The sixth installment of a recurring feature where we listen to the latest number one Australian single so you don’t have to.
--
Rihanna
'Only Girl (In The World)'
(Def Jam/Universal)
Ask yourself: who is currently the biggest pop star? You’d probably say Lady Gaga or Katy Perry – they’re the ones people parody and cover on YouTube, they’re the names you’d casually drop in conversation, theirs are the songs from the pop charts you’d be most likely to know. But, if you asked the ARIA singles charts, Rihanna would be its answer. Here’s why: 'Only Girl (In The World)' is her third Australian #1 single of 2010. No other singer has had more than one #1 this year. It also debuted at #1 this week, knocking off
'Dynamite' by Taio Cruz. Debuting at #1 is another sign of star power: your standard insidiously catchy song might take a few weeks to seep into the brains of people who buy singles, but this one came with a readymade fan base who bought the song simply because it’s by Rihanna.
Rhianna - 'Only Girl' (In The World)' teaser video
So why is it that Rihanna is so popular? A definite component of her success is her versatility as a vocalist – she can sing songs with the aggressive female sexuality of 'Rude Boy', the sweetness and innocence of 'Umbrella' and the sadness and bitterness of the Eminem collaboration 'Love The Way You Lie'. And she sounds more or less believable singing each of these emotions; in contrast, for example, Eminem’s voice only really sounds good when he sings with anger or snark, and Ke$ha’s voice is only interesting when she sounds bratty.
But I can’t help thinking that the level of her popularity right now is directly related to her well-publicised fight with fellow pop star Chris Brown. We’ve all seen the awful pictures of Rihanna sporting the bruises from the conflict. And then there are the nude pictures that got leaked to the internet somehow. It’s hard to resist the idea that Brown, or one of his people, leaked them as revenge (though he denies this, of course). I don’t mean to suggest that people have given Rihanna three #1 singles this year because they feel sorry for her; I feel sorry for plenty of people, but I’m not going to buy their records unless I like their music. What I do mean to suggest is that all of this stuff changes how people hear the music Rihanna makes.
Take ABBA, that other musical act with a hit called 'S.O.S.'. The average Australian will probably associate ABBA with dagginess ('Muriel’s Wedding'), gay culture ('Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert'), and the somewhat emotionally reserved
Swedishness that we see and hear in the tall, statuesque singers with their slightly stilted English-language singing. But the ABBA biography
Bright Lights and Dark Shadows, by Carl Magnus Palm, portrays a very different ABBA. For much of the period of ABBA’s success, they were miserable, still together as a band even though they didn’t get along. Massive success didn’t solve their personal problems; it made it worse in many ways. Which hints at their refusal to reform despite billions of dollars being dangled in front of them. Their songs, under the shiny surface, were often cries for help – when ABBA were singing that they needed an 'S.O.S.', they really actually meant it. Knowing this kind of thing changes the way you hear their music. You listen to different parts of the music, you hear deeper emotions, what once sounded stilted translates now as putting on a brave face. And the song itself will not have changed one iota.
If music has a public function, it is to move us, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Watch young kids at a concert if you want to see humans truly getting lost in music. But by the time we are teenagers, we begin to resist being influenced by music. We begin to become aware that there are tricks that musicians use to fool us into feeling things. This is why people who aren’t fans of "pop" music (but who instead like indie music, or metal, or more obscure genres) take issue with the fact that the singer didn’t actually write the song, that there's autotune ("it’s not their ‘real’ voice"), that the musicians aren't playing ‘real’ instruments. It's why many people want to know if they can pull it off live, and why many people like to hear imperfections in music. All of these things are people hoping that the
emotion in the music they listen to is not simply a trick. Basically, many listeners desire ‘authenticity’ because they know musicians can manipulate us into feeling emotions because it makes them money. These listeners gravitate to music outside the Top 40 in the hope that there will be less manipulation. If a musician avoids all things "commercial" in popular music – autotune being the most obvious – they are trying to tell the audience “I’m making this music because I want you to know how I feel, rather than because I want your money”. This authenticity is a myth, of course. Titus Andronicus are an indie band who very much do not use autotune on their latest critically acclaimed CD, but they still want your money (they have to pay the rent, after all) and the music on their latest critically acclaimed CD is inevitably heavily processed and unreal (which is why it sounds like a proper album, rather than like a demo).
