Oh, lady, you just earned our 15 bucks. Rihanna will sell millions of copies of Loud, her fifth album, and she'll deserve every penny of it -- not because it's a dependably excellent club-shaker, though it is, but because no woman should have to endure the kind of pick-up line Drake shoots her way on "What's My Name," the record's second single. "I heard you good with those soft lips / Yeah you know word of mouth," purrs the Canadian rapper (and Ri-Ri's rumored fling). "The square root of 69 is 8 something, right / 'Cuz I been trying to work it out."
Woof. But while Casanova rolls over in his grave, Rihanna smirks and takes it in stride. Drake may open the track, but she reigns in their shared world -- with a coquettish flip, she glides into a chorus that leaves no doubt: "Hey boy, really wanna see / If you can go downtown with a girl like me." In the video, she struts happily around New York's Lower East Side in a zebra-striped jacket, a nod to the actual animal she sat atop in the video for last year's "Rude Boy" -- with her bodysuit covered in Keith Haring-esque graffiti to match the floor and walls, like Haring himself was bodypainted to melt into his own squiggly backdrop in Annie Liebovitz's 1986 portrait. "Rude Boy," from last year's defiantly terse but uneven Rated X, was released when the young pop star was still struggling to overcome her well-documented romantic difficulties with boyfriend Chris Brown, and seemed about to melt into the tabloid stories.
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We took a trip down to the offices of The Man to hear Rihanna’s forthcoming fifth album, ‘Loud’ (due out November 15). As you might expect it’s a tasteful collection brimming over with wholesomeness and propriety, exactly the kind of thing that should grace the stereogram of any good Christian household…
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