December 8, 2014 Music Monday: Unapologetic
Yes, I edited the album cover down. It’s still the raciest picture you’re ever going to see on this site, unless you’re really attracted to Q*bert, I guess.
I bought a Rihanna album last week, my second one. Her music (as a general rule) falls outside my usual tastes, but her voice is beautiful and she has a couple of songs that I just can’t resist. Since Ms. Rihanna is given to much foul language, I tend to buy her albums at Walmart, where I can get edited versions. You can gripe about how it’s not the artist’s “true vision” and whatever else, that won’t bother me much. I prefer to listen to music how I like to, so if there weren’t this version available, I wouldn’t have bought it. I will say that the first song was hard for me to understand, and at first I thought it was just my standard “can’t hear lyrics” problem, but then I realized that so many things were edited from it that the remaining words just sounded weird.
As I’ve done for many aother albums in the past, I purchased Unapologetic specifically for one (maybe two) songs. The idea is that if I like one or two songs that I know from the album, there’s a chance I’ll like something else on it that I would never hear otherwise. For this album the song was “Stay,” which I think is absolutely beautiful. Her voice plus the tune makes this one of my favorite songs of the last five years. I’ve probably listened to it 30 times in the last couple of days.
I also enjoy the song “Diamonds,” but it wasn’t a huge factor in my buying the album. Turns out I like it more than I thought, though, so we’ll go ahead and count two of the fourteen songs as reasons. The rest of it breaks down into “I don’t like this one at all” and “this one’s okay, I guess” for me. She has another song with Eminem (“Numb”), which I think is the third collaboration for them? It includes him using the line “I’m the butt police/I’m looking at your rear rear rear,” so I don’t really know what’s going on.
I know it would make more sense to just buy the one or two songs I like digitally and not worry about albums as a whole, but the gamble has paid off for me before, most recently with Ingrid Michealson’s “Lights Out.” I just never know how it’ll go, and I don’t mind taking what amounts to a pretty small risk every once in a while. I still have an Owl City CD I’d be happy to give to someone, though. There wasn’t even one on there for me. Any takers?
Tags: Rihanna
Written by: Mark
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daniel
said
The only way the music industry will survive, the only way record companies and musicians know we like their music is if we actually buy it. I am much the same way in buying an album on the chance I’ll like the rest of it. Usually I’ll buy the singles for the B-sides or extended remix.