Amanda Hess over at the Washington City Paper's Sexist blog disagreed with my post on Rihanna's new single, and asks this question: "When Rihanna does decide to make a public nod to her experience with domestic abuse, shouldn’t we refrain from suggesting that she’s not expressing herself correctly as a victim?" I think this is an important and interesting query, whether the victim in question is an ordinary person or a celebrity. But it's one that I'm going to leave to other sections of the blogosphere, mostly because I think the question is motivated by another issue: the different frameworks Amanda and I are operating under when it comes to artists and their personal lives, and since this is a pop culture blog, I want to explore those frameworks a bit. I think Amanda is operating within a framework that assumes because Rihanna hasn't spoken publicly about Chris Brown's attack on her, we shouldn't read that context--and perhaps larger narratives about abuse and the public conversation surrounding it--into her art. And I guess I think it's impossible for us to leave that context out, as critics.
One of the things I find fascinating about Lady Gaga is how opaque she really is. All the ridiculous clothes, and ridiculous interviews about pop operas and vibrators, are a massive, and clever, distraction. We know nothing about Lady Gaga's personal life, except for her declared sexual orientation and a bit about a rough early breakup. We know nothing of substance about her present personal life. Her lyrics are emotionally intense but unspecific. When she sings "Russian roulette is not the same without a gun" in "Poker Face," there are no actual events that are widely publicly know to read them against. The line is about the importance of the gun, but the gun seems singularly unreal.
Rihanna has no such substantive luxuries. Because the crime done to her is a matter of substantial public record and wide-spread knowledge, even when we don't particularly want to know, it's difficult to avoid associating the topography of her life with her lyrics. The songs about relationships on Good Girl Gone Bad about breakups take on retroactive significance. They're no more specific than Lady Gaga's lyrics, but there are associations to be made at all, simply because we have information about Rihanna's life that we don't have about Lady Gaga's. Is that fair to Rihanna? No. Something that was done to her, that is manifestly not her fault, has provided her with a context she never would have wanted, has stripped her of her ability to control her own image and the context of her own work. The impact of that change is bigger because Rihanna isn't a confessional singer: she makes dance songs for times when we don't want to have to think very hard. The juxtaposition between what we know about her life and what kind of music she makes seems even larger as a result.
I feel bad for Rihanna, I do. And I'm aware that my wishes for what she does next with her career are precisely that. She has no responsibility to me, or to anyone else. She wasn't an explicitly feminist (or even someone who could be plausibly read as feminist) before Chris Brown got busted for hitting her, and she has no obligation to be feminist afterwards, to me, or to anyone else. But Rihanna and her management do seem to have a strong sense of how to market her successfully: after the incident, Jay-Z and other artists rallied around her and provided something of a protective buffer between her and Brown. I don't expect those artists who are collaborating with her on her latest album (all of whom are men) to be feminist, or even to be exceptionally sensitive to how women listen (although slow-jam innovator The-Dream is in the mix, so, who knows) to popular music. What I did expect is that they'd be smart businessmen. "Russian Roulette" is a less than fantastic song musically, and it's one with lyrics that have clearly been subject to a wide range of interpretations, some of them fairly disturbing. In other words, it was a poor commercial choice for a first single off Rihanna's new album.
No matter what the content of Rihanna's music, all I really want, personally, is for her to be successful and happy. I don't know that "Russian Roulette" will serve that purpose, because I don't think it'll particularly sell well, and I don't think it provides much in the way of listening pleasure either. Politics are secondary, but they still are an important--and legitimate--part of criticism. Rihanna has the right to live her life however she chooses: if she'd gone to Chris Brown, I would have been worried for her, but I wouldn't have disputed her right to do it. She also has the right to make whatever music she chooses. But unlike in her private life, Rihanna's public product doesn't have some sort of right to be immune from interpretation and from criticism. Maybe critics like me will get it wrong, or read things in that aren't there. But I don't believe in limiting the critical scope for the work of someone who is continuing to produce a public product. It's entirely possible that folks would have seen frightening implications in "Russian Roulette" even if Rihanna hadn't been attacked. We can't know, of course. But it's possible, and interrogating those implications would be equally important under those circumstances, too. I'd rather we make some mistakes in our criticism of art, that we probe in mistaken directions, than that we let things that ought to trouble us go on by.