In a way, Rihanna’s back story – those pictures of her bruised face – serve the same subconscious purposes for some pop music listeners, as avoiding autotune does for indie fans. It validates her pain and thus her music/art, makes it seem like it is portraying real emotion. Pop stars can seem unapproachable, impossibly glamorous and talented – to many, they must seem like they somehow live on a different plane of existence. But Rihanna’s back story removes her from this plane of existence. The back story makes her seem like a real person, one who knows our disappointments and frustrations, happiness and joy. She can sound believable singing lines about fraught relationships in “Love The Way You Lie” because, well, the listener believes that she’s experienced it.
In these “Number Ones” columns, you might wonder if I find a song pretty boring when I go on about what it all means for a thousand words before I even discuss the song. And look! Here we are a thousand words in. “Only Girl (In The World)” is based around a colourless and repetitive club beat, featuring synth sounds that wouldn’t sound out of place on an track by 1990s Eurotrash acts like The Real McCoy or Dr Alban. Musical tropes that evoke mid-1990s dreck are fashionable at the moment in the world of Top 40 pop – David Guetta’s beats sound similar, for example, and he’s been all over the charts. The passage of time hasn’t made those stabs of synth any less painful or ridiculous to my ears, and I don’t think they’re going for ridiculous/fun here: Rihanna’s singing is too full of passion, too serious in tone for the track to be purely silly.
Additionally, there don’t seem to be a huge amount of hooks in the song – the only one I can really discern is the melody associated with the title sung in the chorus. Taio Cruz's, “Dynamite”,
the previous Australian #1, had five separate hooks catchier than this. The blandness of the backing track and the lack of hooks means that, to the extent that the song is memorable, the song relies on the stregth of Rihanna's performance. And she can sing. The sound of the vocals is obviously processed, but it’s not overtly autotuned, and it doesn’t bland out the personality you can hear in her vocal. Furthermore, the vocals propel the song, give it something vaguely resembling character and purpose.
The lyrics are about sex, featuring lines like
“I want you to love me like I’m a hot pie” and
“want you to take me like a thief in the night”. Rihanna, in the lyrics, portrays herself as being at the point of mutually declared lust with a boy – presumably at a club on the kind of dance floor that the song is trying to fill – and she clearly desires a sexual encounter at some point after the song. However, she also, clearly, desires that she will be the focus in this sexual encounter. She seems to be attempting to set the terms upon which she will consent to the act. Firstly, she clearly wants a lot of foreplay - I assume this is the significance of the “hot pie” line, but I may be mistaken. It might simply be a truly terrible lyric. (Actually, maybe it is both a truly terrible lyric and about foreplay? Likely.) Also, I assume that this is why she claims
“I'mma make you swallow your pride” – some men must be too proud for cunnilingus? Secondly, she wants the sex to be so all-consuming that she forgets that anybody else exists, that she is the only girl in the world. Thus we have our title.
Again, Rihanna’s "realness" – our belief that we know her through her personal problems, etc. – make all of this somehow connect more than it otherwise would. Or should. Clearly, sex sells, and a singer singing about sex is trying to sell us a story, right? But because it’s Rihanna, and not some Idol winner who just wants to be famous, it seems a little different. We consider that Rihanna actually is a sexual being – consider those leaked personal nude photos – and we figure that she is truly concerned about being treated well, after her terrible experiences with Chris Brown. This perceived authenticity, along with Rihanna’s vocal ability, means that we can listen to a song - written and produced by people who aren’t Rihanna - and believe that she wants to be treated well in bed. That getting treated well in bed would mean enough to her that she would want to sing about it. And that believability is a powerful thing. It's #1.
Tim Byron