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Throughout The Life of a Showgirl, Swift, Martin and Shellback craft tracks that go beyond what they created with 1989 and reputation. Reuniting with her pop powerhouse collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, who worked on her biggest pop radio hits like « We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, » « Delicate, » « Blank Space, » and « Shake It Off, » was a return to form after the fog of TTPD. (« And all the headshots on the walls/ Of the dance hall are of the b—es/ Who wish I’d hurry up and die/ But I’m immortal now. ») On « The Life of a Showgirl, » she declares with her fellow showgirl that she isn’t handing over the baton just yet. The showgirl is actually the one in charge (« I was your father figure/ You pulled the wrong trigger/ This empire belongs to me »), alluding to her battle to retain her masters.
Rihanna Marks 10th Anniversary of ‘ANTI’ With Record-Extending 8th RIAA Diamond Certification
An interpolation of Toots and the Maytals’ 1966 song of the same name, Sister Nancy’s in-studio freestyle was laid over sparse rub-a-dub production, allowing her declaration of ambition and skill to ring loud and clear. In addition to her status as a rare female voice in a sea of male performers at the dawn of dancehall, Sister Nancy is recognized for her influential, highly sampled single « Bam Bam. » While Sister Nancy needn’t be reminded of her influence — « I’m the woman who created dancehall … on the mic system, around the sound system. I’m the one who did all of that, first » — the past 15 years have seen the artist receive her flowers on a global stage. « I will never be your ordinary thing. When you come to see me, it doesn’t matter the time or the space, it’s always going to be good. » « People love what I stand for. I always give the audience something they can think about, » Sister Nancy tells GRAMMY.com, Zooming in from a car in Midtown Manhattan.
Everything that happened after the success of Fearless pushed Swift from country music’s best-kept secret to a mainstream star. It might not be the romantic tale Swift dreamed of growing up, but her sophomore album signalled that bigger things were to come. It won Swift’s first Album Of The Year GRAMMY in 2010, at the time making her the youngest person to win the accolade at age 20.
Currently certified sextuple Platinum, ANTI also remains the longest-charting album by a Black female artist on the Billboard 200, with more than 508 weeks and counting. Despite the success of singles here and there and a buzzy Super Bowl halftime performance in 2023, she has focused her attention on her beauty brand Fenty Beauty and lingerie brand Savage X Fenty. Twenty years after she released her debut album, Rihanna is back with new music. betista casino Yes, Rihanna has won multiple awards, including several Grammy Awards and MTV awards for her outstanding contributions to music.
- A dance-oriented pop and R&B album, Talk That Talk opened at number three on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 198,000 copies, while debuting atop the UK Albums Chart with 163,000 units sold.
- The pop star delivered her next effort, Talk That Talk, in November 2011.
- David Bowie fans may well feel aggrieved that his post-punk classic « Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) » was entirely ignored by GRAMMY voters, while the bro-step banger it inspired was showered with awards.
- Armageddon —her first full-length since 2001’s Sister Nancy Meets Fireproof — was released this summer, seven years after it was recorded with Mad Professor in the U.K.
- Good Girl Gone Bad remains Rihanna’s best-selling album and marks her greatest reinvention as she adopted a more rebellious sound.
- It spent ten non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making it both Rihanna’s longest-running chart-topping single and the longest-running number one song in the US in 2011.
Her musical career has been marked by experimentation, and she has stated that her goal was « to make music that could be heard in parts of the world that I’d never been to ». She began vocal training during the recording of Good Girl Gone Bad (2007) under the guidance of Ne-Yo, who taught her breathing techniques and vocal delivery. The song earned her nominations for the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Song. Alongside Donald Glover, she starred in the film Guava Island (2019), in which she played his character’s love interest.
- A dance-pop record, Loud debuted at number three in the US with first-week sales of 207,000 copies.
- In March 2015, Rihanna was announced as a co-owner of the music streaming platform Tidal, alongside several other artists.
- If Taylor Swift was the soundtrack to navigating the early stages of teenhood, Fearless is Swift’s coming-of-age record.
- Her journey from a small island to the bustling music scene of America marked the beginning of her transformational career.
- It won Swift’s first Album Of The Year GRAMMY in 2010, at the time making her the youngest person to win the accolade at age 20.
