Her tracks are inescapable-“Umbrella,” “Don’t Stop the Music,” “Rude Boy,” “Work”-but also have genuine personality, not to mention a carnal sense of expressiveness that sets her apart: Rihanna’s changes don’t seem like the product of high-concept self-reinvention so much as gut feeling.

By 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad, she’d expanded the sunny Caribbean pop of her early work for sleek hybrids of hip-hop, R&B, club music, and rock. Her 2005 debut, Music of the Sun, went Gold when she was just 17. She was making things up as she went along, but when she went, she went full-steam ahead.īorn in Barbados in 1988, she left high school to pursue music. Describing the chameleonic nature of her clothing line, Fenty-the first female-created brand for LVMH, not to mention its first luxury label run by a black woman-Rihanna said the line didn’t have any fixed look, in part because her own was always changing. Though her biggest tracks tend toward some variety of dance pop (mixed with reggae, EDM, dancehall, R&B, and so on), a closer listen reveals an artist willing to try just about anything-and the uncanny grace to sound good doing it. Fast-forward to the present day and there remains something effortless about Rihanna, a sense of confidence that transcends any one narrative or style. Most of all, she had ideas and seemed comfortable expressing them.

She took a leading role in group activities. A report card for Robyn Rihanna Fenty, first issued by a school back in Barbados’ Saint Michael parish and later reprinted in a giant coffee-table book called RIHANNA, stated, in part, that the young Fenty was positive, sure of herself.

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