The Vision That Is The Inimitable Robyn Fenty
As a kid, I would collect magazines featuring Rihanna – a habit I recently picked back up after seeing the literal works of art she created with visual artist and photographer Lorna Simpson for ESSENCE magazine. In addition to loving each and every photoshoot she does, I’ve always been particularly fascinated by how people write about Rihanna. I think it’s what has made me extremely interested in writing cover feature stories – with, you guessed it, Rihanna, as my dream interviewee.
For her birthday, I wanted to try my hand at writing a piece about Rihanna. This has been in the works since 2020 – not because I put so much time, energy and research into it, but because I don’t even know what could I possibly say about...Rihanna?
What I admire about her longer-form interviews and features is the way journalists describe her in such a way that enabled her cultural positioning as an enigma. She isn’t just a celebrity, a music artist, an actress, designer or business owner...she’s Rihanna. Even as someone who has been a card-carrying member of the Navy for over half my life, I wouldn’t even know where to start.
That is, in part, due to the fact that in recent years, it has felt harder and harder to feel connected to Rihanna as a fan.
I was never the stan who would be quick to buy all of her products. I felt like there was greater accessibility to Rihanna’s cultural offerings through her music than Fenty Beauty and other products like her clothing lines at LMVH (for which she became the first Black woman to head a major luxury fashion house), Savage X Fenty, Puma, the list goes on. The strength of the product alone wasn’t enough to make me want to spend money on them – I wanted them because they were Rihanna’s.
As I’m sitting here listening to this playlist of her entire discography, “Pour It Up” is playing and just passed the line “My fragrance on and they love my smell.”
It’s funny because I am, in fact, wearing her most recent Fenty fragrance and I do, in fact, love it. The first fragrance of hers I got (and I believe the first product of hers altogether) was Reb’l Fleur – which was a gift from my grandmother. I distinctly remember not wanting to use it so that I could save it for longer – as though perfumes were meant to be archived rather than worn and, in Rihanna’s words, experienced. But in year three of a pandemic, I decided to wear my Fenty perfume almost every day not only to smell good (because, really, it smells that good) but also to just feel good in year three of working from home every day because of the pandemic.
In 2020, in starting to draft this piece, I wrote “that is why her not releasing music has sucked (for a lack of a better word) because as a college student, I don’t want to spend money on hella products just to support my fav (even though as a multi-millionaire, she doesn’t need my support. So framing my purchasing her products as me ‘supporting’ her as a fan has evolved into the understanding that by buying her products, I’m buying into the Rihanna brand – her persona, her look, beauty, style, all the things that make Rihanna the vision she is.”
I’ve joked with many of my friends, family, and mutuals on social media about the similarly enigmatic, yet nonetheless highly-anticipated ninth studio album that Rihanna is working on (allegedly).
After “confirming” that R9 would be released in 2019 (spoiler alert: it didn’t), I avoided this feeling of genuine disappointment out of not wanting to feel or seem entitled to her in any way. Since then, seeing Rihanna flourish in her businesses(es) – and especially in her personal life with her recent pregnancy announcement – has challenged me to let go of the expectation on who I might want her to be (or who I think I need her to be) as a fan of her music, and appreciate the inimitable icon that she is in so many other arenas of her life.
In the era of toxic stan culture fueled by incessant access to celebrities through social media and entertainment blogs – it’s hard to feel like admiring a celebrity in 2022 gives anything other than Cassie-from-Euphoria energy. But I wanted to explore that dynamic because, to an extent, celebrities and public figures do play a role in influencing culture and providing an example (not always a good one, but nonetheless, an example) of what we may experience in our daily lives.
The pandemic and social unrest ignited by Black liberation protests have also brought on a cultural reckoning about the role that celebrities play in our social conditions. And that has inevitably included Rihanna.
It’s been especially interesting to navigate my self-appointed role as a long-time fan of Rihanna, while also confronting how she is – as a newly minted billionaire – certainly among the few who have continued to attain wealth while a great deal of the world continues to struggle under social and political conditions exacerbated by the pandemic.
Additionally, as I’ve grown in my politics in the past few years, I’ve seen plenty of half-assed and often forced statements on behalf of celebrities – who are wholly entitled to their opinions and perspectives – but who position them in such a way that insinuates their authority is afforded to them by their celebrity alone. It’s easy to disregard them when you don’t really care about said celebrity. It’s uncomfortable when it’s a celebrity you genuinely love and admire.
It’s interesting to both revere Rihanna for the success she has worked for and achieved through her career, while at the same time working to develop an anti-capitalist politic that forces me to confront the false notion that Black capitalism – trying to embody it or become adjacent to it – will save any of us, and how that is embodied in the personified aspiration we attach to Black celebrities in particular.
