Review: Rihanna on Tour, Part Preacher, Part Dominatrix, All Human
Source: NYtimes.com.
USA – There wasn’t much to look at in terms of set design during Rihanna’s Sunday-night concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Oversized plastic cocoons throbbed with pulsing air on either side of the stage. About two-thirds into the show, a huge shower curtain dropped from the ceiling; for a while, it displayed multicolored psychedelic swirls, and shortly after, foam came tumbling down it from the top, as if Rihanna had let the world’s largest washing machine overflow.
These didn’t feel like strategic choices so much as a result of needing literally to fill space — vertical, horizontal, intellectual, psychological.
But there was one exceedingly potent and poetic visual gambit early in the night, one that required just as little thought but was endlessly rich. Rihanna began the concert on a platform at the opposite end of the arena from the stage. After one song there, she boarded a clear floating catwalk and soared above the crowd, slithering through erotic numbers like “Woo” and “Sex With Me” while striking one hard pose after the next. She was moving laterally, and also undulating, and also pausing for effect. Songs were playing, she might even have been singing them, but in those minutes, all that mattered was her mastery of space.
She could have done the whole show like this, truly — staring down upon her faithful, bent at various angles, part tent preacher and part dominatrix. Rihanna is exceptional at being famous, and she needs very little in the way of help to fascinate a room.
At this show, though — the first of two sellouts at Barclays Center on her world tour celebrating “Anti” (Roc Nation), her eighth album, which was released in January — she aimed for more, which she doesn’t always do. The concert was arranged thematically, split into sections that showcased different parts of her catalog — bombastic, anthemic, somewhat Caribbean, very Caribbean — if not of her personality. About two dozen songs were compressed into around 90 minutes, a warp-speed recent-career overview that played something like a workout video: tightly controlled with mild variations designed only to obscure the fact that, really, there are no variations.
That was echoed in the wardrobe, which utilized a restrained, mature palette — beige, ivory, taupe, olive — on garments designed for druids, a look that channeled 2013-era Kanye West and suggested a concert at the hottest club on Tatooine.
Neutrality is not anonymity, though. Rihanna, the 28-year-old pop star, was the most present she’s ever been onstage, and maybe the most confident. (Although in the past she has managed to pull off a supremely confident disengagement.)
She wasn’t particularly animated by the particulars of performing — her dancing was still casual, her lip-syncing not always spot on. But she appeared to be finding joy in singing — when she was doing it, which was only some of the time — a part of pop fame that has not always been her strength. Often, performers will front load their sets with songs that demand the most vocally, but Rihanna waited until the concert’s final leg to push herself: an ecstatic “Diamonds,” a bare-bones “FourFiveSeconds,” a melodramatic “Love on the Brain.” As people began to stream out of their seats to head home, Rihanna aimed to pull them back with her humanity.
This represented, in so much as is possible, Rihanna with her guard down. The rollout of “Anti” was scattershot and messy, and the album lacks a center. But it also includes some of Rihanna’s most thoughtful and invested singing ever. She is doing something extremely rare in pop: trying harder the more famous she’s become.
She surrounded herself with worthy allies here: a gaggle of outstanding dancers, including voguers and bone breakers, and a crack band, initially submerged on four square platforms arranged evenly onstage and eventually raised to sea level. The drums were tough and synthetic, the keyboards tingling. The band alternated between faithfulness to the source material and disruption, excelling on a space-funk version of “Birthday Cake” that was colder and dreamier than the original.
It also delivered an expertly rendered but unfortunate run of dance music, a world Rihanna occasionally visits with a big smile and a pinched nose: a nitrous-injected version of Drake’s “Take Care,” followed by “We Found Love” — on which her vocals were unsteady enough that they were clearly live, something that humanized the song’s assault — followed by “Where Have You Been.”
This, the most energized portion of the night’s show, was also the most disjointed. Each person onstage was operating in his or her independent universe; from a distance, it all suggested an Off Broadway play, about an arena show, where each person surrounding the star harbors a provocative inner life but is trapped in an endless performance. In the middle of it all, Rihanna moved a little, but not much — everyone else’s physical scramble for attention only made her reluctance more entrancing.
See larger photo: www.nytimes.com.
