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N.E.R.D.’s first single in seven years is politically charged, quoting Gloria Steinem and railing against hate over sparse, bass-heavy grooves. The group’s return, especially as a follow-up to Pharrell’s string of 2010s hits, would have been a big enough story on its own, but the real surprise was the swaggering verse by a most unexpected guest MC: Rihanna, who laid down a boasting verse packed with sly references to various hip-hop legends in a laconic flow. (The track was originally supposed to go to Sean “Diddy” Combs, but N.E.R.D. Decided to keep it for themselves.) Thirteen years after her chart debut, the song became Rihanna’s.
“Man Down” is another Rihanna gem that resonated more with her urban R&B audience than her pop acolytes. It finds her plunging deeper into gruff patois accents than any of her singles to date, and serves as a female response to popular reggae dancehall cuts like Chaka Demus & Pliers’ “Murder She Wrote.” “The song is about breaking a man’s heart,” she Spin.
However, the controversial video for “Man Down” expanded the narrative further, depicting Rihanna as a woman who kills a man who raped her. Defending the video, Rihanna on the now-cancelled BET show 106 & Park, “We needed to go back to why it happened, because obviously she’s not a cold-blooded killer.”. This deliriously fun highlight from Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. Finds Rihanna flowing in a melodic voice with as much panache as Kung-Fu Kenny himself. Although her rhymes are mostly nonsensical – “On your pulse like a CD in/Gas in the bitch like it’s premium,” she raps – she sounds so charismatic that it hardly matters.
“I love everything about her,” Lamar told Beats 1.”Her artistry, how she represents women to not only be themselves but to express themselves the way she expresses herself through music, and how she carries herself.”. “A lot of the energy we bring is genuine,” Drake said in 2016 of his long and fruitful collaborative history with Rihanna.
It sure sounded genuine on “Take Care.” The pair’s on-again, off-again relationship seemed clearly to be in “on” mode when they appeared together on the rapturously vulnerable title track from Drake’s 2011 second album. Producer Noah “40” Shebib flipped a sample of a Gil-Scott Heron remix by Jamie xx, dangling gorgeous stalactite-like guitar sounds over a slow-build Balearic throb. But the real heat comes from the chemistry of the artists at the center of this sublime musical and emotional drama, as they sing about moving beyond old heartaches to negotiate a scary new future together. How much history can you fit into one stellar pop hit? DJ Khaled and Canadian songwriter PartyNextDoor sampled a Nineties collaboration between Wyclef Jean and Carlos Santana to create this steamy Latin-tinged jam, in which Rihanna teamed up with trap-soul singer Bryson Tiller. Unsurprisingly, she steals the show with a little old-school New York hip-hop flow (complete with a fly reference to Joe Namath’s Super Bowl champ ’68 Jets)., the trio deepened that Big Apple connection by performing the song with a set and costumes that alluded to the Harlem Renaissance.
Khaled later recalled Facetiming with Rihanna while she recorded her vocal for the song. “She was singing the record on the phone and I was dancing on the phone, she was dancing and we was going back and forth,” he said. Pretty soon, the world would be dancing along, too.
Having co-written Rihanna’s 2006 ballad “Unfaithful” and been dubbed a “genius” by the then–19-year-old in, Ne-Yo helped craft three tracks on 2007’s titanic Good Girl Gone Bad. None were as big as this Grammy-nominated gem, which updated the soul-duet ideal for the mid-2000s R&B landscape by combining breezy guitars with bittersweet harmonies. “The best way to express an emotion like love is through storytelling,” Ne-Yo. “It makes it more, ‘I can relate to this character in this song, because I’ve been through something similar.’ I come from a generation where saying ‘I love you’ is something you say to a girl to take her pants off. But I know the weight of those three words.” M.J.
While Geoff Mack’s 1959 outback-country song “I’ve Been Everywhere” has been covered by Johnny Cash and Kacey Musgraves, its most unexpected appearance is probably its interpolation into this Talk That Talk banger, pieced together by the album’s lead co-writer Ester Dean, the hitmaking team of Dr. Luke and Cirkut, and “We Found Love” mastermind Calvin Harris. The pleading, beat-heavy track has one of Rihanna’s more urgent lyrics, her voice bending skyward as the urgency builds into a quick-stepping refrain. There was a lot of pressure in late 2009 when Rihanna dropped Rated R, her followup to the juggernaut that was Good Girl Gone Bad.
For a short time it seemed like the project might underwhelm when early singles “Russian Roulette,” “Hard” and “Wait Your Turn” failed to become “Umbrella”-like mega-hits. But then in February of 2010, “Rude Boy” hit the airwaves. The dancehall song was the work of small army of songwriters, including Stargate, Ester Dean, Makeba Riddick, Rob Swire and Rihanna herself, and it quickly shot to Number One on the Hot 100 and stayed there for five straight weeks.
No other song from the album was nearly as successful.