- When she announced the album, she declared, « And baby, that’s showbiz for you. » No one knows that better than someone who has been through the ringer in the industry like Swift has.
An Era-By-Era Breakdown Of Taylor Swift’s Career
The lead single, « Work », topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, with the third and fourth singles, « Needed Me » and « Love on the Brain », peaking within the top ten. With an eclectic blend of genres such as pop, dancehall, and psychedelic soul, Anti peaked at number one on the Billboard 200, marking her second chart-topping record in the US. It spent ten non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, making it both Rihanna’s longest-running chart-topping single and the longest-running number one song in the US in 2011. To support the album, Rihanna launched the Loud Tour in June 2011, which included a record-breaking ten sold-out shows at The O2 Arena in London—the most by a female artist in the venue’s history.
The record also featured the popular power ballad “Unfaithful,” as well as singles “We Ride” and “Break It Off.” The album debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart and earned her first No. 1 hit with the catchy pop single “SOS,” which spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100. In 2008, Rihanna topped the chart three times, twice with her own songs “Disturbia” and “Take a Bow,” plus a feature on T.I.’s “Live Your Life.” She has also earned nine number-one songs on the UK Singles Chart and ranks second to the Beatles for the most million-selling singles in the country. This made her the artist with the most digital single awards and the first performer to exceed RIAA’s 100 million cumulative singles certification threshold. With estimated worldwide sales exceeding 250 million records as of 2023, Rihanna is one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
A pop and reggae album, A Girl Like Me peaked at number five on the Billboard 200 chart, with 115,000 copies sold in the US in its first week. Impressed, Rogers arranged a second meeting with Rihanna and her mother—this time without the other two girls—and later invited them to his hometown in Connecticut to record demo tapes for record label submissions. Around this time, Rihanna began listening to reggae artists such as Sizzla and Damien Marley, as well as R&B musicians like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. She is the highest-certified female digital single artist by the Recording Industry Association of America, and has seven diamond-certified singles and fourteen number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. These albums contained the US number-one singles « Rude Boy », « Only Girl (In the World) », « What’s My Name? », « S&M », « We Found Love », « Diamonds », and « Work ». The albums spawned the singles « Pon de Replay » and « SOS », which peaked at numbers two and one on the US Billboard Hot 100, respectively.
How Rihanna’s « Work » Reinvigorated Dancehall
Retrospective and reflective, Speak Now is an album about the speeches she could’ve, would’ve and should’ve said. The album’s title track pulled from the saying, « Speak now or forever hold your peace, » inspired by a friend’s ex-boyfriend getting engaged; meanwhile, « Mean » was everything Swift wanted to say to a critic who was continuously harsh about her vocals. Along with having more eyes on her, Swift also felt pressured to maintain her persona as a perfect young female role model amid a time when her peers like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato were attempting to rebrand to be more mature and sexier. But this meant that she faced more publicity and criticism, from naysayers who nitpicked her songwriting and vocals to the infamous Kanye West incident at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
On the Life of a Showgirl track directly named after the late icon, Swift circles back to the themes she touched on with folklore’s « Peace » and the tension between her private reality and her public persona. While half of The Life of a Showgirl’s 12 tracks peer into the darker corners of fame and explores the loneliness, scrutiny and fractures that used to come with it, the other half are dedicated to falling completely head over heels. And on The Tortured Poets Department’s « The Prophecy, » she pleaded for someone to change what she believed to be her predestined future of being alone and what she’d give up to find someone she loves.
In addition to her musical career, Rihanna acted in the movies Battleship (2012) and This Is the End (2013). In 2023 she returned to the stage for the first time in some four years, performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. Included in the total were prominent collaborations with hip-hop artists T.I. The album that followed later that year, Rated R, much of which she cowrote, was marked by icily stark production and brooding lyrics that touched on revenge. With the effervescent dancehall-inflected single “Pon de Replay” (2005), Rihanna immediately captured an international audience.
But if you want to add a bit of prestige to your supernatural soundtrack, there’s another list of Halloween-friendly songs to check out — one that highlights another celebrated annual occasion. With Halloween celebrations in full swing this Oct. 31, revisit some eerie or ghoulishly titled songs that have been awarded golden gramophones, from the ‘Exorcist’ theme to Eminem and Rihanna’s « The Monster. » More than 40 years later, she’s still happy to discuss and play that single she recorded back in Kingston as a young woman.
