This week’s blog post will be about one of the most pivotal eras of all time in an artist’s career: the critically acclaimed Rated R by Rihanna. Good Girl Gone Bad was the teaser to Rihanna’s bad girl image, but Rated R, released in November 2009, took it to the next level with a more mature aesthetic and a darker, more foreboding sound to match as well as Rihanna’s deep exploration of her lower register, at which she excels as a mezzo-soprano. This authentic artistic reinvention was sparked by the ubiquitously known case with Chris Brown before the 2009 Grammys and led to Rihanna asserting more input into her music than ever before, helping write almost the entirety of the album and delivering such powerful emotion unprecedented from Rihanna at the time. Now let’s get to the music. The album opens with an impeccably crafted introduction track “Mad House” of only one minute and thirty five seconds, signifying that this song is not meant for mass consumption as a single but as the start of the musical experience of listening to the entire album. The song starts with a devilish Halloween-esque piano, lightning strikes, and a mysterious voice that preaches “Ladies and Gentlemen / To those among you who are easily frightened / We suggest you turn away now / To those of you who think you can take it / We say welcome to the Mad House”. Followed by Rihanna’s eerie vocal tricks and innovative-for-the-time dubstep elements, the song effortlessly sets the overall tone of the album. The lead single “Russian Roulette” was quite risky despite its brilliance, but for a versatile artist like Rihanna who can pull off anything and for whom the public has set no boundaries like for a Disney artist, the public resonated with the song, elevating it to the top ten. As the title suggests, the song deals with the topic of Russian Roulette. The dynamics of the song fueled by a hard-hitting beat include somber verses and a climactic bridge which includes lyrics as “So, just pull the trigger / As my life flashes before my eyes / I'm wondering will I ever see another sunrise?” and an equally climactic final chorus. The most notable element of the song is the final gunshot, quite a statement and symbol explicitly conveying the “hardness” of this album. Speaking of which, the second single “Hard” featuring Jeezy is another form of excellence. “Hard” is a perfect blend of the unapologetic and intense sentiments of Rated R mixed with mainstream potential, hence its multiple weeks in the top ten. “Hard” really helped Rated R be reached to a wider audience and the audience understand what Rated R really stands for, which is a far cry from Good Girl Gone Bad. The song begins with Rihanna’s signature sounds that only her Island-fusion voice can express, and we all love when Rihanna does what only she can do. With lyrics like “Tougher than a lion / Ain't no need in tryin' / I live where the sky ends / Yup, you know this … Never lyin', truth teller / That Rihanna reign, just won't let up ... Sincere, I see you aiming at my pedastal / I betta let ya' know”, Rihanna exudes confidence in this song and recognizes that she’s meant for big things. The third single “Rude Boy” is the most mainstream song on the album, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks, and the most refreshing touch from the melancholy sounds of the rest of the album. The song conveys the Barbadian Rihanna’s Caribbean and dancehall roots and carries the sound of her first two albums, albeit reinvented and more mature; for instance, her seducing vocals on the bridge reminiscent to those on “S&M”. Rihanna makes a statement with this song on Rated R that she is still the modern-day queen of pop and is able to be versatile with her overall sound - she will further continue to reinvent herself. The fourth international single “Te Amo” produced by my favorite producers Stargate is on another level. Featuring my favorite beat of all time that has been sampled and imitated in countless songs succeeding it including Chris Brown’s “Deuces”, Sean Kingston’s “Letting Go (Dutty Love)”, Keri Hilson’s “Lose Control, and to an extent Victoria Justice’s “Begging on Your Knees”, the song places itself in my trinity of Rated R as well as Rihanna’s entire discography along with the aforementioned “Russian Roulette” and the special “Cold Case Love”. The somber Latin-inspired R&B-pop song featuring handclaps and romantic strings, whose demo leaked in the summer of 2009 as an upbeat song, is Rihanna’s assertion to this particular woman in which she states “I understand / that we all need love / and I'm not afraid / to feel the love but I don't feel that way” and asks “Te amo, te amo / Don't it mean I love you”. This song not being released in the United States, and being her only single to have this fate, is likely due to the lesbianistic element in the lyrics; back in 2010, the United States was not ready, nor was the country ready for the sultry video. Regardless, the song and video have helped to elevate Rihanna to icon