I wonder if the average consumers on the street assume pop star Rihanna to be American. How many of them are aware that she was in fact born and raised in Saint Michael, Barbados? The manner in which she has been predominantly implicated as an exponent of black American R&B, to be considered systematically alongside the likes of Beyoncé, speaks to a kind of cultural eclipsing, whereby an archetype for the American R&B songstress has already been set in place, potentially inhabitable by any woman from the outside whose looks, mannerisms, and voice match the established criteria. It should be noted, of course, that Barbados is an Anglophone country – more economically developed than most of its neighbouring Caribbean islands – and one must assume that the influence of mainstream pop and R&B from the United States is highly pervasive among the young population. I was not surprised to learn that, upon first auditioning for American songwriter and producer Evan Rogers in 2003, Rihanna performed a rendition of the ballad ‘Emotion’, as recorded famously by Destiny’s Child. It was this audition that ultimately provided the impetus for her relocation to the States a year later. The rest, as they say, is up on Wikipedia.
By identifying Rihanna as satisfying some pre-existing paradigm, I do not mean to suggest that she has not successfully transgressed that stereotype since her initial rise to fame in 2005 with ‘Pon de Replay’. This first single differs from almost all of her subsequent hits in that it works in a Jamaican-derived dancehall style (as popularised internationally by Sean Paul), delivered in an idiomatic form of Caribbean English. Commenting on the song’s lyrical style at the time of its release, Rihanna states: ‘It’s just language that we speak in Barbados. It’s broken English. Pon is on, de means the, so it’s just basically telling the DJ to put my song on the replay.’ She also speaks of the significance of the title of her first album, Music of the Sun: ‘The word sun represents my culture where I’m from, the Caribbean. It represents me. So the album consists of music of the sun.’†
Going by this first release, then, it would appear that Rihanna’s Caribbean heritage is referenced freely as a means of distinguishing her from her contemporaries. This invites the question of why on her two albums that follow – A Girl Like Me and Good Girl Gone Bad – this aspect of her image becomes increasingly downplayed. Granted, A Girl Like Me features two tracks that are strongly indebted to this influence: ‘Dem Haters’ is a down-tempo reggae-tinged number featuring fellow Barbadian singer Dwane Husbands, while ‘Break It Off’, with Sean Paul, is an energetic fusion of dancehall and mainstream pop. While this last song became the fourth and final single from the album, it featured no accompanying music video, and only came after the major hits ‘SOS’ and ‘Unfaithful’ had already provided the era’s definitive images of Rihanna as a thoroughly Americanised black pop icon. On the other hand, Good Girl Gone Bad, the record which would cement her place among the most preeminent music stars on the planet, is purged altogether of any overt Caribbean musical influences. One could reason that these developments reflect upon dancehall’s general decline in mainstream popularity since Sean Paul’s career peaked in the earlier half of ’00s, reinforced in turn by the rise of more technologically sophisticated forms of R&B, as exemplified by Timbaland’s work with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado.
