This track from its first penetration of my ears curled up like a panther in my very core and has been tapping out streams of morse code with a claw on my nervous system ever since. This has tattooed itself on me internally, like the nagging guilt of a lapsed vow, it finds its way to my head with an OCD regularity and there is some moment, most days, when a partial fragment of this tune comes swaying into the tempo of my thinking, it's become the sound of my thoughts taking a breath. In the first pulses of a grey morning I might come around to consciousness with an inner Rihanna tossing out the "Yea-yo, yea-yo" or whatever call to attention she's issuing at the beginning of the song, a casual loop playing over and over. Other times, I get the song's bridge, with all its gun-you-down swagger, and it's there, just waiting, cued up ready. And a lot of the time it's just the chorus rolling on and on in my head, over and over, like bra, bra bra. It's some kind of mental tic I think, it's seeped too far into me, I can't extract it from myself. It has become the musical equivalent of the kind of compulsive persistence in enforcing reparations that Rihanna sings about here. It's a lurking presence, a constant reminder that this song exists, and that I've chosen to fuck with it, and it's left its stain. The song is joyously vicious, it is a cold hard stare, it's a ringmaster of bad days, roping up temper and resentment into a victoriously vindictive chorus of vengeance that can bring everything down like dominoes with one movement. The music has this weird twilight zone, acid trip at the amusement arcade, wonky keyboard in the background, like when you've been drugged and dragged down an abandoned pier in the middle of the night to face your creditors. On top of the tilted keyboard, there's a clicking wrench of drumbeats, like the sleepless grinding teeth of anxiety from mulling over the weight of inescapable debt that's owed, the Rihanna-sized anchor around the neck, and the only dreams that come are you standing naked in a room full of cracking knuckles.
Rihanna sings this all out like it's standard practice, like of course it was going to turn out this way, you let her down, and this was the only possible response. The tone running through the whole thing seems to be oblivious as to why anyone would be surprised by this retaliatory behaviour. And it's actually easy to take from Rihanna for that reason. It's like being face down on the floor, because that's where you live now that you can't pay your dues, and the skies have all darkened, and the muscles in your neck are starting to atrophy, so you can't lift your head and you have to start marking the shifting time of day through the length of the shadows as they fall on the ground beside you, and you live in the endless hope that at some stage the forces of Rihanna's retribution, having held you to a life of servitude for your insincere approach to debt repayment, might find enough grace on a warm spring afternoon to drop you the half-chewed remains of a lunch burrito, so you can fill your mouth with the taste of what once passed for a sense of dignity. And in the background there's still that "Yea-yo, yea-yo" on a loop and you wish it would stop, and then you don't because it's so brutally catchy that all you can do is tap your foot in concert with each whimpering breath, and still the beat goes on.
IM.
This is a good song, and maybe you already own it, but if you don't, maybe you should own it, from here. Get Rihanna's album if you want, even though this track's not on it for some reason.
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