YOLO-oriented, melancholia manifests as a failure of
resilience. There is still a loss involved, but here loss is figured as diminished capacity (i.e., inefficiency &
incomplete optimization) rather than as lack or absence. So, melancholia is
like a loss in fidelity, a too-noisy signal. It is a failure in resilience
because some noise goes unrecouped and unrecycled into signal; it’s
inefficient. Rihanna is perceived as a
bad girl because her feedback is too noisy and inefficient. Whatever work or
capitalization she might be doing, it isn’t legible as resilience: she “bounces
back,” but in a skewed, misdirected way with a signal that isn’t properly
tuned. You can try to capitalize on this goth damage, but doing so may not
return a profit that hegemony recognizes as such. It may just produce sub-par
if not diminishing returns. This
non-resilient practice of damage is a failure to recoup loss, and, in a way, a
generator of diminished signal. The damage here is not noise, per se, but
insufficient/sub-optimal amplification. It is, in this way, a neoliberal
version of melancholia.
I
would argue that feminists should perhaps be a little melancholic. If our
personal resilience is ultimately about MRWaSP’s resilience, then perhaps it’s in
our own best interests to kill some of that joy, as Sara Ahmed would say? Maybe
we shouldn’t act like we’ve recouped the noise that MRWaSP introduces into our
life until, you know, we’ve actually overcome multi-racial white supremacist
patriarchy? In that way, melancholia would be a counterposition to post-racial,
post-feminist discourse. When resilience means performing culturally racist
feminisms (this is Alia Al-Saji’s term), we should reject its imperative to
overcome. We should actually amplify our
noisy complicities with MRWaSP, and not pretend that we’ve overcome racism
& sexism. Repudiating certain types of men of color as irreparably
misogynist—one might say, riffing on Spivak,
saving-brown-women-from-Chris-Brown—is a racist scapegoating of our own
continued complicity in MRWaSP. The self-deception here is that we think we’ve
overcome when Breezy hasn’t. Let’s not act like we’ve overcome our damage until
we’ve actually done so.
This melancholic approach to damage likely comes from a
place of conditional privilege—this is about under-shooting the peak, not
sinking below the valley’s lowest threshold. For the precariat, resilience is
more like endurance, staying one step ahead of the next disaster; for
privileged subjects, resilience is about stockpiling human capital. The
precariat is already equalizing a shitload of noise. Privileged subjects are
finely tuning an already mostly noiseless signal.
So, just to clarify: I am
neither qualified to nor interested in judging Robyn Fenty’s personal life. On
that score, I’ve got my own damage to keep me busy. I’m not arguing that we
should see Rihanna as a noble victim/savage. I’m not trying to argue that she ought
to stay pathological so that we white people can appropriate her pain. I’m not
romanticizing her suffering. I am trying to develop an account of why critics
pathologize her performance, why it gets read as “sickening.” I am trying to question the presumption
that Rihanna, at least the Rihanna performed on the most melancholic tracks on Unapologetic,
is any more pathological and fucked up than any of the rest of us white music
critics and feminists. The demand
that she perform overcoming/resilience (as a structure of subjectivity specific
to neoliberal femininity) is actually an attempt to obscure MRWaSP’s own damage/pathologies.
And I’m not arguing that Rihanna/Robyn Fenty stay pathological, that she not
work through her damage…it’s just that “resilience” and “overcoming” are
culturally-specific models of healthy subjectivity, and it is entirely possible
to be mentally and socially functional but yet deviate from these models of “health.”
[ii] “…her
reunion with ex-boyfriend Chris Brown trumps that. ‘Unapologetic’ not only
confirms that the rumours are true, but is a ‘fuck you’ to anyone who dares
warn her off the 23-year-old after he beat her up in 2009.” http://www.nme.com/reviews/rihanna/13899#GW7uXBBaq4TqeeVv.99
[iii] “Say what
you like about her judgment, but just as Rihanna never asked to be assaulted by
Chris Brown, she also never asked for millions of Twitter followers determined
to opine about her every decision. ‘Unapologetic’ makes a compelling case for
Rihanna knowing what she’s doing.”
[iv] http://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/rihanna-unapologetic
[v]
Alex Macpherson in Fact: http://www.factmag.com/2012/11/23/rihanna-unapologetic/
[vi] It’s not minimalism, because this implies an intense
focus on a very small sample (e.g., one pitch, as in Riley’s “In C”); these
devices suggest avenues for development and intensification, but then fail to
follow through with them.
[vii] For a clear account of all the song’s chords and its
melody, see: http://www.onlinepianist.com/songs/piano_tutorials/1720/Diamonds-Rihanna.php
[viii]
In a way this song is structured like Ravel’s Bolero:
it’s one long crescendo over a rhythmic ostinato. But if this were just about
building up tension and releasing it, why doesn’t it end where the vocals
climax, on the “woah-oh-oah-yeah” at 4:06-:08? The denouement or coda of
another bar of “shine bright like a diamond” diminishes the impact of that
climax: we don’t rise to a peak and stay there, but start heading back down.
The song leaves us on a downward trajectory, not a plateau or a peak.
[ix] The pan-out is preceded by a close-up of Rihanna
opening her eyes, which implies that she’s both conscious and alive, and gazing
at the camera. This also gives a sort of intentionality, if not “authorship”
(note scare quotes), to her lack fo resilience: she’s not drifting because
she’s dead or unconscious, but because she’s decided not to struggle, not to
swim to shore or shout for help. She’s not maximizing the opportunities this crisis
lends her.
[xi] According
to Caramancia, “Pour It Up” sounds like a track the ambient-goth outfit Salem might make for a
strip club.”
Caramanica, not Caramancia
ReplyDeleteAlso, "yellow diamonds in the light," not "sky"
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