She decided her old image was 'girlie and boring' and now wants to look 'different, unexpected and edgy'. In the past 18 months, the single-minded teenager has fired both her original hair stylist and fashion stylist and hired new ones, her confidence high after two enormous hit singles, the reggae-tinged 'Pon De Replay' and the 'Tainted Love'-sampling 'SOS' in 2006. With their oddly similar names - Amerie, Teairra Mira, Ciara, Christina Milian - they seem to have merged into a transparent, homogenous pop amoeba: pleasant enough, always beautiful, never surprising.
In recent years, though, their once-defiant spirit has been dying of compliant dreariness (Beyonce excepted). Ever since, in the UK (as everywhere else), the bedrooms and clubs of teenage and twentysomething Britain, across all ethnic backgrounds, have been dominated by its production-slick beats and impossibly glamorous, assertive singers, especially the women who used to sing about financial independence and sexual empowerment. Since 1999, the year Destiny's Child saw 'Bills Bills Bills' become their very first US number one, contemporary American R&B has been the definition of what we mean by global pop music. 'I said, "I don't wanna wear that and I wanna wear my hair like this." Now I'm in complete control of my image and everything else. 'At first I just took what was given to me, but eventually I started saying "no",' she says in her measured way, contemplating her transformation. She comes out of the bathroom and perches awkwardly on the side of an enormous bed. Rihanna's been called the Bajan Beyonce but really she's less a songwriter and more a pop impressionist - the Caribbean Kylie. She sifts through a selection of vastly expensive frocks by Roberto Cavalli, Stella McCartney, Gucci and Versace, deeming her favourites 'retarded' (fantastic) and disappears into the bathroom, her walk-in wardrobe for tonight. She's flanked by her four-woman team (hair, make-up, personal assistant, manager) and is both undeniably teenage - chewing bubblegum and asking for the music (Amy Winehouse, Akon) to be turned up 'a lot' - and curiously self-contained, with an odd, detached otherness, her solitary 'demand' a bowl of calamari from room service.
Rihanna rehab haircut skin#
She could be the 'Bratz Funky Fashion' version: enormous smoky-green eyes framed in glittering amber, exhibition pop-art lips glossed in pink, bewitching up-turned nose, sculpted eyebrows in a formidably high forehead and flawless caramel skin all spectacularly framed in a bouffant tease of raven-black curls, the sort of curls last seen in platinum form on the head of Marilyn Monroe. Her head pokes out from a fluffy white hotel bathrobe, like one of those 'styling heads' - a dressing-room table mannequin head on which 10-year-old girls practise make-up.
'I broke it,' she announces to the room, in her a iry, Caribbean-inflected American tone and gives an apologetic smile. On one foot she wears a sparkly silver flip-flop, a bandage on the other because this week she broke a toe (stubbed it against a chair) and is now walking with a high-camp orthopaedic aid, a black wooden cane with a duck-head silver tip. Right now, though, she is hobbling rather than tiptoeing into a suite of the 'W' hotel in Manhattan for a photo shoot. In the video, 19-year-old Rihanna, from Barbados, cuts a startling, hyper-stylised, almost burlesque figure with a deep-slashed raven-black bob and rolled-up umbrella as a dancer's cane, tiptoeing through the rain in ballet pumps and leather hotpants. It stayed at No 1 for 10 weeks and became the longest-running UK number one by a female artist since Whitney Houston's considerably less moving yodel 'I Will Always Love You', finding Rihanna fans in the Beckhams, Naomi Campbell, Wayne Rooney and self-appointed global cool-pop detective Dame Elton John.Īs with most pop hits, 'Umbrella's success wasn't solely down to the quality (and timeliness) of the song but also to the singer's mesmerising look. It's a perfect yet strangely melancholic and moving pop song, about sheltering your friends from harm. This summer, our biblical summer of the worst floods in 200 years, found its very own soundtrack in a song called 'Umbrella', by Rihanna (featuring Jay-Z).
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