Review: Rihanna, "Talk That Talk"

Rihanna
Talk That Talk
11.18.11
Def Jam

Everyone's favorite Barbadian R&B dancefloor diva has always been very specific about her goals, claiming early on her desire to be the "black Madonna." And she's followed that playbook even closer than she herself may have realized, or even wanted to: she starts in the clubs, making the DJ the center of her world, then expands out into shiny, big-league pop, gets a big-name boyfriend with anger issues, cuts a dark and dramatic record, then dives headlong into hypersexuality and hits a brick wall. True to her time and place (and Madge's work ethic), Rihanna did it in half the time. Now we reach the level Ms. Ciccone did in the mid-Nineties: love songs.

Not that RiRi is foolish enough to remake Madonna's own mistakes; Talk That Talk is a lot dancier than, say, Bedtime Stories, but if you shuffled it with Something to Remember and Music, you'd get the general thematic idea. Always expected to slow it down at least some of the time -- that's the "black" part of the "black Madonna" plan, because R&B stardom demands it -- she also glosses it up hard and keeps it positive, as if realizing that riddims and rage, in 2011, are not nearly as important as radioplay. Like Madge, the club is no longer her top priority. Pop rules.

Also like her idol, she has a problem getting real. Rihanna has emotions, mind you, she just doesn't let them into her work much. She's an entertainer first, unfairly tagged with the "ice queen" label because she didn't run out and do a bunch of angry songs about Chris Brown. She's not here to be deep, she's here to get you jacked up and then, maybe, to ease you down afterwards. When she tries for anything more, like Madonna coming up short on "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" or getting utterly lost in "American Pie," she disappears.

You wouldn't know unless you paid attention, though, not with the cream of the crop designing club beats and rich, gentle soundscapes for RiRi to wear like couture. Dr. Luke makes the opening ballad "You Da One" into a irresistibly choppy, poppy dedication jam. Stargate gives "Farewell" twice the import as Rihanna can with her voices. No I.D. does a great job at fashioning the faux-rock guitars of "We All Want Love" into a perfect romcom happy ending. Unfortunately, except for a pair of appealingly shallow (and non-Caribbean) jams in "Drunk On Love" and "We Found Love," that's about all there is to the ironically-named Talk That Talk -- even Jay-Z's turn on the title track feels like a retread. What sex there is gets short shrift. And at 11 tracks running 37 minutes, it's impossible to see how she can keep this on the radio until next November's obligatory album. If pop music doesn't quit being so perfunctory and incestuous, ambitious pros like Rihanna will become so anonymous they'll disappear right into the background. Madonna was never having any of that.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 60. No fake attempts at being hard or kinky, but no new "Umbrella," either.
Invention: 50. She's at the stage where she's finding an interesting middle ground for all her stylistic ambitions...
Integrity: 41. ...but it'll just sound bland without a really distinctive producer.