status. Now comes my favorite non-single on the album, “Cold Case Love”, her longest song at that point spanning over six minutes, her most underrated song in her discography, and her most emotional song to this day, evidently portraying her complicated relationship with Chris Brown. The song is backed by a depressing powerful organ, and the dynamics of the song build in terms of both production (percussion, strings, and final beats) and vocals upon reaching the climactic end of the bridge which segues into the final chorus and the minute-long guitar solo. This song is truly an experience and an emotional rollercoaster, catalyzed by lyrics such as “What you did to me was a crime / … We opened up a cold case love / And it got the best of us / And now prints, pictures & white outlines / Are all that's left at the scene of a crime / Of a cold case love”. “Stupid in Love” is a excellent ballad in which expresses her relationship with Brown and how it was a complicated waste of time which she took too long to end: “Trying to make this work / But you act like a jerk / Silly of me to keep / Holding on / But the dunce cap is off / You don't know what you lost / And you won’t realize / Till I'm gone, gone, gone / That I was the one … I may be dumb but / I'm not stupid / In love”. The lyricism is a tad awkward especially with the repetition of the word stupid in the chorus but the song itself is beautiful. Having been written two days before the incident is a sign that Rihanna was having misgiving of the relationship and its aftermath. “Photographs” featuring Will.I.Am is a dynamic pop-rap ballad with implemented romantic strings and a light beat. Rihanna speaks of how all that remains in the relationship are photographs and memories and how she wish things happened differently: “All I've got are these photographs / I remember when I used to make you laugh / I don't wanna be stuck in the past / But you're all that I have that I had”. The song throws the listener for the loop with Will.I.Am’s upbeat verse; nevertheless, it still teems with the scars of the past, seeming to take on the male role in Rihanna’s relationship in the song. “Fire Bomb” is a guitar-led rock ballad, with beautiful lyrics, that would have been the perfect single, in my opinion, although I would not mind “Photographs” either. Rihanna sings about explosions and other climactic events as well as not wanting to burn alone: “The lovers need to clear the road / Cuz this thing is ready to blow / I just wanna set you on fire / So I won’t have to burn alone / Then you’ll know where / I'm coming from / Fire bomb”. The closer of Rated R, appropriately titled “The Last Song”, is a hypnotizing guitar-led ballad. Rihanna also recorded this song last: she said how she was in the studio, dimmed the lights and drank some red wine, and just let her creative juices flow in the spirit of this song. Lyrics include “Here we are / Midair off of the cliff / Staring down at the end again … / You'll never know when the song's gonna play / The last song you'll hear is the one you made” which can be perceived in two ways: in terms of a rocky relationship or Rihanna’s album-making process itself, until her follow-up album Loud. “Wait Your Turn” was a buzz single of Rated R and the very first glimpse that the public saw of Rated R, although not to the scale of a single. The song implements dark-sounding dubstep and features confident lyrics in the vein of “Hard”: “I pitch with a grenade / Swing away if you're feeling brave / There's so much power in my name /If you pop off and you say it stadium gon' do the wave”. Rihanna also presents the fact that the wait for her comeback is finally over (her previous album Good Girl Gone Bad was released in mid-2007 and re-released in mid-2008, the longest wait for music since after the Unapologetic era). G4L, which stands for Gangster for Life, is a similar song in terms of the dark dubstep sound and lyrical matter, with lyrics which include “I lick the gun / When I'm done / Cuz I know / That revenge is sweet / So sweet”; however, G4L is mostly a message to the fans, to whom she first names “the [Rihanna] Navy” in this song, to assemble this unbreakable unity: “We're an army / Better yet, a navy / Better yet, crazy / Guns in the air”. Lastly, “Rockstar 101” featuring Slash is a song, the fourth U.S. single, of which I am not too fond. It features the same dark, confident and unapologetic elements as the other non-ballads on the album (other than “Rude Boy”) including “Hard”, ‘Wait Your Turn”, and “G4L”, although in a more detached and less authentic manner. With the omission of this song and some lyrical tweaking of “Stupid in Love” (I wouldn’t mind the removal of Will.I.Am either), Rated R would be a perfect album, but it is nevertheless perfect enough to score at least a 9.5/10 from me and qualify as Rihanna’s best album to this day. I am so proud of how far Rihanna has come as an artist, and I hope her 2016 release Anti moves me and wows me as much as the tremendous Rated R has.