That year, fans also got their first glimpse of the pop superstar alongside Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, and Anne Hathaway in trailers for Ocean’s 8, a female-led spinoff of the popular Ocean’s Trilogy which hit theaters in June 2018. It also spawned the popular radio hits “Needed Me” and “Love on the Brain.” At the 2014 Grammy Awards, Unapologetic won Best Urban Contemporary Album, marking the singer’s first win in an album category. In November 2012, Rihanna scored her first No. 1 album with Unapologetic. The pop star delivered her next effort, Talk That Talk, in November 2011. Rihanna returned back and better than ever in November 2010 with her fifth studio album, Loud.
Her work has influenced artists such as Lorde, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez, Ed Sheeran, Ellie Goulding, Kim Petras, Marilyn Manson, Jessie J, SZA, Ayra Starr, and Demi Lovato. In July 2015, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that Rihanna had surpassed 100 million gold and platinum song certifications. In 2012, she set a Guinness World Record as the best-selling digital artist in the US.
Rihanna Biography
She’d see visceral images in her mind — from battleships to tree swings to mirrored disco balls — and turned them into stories, sometimes weaving in her own personal narrative throughout, or taking on a narrator role and speaking from the perspective of someone she had never met. Crafting a world with characters like the folklore love triangle between those in « betty » and « august, » as well as Rebekah Harkness from « the last great american dynasty » (who once lived in Swift’s Rhode Island mansion), was Swift’s way of venturing outside her typical autobiographical style of writing. Without exactly setting out to create an album, she began dreaming of fictional stories and characters with various narrative arcs, allowing her imagination to run free. But Lover was more than any accolades could reflect — it was Swift’s transitional album in many ways, notably marking the first album that she owned entirely herself following leaving Big Machine Records for Republic Records in 2018. This evolution is mentioned throughout Lover, particularly in a direct callback to 2012’s Red, « Daylight, » which sees her describe her love as « golden » rather than « burning red. »
She scored another No. 1 hit with the single “Rude Boy,” while the tracks “Hard” and “Russian Roulette” landed squarely in the top 10. Good Girl Gone Bad remains her best-selling album with over 10 million copies sold worldwide. Her lead single “Umbrella,” featuring Jay-Z, lead the Billboard Hot 100 for a whopping seven weeks and later won the Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration in 2008. Her sophomore effort, A Girl Like Me, followed in April 2006, incorporating reggae, rock, and pop influences.
Highly regarded as Swift’s magnum opus, Red sees the singer shed the fairytale dresses and the girl-next-door persona to craft a body of work that has now been deemed as her first « adult » record. Writing the entire album herself, Swift used Speak Now to prove her songwriting prowess to those who questioned her capabilities. For the first time since becoming an artist, she was forced to reckon with the concept of celebrity and how turning into one — whether she wanted it or not — informed her own writing and perception of herself. On the album’s liner notes, Swift says Fearless is about « living in spite » of the things that scare you, like falling in love again despite being hurt before or walking away and letting go.
Music of the Sun
Its win for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 2014 GRAMMYs, however, proved that Rihanna’s reign wasn’t letting up anytime soon. « Mr. Jesus, I’d love to be a queen/ But I’m from the left side of an island/ Never thought this many people would even know my name, » she pleads in the seven-minute two-parter. Her swagger is boisterous in « Phresh Out the Runway, » « Jump, » and strip club anthem « Pour It Up, » but « Nobody’s Business » really drives home the album’s theme of being unbothered. Vocally, Rihanna’s strength lies in her ability to evoke raw emotion à la « Stay. » Featuring Mikky Ekko, the stripped-down, slow-burning piano ballad narrowly missed the top spot on the Hot 100 but gave Rihanna her 24th top 10 hit, surpassing Whitney Houston’s record of 23 in 2013. One of Rihanna’s most precious offerings to date, « Diamonds » emerged as a self-love mantra due to its uplifting « Shine bright like a diamond » chant. Its lead single « Diamonds » resonated in an equally major way, giving Rih her 12th No. 1 on the Hot 100.