I felt the same way seeing Rihanna hit a billion as I did with Jay-Z, Kanye, Beyoncé (who I don’t believe has officially hit a billion, but does promote that aspirational vision of Black capitalism): it’s great to see individual Black people achieve such milestones in their careers given the economic disenfranchisement we collectively face globally. And you cannot ignore the fact that that level of wealth accumulation is literally not possible without some level of exploitation somewhere along the line.
“My issue with capitalism is that it makes me feel like supporting successful Black people is bad, but I think with Rihanna, looking at how she’s uplifted and supported Black influencers and creators, challenged and shattered long-held beauty standards that excluded darker-skinned Black women, and brought Blackness into rooms where it hasn’t been before, it’s more of a teaching moment that makes me want to explore how we can do things like that ethically, co-operative models, ensuring workers rights. Which directs my gaze to the behind-the-scenes, who manufactures and produces her products, is it ethical? What does DEI look like for her companies? Is it as diverse behind the scenes as it is on the main stage? Especially since Fenty Beauty, in particular, has yet to put out employee demographic data, it makes those details concerning.
Again, it goes back to the fact that Rihanna has such a global reach and has historically worked with people of all backgrounds...Rihanna has always included Black people and I believe that’s who she tends to speak the most life and power to, but her audience base has never been solely Black people which I have to remember. This can also be attributed to her palatability to a broader audience as a light-skinned Black woman.”
As a dark-skinned young Black woman, I’ve tried to be more intentional about the images and role models I present myself with as I’ve gotten older. Many of the Black women lauded to the front-and-center of popular culture do tend to be light-skinned and/or mixed-race women. That in and of itself is not a problem, nor is it a problem for me to find qualities from any type of woman that I can see in myself. I do, however, see it as more of an imperative to try and unlearn the reflexive acceptance of imagery displayed to dark-skinned, monoracial Black women and girls. That’s been especially hard to confront when it has come to Rihanna, not to her own fault but moreso since she started dating A$AP Rocky, a dark-skinned Black man whose public image is immortalized in the 2010s due to his disparaging comments about the Black Lives Matter movement and dark-skinned Black women wearing red lipstick.
I find myself thinking often about if there is another side to who Rihanna truly is behind the scenes when it comes to things like that – a version of her that would allow her public image to be attached to that kind of headline. “Cancel culture” aside and in all seriousness, I wonder if that is something she and A$AP Rocky have discussed or if he has privately atoned for either of those statements? It’s hard to ignore that given the fact that Rihanna quite literally sells the red lipstick in question, and especially because she often shared that her reason for loving makeup so much and being so intentional about inclusivity in her beauty brand began by watching her mother – a dark-skinned Black woman – apply lipstick when she was a child.
I don’t say any of this to bash Rih at all. This is simply what it has looked and felt like for me to navigate what it means to be a “fan” at a time when one cannot simply “separate art from the artist.” When the parts of our world (and, really ourselves) we are unwilling to confront might be exposed when we blindly support and defend celebrities and the institutions they personify. Again, that is Rihanna and, ultimately myself, included.
It’s less about trying to prove that she’s “really a good person” because at the end of the day that has no bearing on my life. It’s more to do with what she, and other public figures, represent and what “stanning” them might say about what we, in turn, represent. It’s about how we relate to their persona, and how it might influence how we move in our real lives – for better or worse.
Parasocial relationships are defined as “one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.” (source)
Coined in the 1950s in response to the rise of TV and other mass media, “Now, these relationships also occur between individuals and their favorite bloggers, social media users, and gamers. The nature and intimacy of parasocial relationships has also matured. Reality television allows viewers to share the most intimate and personal lives of television personas, and celebrities openly share their opinions and activities through various social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.”
It feels cringe to even acknowledge that you engage in that type of thing, given the nature of stan culture these days on social media. However, this article explaining studies done on parasocial relationships with public figures says that those types of connections “tend to be ‘quite healthy,’” more often than not and that they “usually don’t replace other relationships.’”
“In [Sally Theran, Ph.D.]’s research with her Wellesley colleagues Tracy Gleason and Emily Newberg, the trio found that adolescent girls were likely to form parasocial relationships with women who were older than them...becoming mother, big sister, or mentor figures. ‘It’s a great way for adolescents to connect to someone in a risk-free way and experiment with their identity,’ she says.” (source)
I can definitely say that describes my relationship to (not with, but to) Rihanna – namely the idea of Rihanna – in my teenage years. We’re both eldest daughters and older sisters to younger brothers – I would always think of her as someone who I’d like to be my cool older sister if I had one. One whose more-matured footsteps I’d awkwardly attempt to follow, whose essence I’d use as a guidepost for my own self-discovery. I often (still) look at women older than me who seem to have such an impenetrable sense of self that I can only hope to find for myself one day – and I definitely got that feeling from Rihanna.
