Radicalising Rihanna

CONTENT NOTE: SEX. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

The relationship between pop culture icons and politics is always a site of contention. I, like many others, am guilty of projecting feminist ideals onto the image of pop stars. I think I avoid it now, especially since I make an active effort to humanise public figures, and think of them of people who only know so much. I like to imagine Beyonce doing mundane things, like cleaning her teeth, and she can only think of so many things while she's doing that, but despite her public image I can only speculate what her thoughts are. Anyway, the intersection of pop culture and politics can often be found when you think about ideas of the public and the private, intention and humanity, ideas of respectability and responsibility.

Much like Beyonce, Rihanna has copped a gigantic amount of criticism from all sides of the room. She's too feminist for non-feminists, yet her decisions, especially regarding Chris Brown, cause her to be disparaged by certain feminists. But her position as a younger black woman of colour and her push to present herself in an authentic way, especially through her notorious Instagram account @badgalriri, is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. It's extraordinary in its ordinariness, in the ways she shows her multiple dimensions as an otherwise extremely commodified woman of colour.

As a woman of colour working through the same systems as Rihanna, I find inspiration in her agency. Not in terms of her economic capital (which incidentally is nothing but large if you listen to 'Pour it Up') but in terms of her expression of self in a society that rejects her, either as a human being or as the Bad Girl pop star she's constructed. Her choice to reside on one side of the virgin/whore dichotomy was partially enforced by the Chris Brown incident, and she decided to make the most of it, culminating with her most recent album titled 'Unapologetic'. When the sunny pop princess image shattered, it seemed that Rihanna made the most of the transformation and rebirthed as a sexually independent, expressive and fun-loving woman. Her songs reflect this transformation, and while she leaves room to express emotional turmoil, she also articulates a sexual hunger that revolves around her own wants and needs rather than pleasing others. Songs like 'Rude Boy', 'Cockiness (Love It)', 'S&M' and 'Birthday Cake' express a sense of sexuality that is often placed as exterior to ideas of love and intimacy, rebuking the idea that feminine sexuality is more emotive and centred around relationships rather than the more straightforward idea of pleasure for pleasure's sake. In 'Watch N' Learn', she emphasises reciprocacy and the idea of a partner pleasing her sexuality as representative of their feelings for her. This attitude is unique in mainstream pop culture, as the majority of other sexual songs are implicitly or explicitly centred around male pleasure. Rihanna makes it clear that she is not purely instrumental in that pleasure, reclaiming it as something that she definitely benefits from (sooner or later): "Make me a priority; there's nothing above my pleasure."

I could go on about the various ways Rihanna inspires me, in terms of body image, the way she subverts classic survivor narratives, and her strength in the face of public scrutiny. But largely I want to emphasise that while structurally Rihanna is complicit in neo-liberal blah in her highly commodified music/self, there is an element of authenticity that I think is irreducible, from her expressions of her lower-class Bajan background, to her subjectivity as a woman of colour.