More than its predecessor, Fearless blurs the line between country and pop thanks to crossover hits like “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me,” yet still keeps the confessional attributes known in country songwriting. Even as a new country artist, critics claimed that she “mastered” the genre while subsequently ushering it to a new era — one that would soon see Swift dabble in country-pop. One writer in particular, Liz Rose, applauded Swift’s songwriting capabilities, stating that she was more of an “editor” for the songs because Swift already had such a distinct vision.
Though it’s been close to a decade since Rihanna’s last studio album, 2016’s ANTI, she reminded the world of her reign with her 2023 Super Bowl halftime show — which also marked her first time taking the stage in five years. She has sold over 60 million albums worldwide, landed 14 Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers, and won nine GRAMMY Awards. As Rihanna’s debut album, ‘Music of the Sun,’ turns 20, take a deep dive into the superstar’s catalog and her evolution from teen idol to beloved icon. Though a new album still eludes the Rihanna Navy, their fearless leader hasn’t been completely musically absent in the years since ANTI‘s release.
She especially enjoyed singing and won a high-school talent show with a rendition of a Mariah Carey song. As a child, she listened to Caribbean music, such as reggae, as well as American hip-hop and R&B. Rihanna (born February 20, 1988, St. Michael parish, Barbados) is a Barbadian pop and rhythm-and-blues (R&B) singer who became a worldwide star in the early 21st century. In 2022, Rihanna advocated for reforming the global financial system to better address climate change and poverty, including providing aid to nations most affected by climate-related crises. In October 2019, she stated that she declined to perform at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show in support of Colin Kaepernick following the controversy surrounding his role in the national anthem protests. Proceeds from the single supported the fundraiser, which ultimately helped raise $100 million for cancer research.
Rihanna News: Singer Gives Birth to Third Child with A$AP Rocky
No matter what genre Rihanna touches or what artist she links up with, she brings her full self to each session whilst completely immersing herself into the music — taking on different personas to make the collab well worth it. Amid smash collabs, Rihanna and Coldplay’s intricate “Princess of China” number gets lost in the shuffle, but it speaks to her charm as it’s the band’s first album (2011’s Mylo Xyloto) to feature another artist. The one-off single is so quintessentially Rihanna that it notably kicked off her Super Bowl halftime show.
The singer/songwriter also picked up a Best Traditional Pop GRAMMY in 2024 for her second LP, an immaculate collection of jazz, pop and classical that bridged the gap between Gen-Z and the Great American Songbook. Still, as a love song dedicated to wife Amanda Shires — and the quiet acceptance that the Grim Reaper will inevitably end their story — it’s certainly no less emotional. Just four years after picking up five GRAMMY nominations for their transatlantic chart-topper “Love the Way You Lie,” unlikely dream team Eminem and Rihanna once again joined forces for another hip-pop masterclass. Traditional Appalachian folk song “O Death” had previously been recorded by the likes of gospel vocalist Bessie Jones, folklorist Mike Seeger and Californian rockers Camper Van Beethoven, just to name a few. The King of Pop picked up a whopping 11 nominations for his first blockbuster album, Thriller, and then converted seven of them into wins, including Album Of The Year. Considering how perfectly Mike Oldfield’s prog-rock epic Tubular Bells complements all-time classic horror flick The Exorcist, it’s remarkable to think that it was recorded before director William Friedkin came calling.
In August 2021, Forbes announced that Rihanna had become one of the richest entertainers in the world, estimating her net worth to be $1.7 billion at the time following the success of her cosmetic company. In lieu of another album, the singer-turned-entrepreneur, born Robyn Fenty, launched Fenty Beauty in 2017 in partnership with luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which also preceded a short-lived luxury fashion line. “20 years ago, i left my country, my culture, my food, and family to embark on a journey that started with the release of my very first body of music!” she wrote in an Instagram caption alongside a montage of her biggest career moments. Rihanna officially becomes a billionaire and Forbes names her the ‘richest female musician’
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Eventually, her bold move to the United States at 16 years old marked the beginning of her journey to stardom, as she pursued her passion for singing and songwriting with determination. Despite these difficulties, Rihanna showcased resilience and creativity from a young age, channeling her personal experiences and pain into music. She is the eldest of three siblings, navigating a childhood fraught with challenges, including her father’s struggles with substance abuse and her parents’ tumultuous marriage, which ultimately ended in divorce when she was just 14. Rihanna, born Robyn Rihanna Fenty on February 20, 1988, in St. Michael Parish, Barbados, is a betista casino globally renowned pop star, singer, and fashion icon.
“And, baby, that’s show business for you,” Taylor Swift declared after announcing her 12th full-length album, The Life of a Showgirl. But with The Life of a Showgirl, it’s clear she’s closing the chapter — or should we say era — of her life that was the catalyst to the new one she’s stepping into. Yes, she is still the same artist who wrote the fairytale-tinged record Fearless, crafted the indie pandemic escape that was folklore, and dove into the depths of her sadness on The Tortured Poets Department. After the muted sonic tones of The Tortured Poets Department, The Life of a Showgirl is possibly Swift’s most jubilant album yet.
- While her songwriting has developed and matured, feeling like an outsider and carving her own path is a theme she still writes about now, as seen on Midnights’ “You’re On Your Own, Kid.”
- Her longing continues in “Where Have You Been,” which flaunts Rihanna’s versatility, flipping Geoff Mack’s 1959 country song “I’ve Been Everywhere” into an infectious EDM banger.
- “Wood” and “Honey” capture the playfulness of true love, while songs like “WI$HLI$T” and “Elizabeth Taylor” see love not as a distraction from her life’s work but as the very thing that makes it feel meaningful.
