Rihanna, Anti (2016)

I've had bad luck trying to listen to this album. I actually tried to listen to it maybe a few weeks ago, and my computer overheated and crashed. I had to completely wipe the comp and reinstall Windows. I also bought a new laptop battery. My computer is five years old, it's running fine now, but I don't know how much longer it will work. I can't even install Windows 11, because my processor is out of date and couldn't support the new Windows. Funny: when I bought this thing, it was top of the line. Forced obsolescence, man.

This album is not bad, but it's not too good, either. Actually, it's more bad than than good. More finely put, it's forgettable. You can usually tell how a thing will go from the start, and right away there was nothing to hook me.

I think Rihanna's a good singer. I've been entertained by her music up until now. But there's nothing here for me.

Something goofy to me: the cover of the album has what looks like a young girl with a gold crown slipping down over her eyes. For the last 10 years or so, that whole crew, Jay-Z, Kanye, Rihanna, others, have been playing with this Illuminati imagery because it seems spooky. You know what I'm talking about, right? The Freemason / Illuminati silliness? Like the eye in the pyramid, which also, incidentally, is on our legal tender, because several of the Founding Fathers were Freemason dorks. But as I said, hiphop has adopted this stuff because it generates buzz, and it's the same kind of crap that has happened in music since forever. Remember when Led Zeppelin hung out with Anton LaVey, the head of the Church of Satan? This is all part of artists playing around with the idea that they're evil when all they're really doing is dorking out.