Even by the standards of the R&B video – never the most opaque or subtle of the visual arts – the promo for Rihanna's single Russian Roulette is striking. It features the singer being gassed, shot, run over, drowned, and tearfully pleading with her captors in a torture chamber: "I'm terrified." This is interspersed with scenes of her curled up in a padded cell: at one juncture in the latter, she appears to be – and, given the provocative nature of the video, let us not be unduly coy here – masturbating.
You could say that making a video that explicitly links sexual desire with abusive violence is a deeply weird thing for the victim of the most high-profile case of domestic abuse in recent memory to do. Nine months ago Rihanna was forced to miss the Grammy awards because her then-boyfriend, singer Chris Brown, attacked her in a rented car, leaving her with a split lip, a black eye and bite marks on her arm. Then again, since the attack, both Rihanna and Brown have persisted in doing some deeply weird things, as if they're engaged in a kind of bizarre competition to see who can come up with the weirdest response. First, she got a gun tattooed on her side, which seemed odd, but trifling compared to what happened next. Brown released a video to YouTube in which he expressed contrition for the incident, while wearing a pendant that read "Oops", presumably intended as shorthand for the entirely fitting and contrite response that is: "Oops! I attacked my girlfriend, leaving her with a split lip, a black eye and bite marks on her arm! Blimey, what am I like, eh?"
Now, raising the bar substantially higher, there's the Russian Roulette video and Rated R, an album that arrives packed with songs in which relationships are linked with violence and criminality: guns are licked, lives flash before eyes, crime scenes are picked over, heads smack against car windscreens. It's worth noting that a lot of the time, the songs cast Rihanna as a ballsy revenger on an abusive male. But they don't always, and it's hard to get through Fire Bomb – "we were criminal," she sings, "as we were burning, the world called the police department," which is certainly one way of putting it – without feeling your jaw head involuntarily southwards, not least at the thought of what Chris Brown might do to top this.
It's difficult to look past the lyrics and focus on the music. Indeed, it's not always clear that Rated R even wants you to do that: a song as musically slight as the ballad Stupid In Love seems to exist primarily to excite the listener's prurience. But when you do, Rated R is revealed as the kind of disparate album people tend to make in the wake of a single like Umbrella, a career-defining global smash hit that can leave artist and producers alike unsure of where to go next. In the absence of a song as undeniable, they try a number of approaches, with varying success. At one extreme, the resemblance of Umbrella's chorus to that of a stadium rock ballad seems to have encouraged Rihanna to cut out the middle-man and just start making stadium rock: cue the awful widdly-woo guitars of Rockstar 101 and Fire Bomb. At the other, however, the desire to escape the single's vast shadow has clearly led some of her collaborators to indulge in feats of impressively risky invention: the hypnotic, dirgey electronic grind of Wait Your Turn, Gangsta 4 Life's druggy, intoxicating mix of backwards drums, minor-key verses and spectral backing vocals.
The album's two highlights may be Hard and Rude Boy, both of which exploit Rihanna's most appealing vocal style, a sulky, icy, monotone – uniquely among the pantheon of showboating R&B divas, Rihanna often sounds as if she's about to roll her eyes and tut. It undercuts the standard braggathon of Hard – "fan mail from 27 million," she offers, in a tone that suggests she's disappointed most of them didn't even bother to include a stamped addressed envelope – and turns Rude Boy's pillow talk on its head: "Come on rude boy, can you get it up?" seems less like a come-on than the impatience of a woman who – tsk! – is going to miss America's Next Top Model if rude boy doesn't hurry up. Rather cheeringly, neither song appears to reference the events of February at all. You can see why Rihanna has chosen to litter her album with apparent allusions to the assault: as people are going to read references into the album regardless, you may as well throw them a bone. But there's more to her than the public's prurient interest in her private life. That you can't tell that more often from Rated R is the album's big flaw.