Rihanna is crying. Tears – actual droplets – are rolling down the 28-year-old’s cheeks as she fluffs the opening lines of the set’s second song, Love the Way You Lie (Part 2). It’s unclear whether the adoring screams of the Dublin crowd have moved this infamously inscrutable star. The vast bulk of Rihanna’s work is permeated by the singer’s deliciously bored approach: dialling it in as an art form.
On the other hand, it could be the fact that this erstwhile glamour queen has been forced to attend the opening night of the UK & Ireland leg of her Anti tour dressed as the ghost of a sack of potatoes. Two crescent slices of her bum hang out of some chaps when she twerks. This highly irregular costuming matches her set’s highly irregular opening – a one-two of ballads, the sort of unctuous longueur normally reserved for the night’s middle eight. Moreover, “ghost of a potato sack” is just the first of an extraordinary sequence of costumes whose bronzed earth tones, lacings-up and flapping bits suggest the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina scene, as updated by Kanye West for autumn/winter 2016. With not a sequin in sight, this is all very “anti” what a pop diva would wear on stage: purposely so, her stylist has said.
Then again, it might well be that Rihanna’s tears are a response to the song itself. LTWYLII is the female reply to Eminem’s original Love the Way You Lie (2010) on which Rihanna guested. The tracks tell of a tempestuous relationship, viewed first from the man’s perspective (Em), then the woman’s (Rih). The parallels with Rihanna’s own troubles with rapper Chris Brown, black eye and all, aren’t hard to spot, although that was a long time ago and these tears are box fresh.
Whatever the source, this unprecedented display of emotion from the gelid doyenne of numb&B swells the song inexorably. Dublin turns to mush in Rihanna’s taloned hand. The floor drops away when singer, band and crowd hit the none-more-masochistic chorus together. “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn,” Rihanna sings, “But it’s all right because I like the way it hurts.” It’s actually meta: after all, a not-quite-sold-out crowd is literally standing there, watching her cry, her pain mitigated by gratitude.
This isn’t how Rihanna normally rolls. Granted, Rihanna’s eighth studio album, Anti, was meant to be different, a departure from the chart-seeking the Barbadian has been on since Umbrella, her first hit just shy of a decade ago. A grab bag of styles with few conventional hits on it, Anti has been wildly successful nonetheless; it was certified double platinum in May, the first US LP to do so this year.
And this Anti tour breaks moulds: all-white staging, maximally minimal, in stark contrast to arena convention. Another strange costume – for this year’s islands-tinged mega-hit, Work – suggests a Wookie dipped in glitter. Ill-defined inflatables grow tumescent, like blobby onstage îles flottantes. A transparent gangplank, floating in mid-air on its way from the B stage to the main stage, rocks alarmingly when Rihanna simulates sex on it for Sex With Me, a song as single-entendre as any by AC/DC.
Tours often seek to reimagine old songs in the light of the star’s latest mindset. And so it is that crass, menacing cuts like Pour It Up (synopsis: greed is good) are filmed in pensive black and white, a hip-hop gangster flick gone art-house. I might be wrong, but Rihanna’s canon is perhaps the only one in the upper echelons of diva pop with a substantial body count: Man Down, Needed Me, Bitch Better Have My Money, et al.
Some of the star’s bigger guest spots are referenced in bite-sized chunks – Kanye’s thrilling All Of The Lights, and Drake’s magisterial Take Care, even more favela-party than usual. Surprising selections receive extensive airtime, however. One of Anti’s most left-field lurches was Rihanna’s cover of Same Old Mistakes (restyled as Same Ol’ Mistakes) by Australian rock band Tame Impala.
Tonight, Rihanna pulls off several minutes of psychedelic brooding, while the TV screens render the star – now wearing giant specs – in wibbly fuchsia. The crowd doesn’t just tolerate it – it actively wigs out.
What starts as an emotionally memorable gig soon settles into merely an aesthetically remarkable one. It is a shame that the electrifying simpatico of Love the Way You Lie (Part 2) isn’t sustained throughout. But for Love on the Brain – one of those rare tracks that Rihanna sings like singers are meant to sing – she reprises her recent, celebrated Billboard Awards performance. Rihanna’s inscrutability is once again transformed by jazz hands, and some scrunched-up jazz cheeks and jazz eyes.