- Rihanna became the youngest and fastest solo artist in Billboard Hot 100 history to accumulate ten number-one singles.
- Released on November 20, Rated R marked a shift away from the upbeat sound of Rihanna’s earlier albums, embracing a darker, more introspective tone with rock influences.
- “She continued to make incredible art and so this is a love song kind of through the lens of the motif of what she had to go through in her life and sort of the parallels that I feel in my own life.”
Elizabeth Taylor has appeared as a character in Swift’s songs before, particularly in rep’s “Ready For It…?” where she compares herself to the famous actress and entertainer. Comparatively, “Eldest Daughter” — track five, a spot Swift notoriously reserves for the most emotional song — is a love song about the masks we wear and the selves we choose to reveal. Throughout the record, dynamic and layered pop soundscapes mimic the same energy Swift was feeling both on and off stage. “I thought who better to ask to be a part of this song than the ultimate showgirl Sabrina Carpenter.” Instead of writing songs akin to “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” a song about performing in the midst of heartbreak and grief, Swift opted to focus on what people don’t necessarily see when they buy a ticket to a show. Now that the curtain is up and The Life of a Showgirl is out, read on for five key essential insights from Taylor Swift’s new album.
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.
Life and career
“Wood” and “Honey” capture the playfulness of true love, while songs like “WI$HLI$T” and “Elizabeth Taylor” see love not as a distraction from her life’s work but as the very thing that makes it feel meaningful. Many of the love songs on Swift’s more recent albums are brimming with anxiety, from Lover’s “Cornelia Street” (“I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends”) to folklore’s “Peace” (“The rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me”). One of the biggest takes by critics — that borderlines on sexist at times — is that Swift won’t be able to write good, reflective music that cuts deep like the songs that orbit around heartache and pain.
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.
A New Island Girl In Town
Rihanna has delivered pop hit after pop hit since bursting onto the music scene in the mid-2000s. The album’s lead single, “Work,” featuring rapper Drake, spent nine weeks at No. 1 and earned two Grammy nominations. In January 2016, Rihanna released her eighth album, Anti, allowing Jay-Z’s online streaming site Tidal to exclusively feature the collection of tracks for a week. The album included “We Found Love,” a track with DJ Calvin Harris that won the 2013 Grammy Award for best short-form music video. Less than a year later, when Rihanna was only 16 years old, she left Barbados to move in with Rogers and his wife in Connecticut and work on recording a demo album.
- It’s been used in film and television, including prominently in 1998’s Nas- and DMX-featuring Belly.
- “20 years ago, i left my country, my culture, my food, and family to embark on a journey that started with the release of my very first body of music!” she wrote in an Instagram caption alongside a montage of her biggest career moments.
- Seven years into an already extraordinary career, 2012’s Unapologetic became Rihanna’s first album to debut at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart.
- Transitioning from a teen pop sensation to a mature artist, Rihanna’s work reflects her evolving artistic vision.
- Oldfield was rewarded for helping to scar a generation of moviegoers for life when a condensed version of his eerie masterpiece picked up the Best Instrumental Composition GRAMMY in 1975.
- He highlighted her multifaceted career, “from her business achievements through Fenty to her tremendous record as an activist and philanthropist”.
- It was a very vulnerable time in my life, and I refused to let that be the image.
Many of her music videos were shot as short films exploring issues such as love triangles, abuse and substance abuse romance, including “We Found Love” and “Man Down”. The album’s lead single, “Diamonds”, topped the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming Rihanna’s twelfth number-one song on the chart. A synth-pop record with EDM and hip-hop elements, Unapologetic debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 238,000 copies, becoming Rihanna’s first chart-topping album in the US. Rihanna is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated sales of over 250 million records. “She continued to make incredible art and so this is a love song kind of through the lens of the motif of what she had to go through in her life and sort of the parallels that I feel in my own life.”
This initial success paved the way for her subsequent albums and chart-topping singles, solidifying her status as a pop powerhouse. Just months later, Rihanna released her first single, “Pon de Replay,” which quickly climbed the charts and established her as a formidable newcomer in pop music. The pop star has an impressive 64 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including 14 No. 1 hits and 32 tracks in the top 10.
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.
Rihanna’s first studio album, Music of the Sun, was released in August 2005 to much intrigue. Her last No. 1 single, “Work” featuring Drake, topped the chart for nine weeks. Her first No. 1 song, “SOS,” topped the chart for three weeks in 2006, while her Grammy-winning Jay-Z collaboration “Umbrella” far surpassed that the following year, maintaining the lead spot for seven weeks.
Lead single “We Found Love” is undeniably the biggest hit to stem from the Talk That Talk era, spending 10 consecutive weeks atop the Hot 100. Her longing continues in “Where Have You Been,” which flaunts Rihanna’s versatility, flipping Geoff Mack’s 1959 country song “I’ve Been Everywhere” into an infectious EDM banger. It was especially refreshing to see Rihanna emerge from one of the darkest periods of her life as exuberant as ever.
And in true Swiftian fashion, turning into a pop artist didn’t just prove her genre-shapeshifting capabilities — it further solidified her as an artist who is at her best when she freely creates to her desires and refuses to adhere to anyone. After years of identifying as a country artist and flirting with pop, Swift departed her roots to reinvent herself, no matter what her then-label or critics had to say. On Red, Swift focused on emotions evoked from a hot-and-cold relationship, one that forced her to experience “intense love, intense frustration, jealousy and confusion” — all feelings that she’d describe as “red.”
And yet, she has still come out the other side, sparkling, self-assured and ready to revel in a career built on resilience and reinvention — something only a true showgirl could achieve. 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. What is most apparent on the album, though, is just how much Swift embraces every aspect of who she is.
