Her dark and thrilling new show takes on difficult topics, even in her lighter songs.
For the couture-clad Amazons in today's pop ingénue brigade, self-presentation is a battle game of flirtation and threat. Never before has a group of young women so openly explored the darker side of the freedom that women's liberation has brought. Most observers credit Lady Gaga for bringing difficult themes such as self-alienation and violence against women to light, but Rihanna, who brought her first headlining tour to Staples Center Wednesday night, is right there with her on the front lines.
“Last Girl on Earth,” the title of her show, lays out the thematic territory Rihanna travels in her music. Though she started as a carefully controlled teen pop star, by her second album, “A Girl Like Me,” she'd begun exploring the more chaotic side of emotion. Her 2006 ballad “Unfaithful,” which she presented Tuesday as a torchy number sung in a nightclub that might be in Hell, imagines infidelity as a form of murder. She would continue to elaborate on these imaginings of love as a dangerous endeavor in songs such as “Shut Up and Drive” and “Hate That I Love You”; even her biggest hit, the tender “Umbrella,” unfolds in sad rhythms, its lyrics expressing pain as well as faithfulness.
So Rihanna and her collaborators had set the stage for this tour's bombardment of violent imagery — floating machine guns, a hot pink tank, a trashed car, menacing bird demons on stilts — long before her then-boyfriend Chris Brown assaulted her after a party in February 2009, forcing an all-too-real biographical detail on the already dark psychic realm she was exploring in her music. She responded artistically with “Rated R,” a brave album that laid out the sticky web of emotion an abused woman feels. “Last Girl on Earth” expands on this subject by presenting itself as Rihanna's dream world, which turns out to be a very troubling place.
Troubling, but undeniably exciting. Working with the English fine artist Simon Henwood, who directed Kanye West's similarly disconcerting video for “Love Lockdown” (and whose partner is the singer Róisín Murphy, often cited as a source of both Gaga and Rihanna's outrageous fashions), Rihanna has devised an entertainment far more in touch with the unpredictable nature of the subconscious than, say, certain Hollywood movies treading similar ground.
Framed by films that use somewhat clunky language (“This is a dream,” the supertitles blandly announce) and creepy imagery that does seem related to Gaga's Monster Ball screen images, the show placed Rihanna within gothic fantasy landscapes where she delivered her songs in a gutsy, lonely wail.