Last night, Rihanna sang “Bitch Better Have My Money” suspended on a platform above a crowd of tens of thousands, as over 100 million people watched on from home. It was the moment we’d all been waiting for: over seven years since she last released an album, Rihanna — who has, in the interim, been an LVMH-approved designer, lingerie maker, makeup mogul and actor — felt like a musician again, making her return to the stage at the Apple Music Super Bowl halftime show. Over the course of a precise 13-minute set, she reminded us why she’s spent over half a decade not caring about what people thought of her as a popstar: her back catalogue proves it was a one-sided argument all along. And what’s more, she proved it to you while she was pregnant with her second child.
The show, which steered clear of the usual grimace-worthy gloss that Super Bowl halftime shows offer up, was elegant — defined not by bombast but by her own impressive discography, a team of tightly-trained dancers and simple staging with awe-inspiring potential. (Willo Perron, the creative director whose previous collaborators include Drake, Stüssy and PornHub was behind it). Still, as she raced through over 15 years of tracks – everything from the EDM-heavy Loud era to the left-field genius of ANTI – dressed in Loewe and Alaïa, fans on Twitter still responded mutedly to the performance. Some called it “boring”; others called it “mid”.
It was as if some folks had forgotten the music that Rihanna makes; the specific type of energy that she brings to the stage, and how incongruous that might feel in a setting that’s birthed Lady Gaga dropping from the sky and Katy Perry’s left shark.
Artists invited to perform at the Super Bowl agree to do so with the knowledge that it’s a space for entertainment. To deviate from your traditional style here for the sake of super-sized, glitzy spectacles, is to shoot yourself in the foot. If Gaga is giving jazz hands on Broadway, Rihanna’s music is made for hands-on-asses in the corner of the club, and somehow she managed to replicate that deeply seductive mood on a stage that doesn’t traditionally lend itself to it.
Plus, to do it while pregnant is an act of subversion in itself: she didn’t stand behind the mic and give you ballad after ballad (she didn’t even do the Oscar-nominated Black Panther track, “Lift Me Up”), she was whining to “Rude Boy” and delivered slivers of “S&M”. With her skin covered entirely in custom Loewe, buried in an Alaïa coat designed as an homage to her late friend, André Leon Talley, she looked and felt sexy. That was the energy.
Furthermore, there was a certain subsect of the internet who felt shortchanged that Rihanna was pregnant at all. Their criticisms were delivered with the kind of flagrant misogyny that suggested we had been robbed of entertainment, and that Rihanna should have had this one night in mind when she conceived her child. The responses from some weren’t of jubilance, but that we’re now definitely not getting a new album anytime soon. One tweet even compared Rihanna’s performance to Beyoncé’s when she was pregnant, insinuating that one didn’t match up to the other.
It says a lot about the way stan culture sees women artists — particularly Black women: as marionettes stans hold the strings to, demanding their artists dance, sing, release music, and turn looks on their command. It’s a contract with such impossible conditions that artists now involuntarily have to buy into it as soon as the rabid fan bases latch on to them. While, in the maddening days of pre-internet obsession, the weight of such criticisms were restricted to newspaper columns, social media now makes avoiding these responses near impossible. Every push notification and mention is a window for a stan to crawl to and confront the artist they profess to love, and ask them, ‘Why didn’t you do better for me?’.
Funnily enough, Rihanna is famously one of the most unbothered women in the industry. If there’s someone you want to get through to, to provide unsolicited career consultation to, then she is the one least likely to respond. 18 years into her career, Rihanna doesn’t owe you anything. Not the energy you ask for. Not the performance you’ve been craving. She gave what she wanted to give, and if you’re struggling to see the excellence, perhaps it’s worth looking at how you see women like Rihanna rather than how they see themselves.