I’ve never had strong feelings about Rihanna. I was always like “yeah, she’s pretty, and a couple of her songs are ok, but can we move on?” But then she went and said some pretty respectable words to Vogue, and I think I’m going to give her an official thumbs up.
On her father and his reaction to the Chris Brown incident: “It really makes me question what I have become to my father. Like, what do I even mean to him? It’s really strange. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it, because you grow up with your father, you know him, you are part of him for goodness’ sakes! And then he does something so bizarre that I can’t begin to wrap my mind around it. You hear these horror stories about people going behind people’s backs and doing strange things, but you always think, Not my family. My father would never do that to me. My dad went to the press and just told them a bunch of lies. Because he hadn’t talked to me after… that whole thing … He never called to find out how I was doing, if I was alive, nothing. He just never called. He went straight to the press and got a check. And now he does it again. Now I’m like, Whatever. I tried.”
On her own reaction: “It actually gave me a lot of liberation,” she says. “What I mean is, I was able to tap into the personal part of my music. I started to tell stories through my music that were actually my stories. My album before that, there was still a little bit of protection, there was still an innocence to me. And what that time in my life did was kind of wake people up: It’s not all a bed of roses. My life is like yours. It made me look at the world in a much bigger way because my life was suddenly superduper magnified; all eyes were on me. I needed that in my life to know how to say, ‘Fuck off.’ To know how to keep my head high even in the worst of situations. I keep using the word unapologetic. But there’s a freedom that has come with all of that. Where you feel like you don’t have to make an excuse for being yourself.”
On her break-up with Matt Kemp: “I just kind of shut down from that,” she says. “I just let it go. I don’t ever want to have to depend on a relationship. I think it’s a really special thing to find love. It’s beautiful. Nothing can match it. But I want to make sure that I can find other things in life that I love besides … love.”
Rihanna has obviously gone through some horrible things in her life, much of it in the public eye, and for her to speak of it this gracefully and assertively? I think that speaks really highly of her character. So good on you, Rihanna, but I still can’t change the radio station fast enough when “Rude Boy” comes on.
Images courtesy of Bossip
