The critical reactions to Rihanna’s new album tend to agree on at least one accolade. VH1’s blog called Talk That Talk “the dirtiest pop record since Erotica” – and then, somewhat confusingly, “the dirtiest pop record we have ever heard,” as if Madonna’s attempts to give Jesse Helms an aneurysm were only a kinky legend now, passed down orally by bards in domino masks. Vulture noted that the LP includes a couple of PG ballads before shrugging: “But everyone’s here for the crazy sex stuff, right?” Esquire conveniently determined that Rihanna is the “sexiest woman alive,” while Popdust (where I used to write) nominated each song’s most explicit lyric in its track-by-track review.
Apart from the purely cross-promotional but not necessarily incorrect one, these superlatives are worth critiquing. As Katherine St Asaph suggested, Peaches’ entire career might be described as a quest to make “the dirtiest pop record since Erotica.” If you like swaggering transgression, Lil Kim long ago used a track to detail the precise number of times she wants to come (21). Trina rapped about “put[ting] my cock in his mouth” circa 2002. If you require some sort of stringed instrument to get off, this year alone saw indelibly libidinous releases from St. Vincent, Tune-Yards and Ssion. And if you’re just tired of men who react to the notion of going down on a woman with Cronenberg-level body horror, in song or in person, Detroit rapper Danny Brown boasted of his love for oral sex in the filthiest possible phrasings: “I go dumb and ignorant when I’m on that clitoris / Lick yo ass delirious my tongue game so damn serious.”
I don’t know if Rihanna’s people encouraged this dubious exceptionalist narrative, but it’d be understandable if they had. The dark, rock-inflected Rated R was cast as The Chris Brown Album, followed by Loud as The One After the Mediocre-Selling Chris Brown Album. Wouldn’t you rather talk about sex with interviewers? But the most remarkable aspect of her new record is how somnolent and post-coital it often seems, full of vocals that settle for hitting their notes. Rihanna notched up ten #1 U.S. singles faster than any other solo artist (a distinction all the more impressive if you happen to be exactly the same age as her) and Talk That Talk represents her third LP in three years. According to the critic Alex Macpherson, it was mostly recorded after shows on tour, in sessions that would go on until 8 or 9 am. Languor can be sexy – it’s almost a genre trope in traditional Arabic erotica – but exhaustion?
Though often indifferently sung, the more explicit lyrics do grab fistfuls of the attention they seek. Rihanna notifies her partner that “just because I can’t kiss back / doesn’t mean you can’t kiss that” (sexily educational), protests some boy who’s “taking too long to get my head on the ground / and my feet in the clouds” (sexily funny), and tolerates Jay-Z rhyming “Pisa” with “pizza” (unsexily masochistic). But whether she was issuing orders as dominatrix or murmuring “daddy,” I had a sense of it being utilitarian, done only for the listener’s titillation. When Rihanna does mention a “you” here, the word sounds theoretical and perfunctory.
Talk That Talk remains some distance away from the repellent gazing-male servility of songs like “I Kissed a Girl,” a depressingly influential template in pop right now. Still, there are intimations of more intriguing territory, sighted then left unexplored. “Birthday Cake” drops the album’s single filthiest line – “come and write your name on it” may not refer to marzipan in this context – before Rihanna sighs “I want to fuck you right now.” Fade out there, at 1:18, as if all involved couldn’t decide how to compartmentalize the outcome, how to contain its potential complications.
Rihanna has handled those fearlessly before. When someone leaked nude camera pics of the singer earlier this year, her reaction was healthily, characteristically insouciant. Talk That Talk’s best track approaches sex with the same sass. “Cockiness (Love It)” was produced by Bangladesh, of “A Milli” fame, and it takes his usual frantic style to minimalist extremes. The beat’s not much more than throbbing bass and a hypnotic vocal sample, but Rihanna sounds playfully engaged as she does nowhere else on the record, going from dancehall toasts to seductive coos. She twists words, bends gender, jacks herself. When her voice synchronizes with the sample’s at several pivotal moments (“No one can do you the way that I do / Boy I waaaant…”), it suggests the half-expected, half-longed-for thrill of successful flirtation. Unlike so many other songs about sex and sensuality, “Cockiness” persuades.
Chris Randle is Toronto Standard’s Culture Editor.
