Which, in turn, means you don’t have to sell music. With profile come the big money endorsement deals. It is complementing attention-grabbing-but-spontaneous Instagram shots with those mega-budget shoots – such as the Harper’s Bazaar shot of Rihanna in a shark’s mouth – that maintains profile.
Print may be dying, and Rihanna may know that a cover shoot might not sell a single download or prompt one solitary stream, but glossies have the biggest picture budgets. In the same article, Rihanna declares – in a phrase that sums up Anti as much as it describes her penchant for wearing men’s jackets: “You will never be stylish if you don’t take risks.” “There is no one else that excites me more,” noted Alexander Wang in the story accompanying Rihanna’s third Vogue cover. Regardless, she takes a good photo, operating as a muse to photographers and fashion houses ( including Dior, for whom she is currently an ambassador). Rihanna’s persona is one that throws up a smokescreen that renders it impossible to deduce whether there is far more, or far less, going on beneath the surface. In short, I can only imagine things that she’s already shown us.” I usually envision Rihanna in the sun, languidly smoking. In last year’s interview-free Rihanna cover story for The Fader, writer Mary HK Choi noted that while Rihanna seems incredibly “real”, “I can’t picture Rihanna jogging. In August 2010, she took control of her Twitter account (“no more corny label tweets”), but it’s through Instagram that she seems to have made most sense of her persona, offering a window into her life that’s convincing, if not totally accurate. For some acts, this requirement to let the world into their affairs was far from ideal, but nobody on the pop landscape has defined their image as well as Rihanna. The timing of her arrival and rise sidestepped the tailing off of the Perez Hilton-type celebrity culture of the mid-2000s and centred on direct-to-fan communication that allowed artists to control their own image. It is significant that Rihanna released her first single within three months of YouTube being invented (her fans are a generation for whom music videos, rather than just songs, are the go-to pop art form), and in the year that MySpace surpassed Google as the US’s most visited website. Photograph: then, she is the quintessential modern pop entity. Far from just creating events, it feels as if Rihanna herself is the event. That social media post went viral because of the headphones as much as the confirmation that her album was finished.
Nor will she have been surprised by the avalanche of thinkpieces surrounding last year’s Bitch Better Have My Money video, and she knew exactly what she was doing with Monday’s selfie in which she wore a $9,000 pair of Dolce & Gabbana headphones, captioned “listening to Anti”. She knows, for instance, that if she goes on holiday and, while wearing a bikini, bottlefeeds a miniature monkey on a public beach, pictures are likely to surface. Like other artists who have appeared in the digital era – Gaga, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift – Rihanna makes everything an event. One of the joys of Rihanna-watching is that, no matter how premeditated certain aspects of her career might be, there is an impulsive, gleeful side that suggests she is actually quite enjoying herself. The music is only half the story, though, because during the past decade, the fame Rihanna enjoyed has shifted, and mushroomed, in both intensity and form. And there were collaborations, too, with Coldplay, Drake, Eminem, Nicki Minaj and Kanye West. But Rihanna’s hits continued to be enormous – 2011’s We Found Love was the second-biggest of her career. This release strategy is most commonly associated, in the modern age at least, with a pop artist terrified of transient fanbases.
But she kept her foot down – in 2011 alone, she had 11 UK hits – and drove her career into the current era where greatest hits albums don’t even exist. Living her career on fast-forward meant that, within four years, Rihanna had sailed past the point where most artists would have released a greatest hits.