In 2012, I was starting my freshman year of high school, and I think Rihanna personified the kind of woman I aspired to emulate: one who exuded not giving a fuck without being a complete bitch about it. Who was in the world, but not of it. Who had razor-sharp clarity on what did and did not matter in life.
One thing I’ve done in the past few years as I’ve started navigating my early twenties is go back to find interviews of Rihanna and other famous Black women that I admire and just see where they were in life, where their heads were at my age. The first time I did this was at 21 – and one of the interviews I watched was her Diane Sawyer interview during the Rated R era in 2009 (no comment on the context).
My biggest takeaway was just realizing how young she really was compared to how I saw her then. Thinking how could she possibly have navigated such turbulent periods of her life both personally and professionally.
Most recently, I watched her interview with Oprah when she was 24, where at one point she says that her quick rise to fame in her late teens felt “claustrophobic” because of her label’s marketing people trying to impose an image of who they wanted her to be at a time when, looking back, she said she really didn’t know herself.
This, compared to one of her first-ever cover interviews with Complex in 2007 (during the Good Girl Gone Bad era I was introduced to her in at around 10 years old): “I’m very sure about who I am as a person and what I’m here to do.” – Rihanna: Good To The Last Drop (Complex)
Given all that she has accomplished, and in this age where fans feel so entitled to artists, specifically musicians, and their content, it feels almost contradictory to invest energy beyond social media jokes to push for a crumb, just a crumb of new music – or anything really – from Rihanna.
It’s been the main factor that has played into my rejection of the “content creator” phenomena – how this attention economy pushes creators (from nano-influencers, YouTubers, and TikTok sensations to mainstream artists) into a space of constant output to remain relevant in a stream of consciousness that cancels callously, floats from one viral persona to the next, and – as far as the institutions they’ve been taught to fight for the approval and recognition of – pays dust to our best and most bar-raising Black creators.
It’s interesting to think about how she might fit into this current music landscape – one where most artists’ albums are rolled out with a cryptic tweet or Instagram caption followed by a possible series of delays. Where the idea of a physical album with cover art in Braille would seem pointless in today’s world of unceasing digital streams.
I distinctly remember how her last album ANTI was rolled out with a commissioned art piece for the album cover, and a Samsung mobile experience “ANTIdiaRy.” Before that, I remember being on the school bus trying to download the iHeartRadio app to listen to the premiere of “Diamonds” – the lead single off her seventh studio album Unapologetic. I remember watching videos from the 777 tour and later seeing her in concert was on the Diamonds World Tour (where I might add, her boyfriend and now baby daddy A$AP Rocky opened the show). I remember painting my own t-shirt with a silver emblazoned “R” – the Rated R era iteration – to wear to that concert. Funny enough, I didn’t go to her most recent tour for ANTI in 2016 because I was getting ready to move to D.C. to start school at Howard (the first line of the essay that got me into Howard was about Rihanna and her “Never a failure Always a lesson” tattoo). I just knew there would be other tours to go to – ha.
I say all of that to say – I always knew Rihanna the artist and her music to be, offer and inspire more than that to pop culture, which makes me curious about how an R9 might manifest at this point in time. I mean, she is Rihanna, so I don’t imagine her next musical project wouldn’t do well, but I do wonder about what she – now in her mid-30s, a soon-to-be mother, a billionaire, and megastar from a completely different era of pop – has to say at this point in her life through her music. And because most of what we see and hear from her come from quick red carpet interviews at Fenty Corps product launches, from her promotional pictures for said products on IG, maybe even in the rare screenshot of a DM exchange with a fan. Even in one of her most recent spreads for Dazed magazine, I was so enamored by the images that I didn’t even realize the photoshoot wasn’t accompanied by an actual interview.
As a person – it’s been cool to watch her journey over the last 10+ years. Although I’ve gotten older and have let go of the stan-ness of Navy life, for the most part, Rihanna has for sure played a significant role in what I’ve been able to see as possible for myself as a young woman by virtue of being herself, pursuing her dreams, while maintaining a semblance of balance and demonstrating how to protect that which is most sacred – yourself.
Like many other people, I’m grateful that Rihanna exists – in both the most ironic and at the same time, deadass serious way. I love the way people write about Rihanna, but I’ll end this with a description of Rihanna in her own words, from this NYT Style Magazine interview from 2019:
“[E]ven within being Rihanna, that freedom didn’t exist for a while. Good Girl Gone Bad is where I started to take the reins: ‘I’m going to do whatever I want to do, I’m taking control of my vision, my sound, my clothes.’ I also embraced change along the way — things that make me a better woman, a better human being. Like, even the way I communicate: I’m really proud of my growth on that. I’m proud to walk into any building as this person. Nothing about me makes me embarrassed about me.”
