Their sonic disparity wouldn’t have mattered because everyone experiments (read: rushes) when it comes to the new songs tagged on to Greatest Hits albums.
RIHANNA GREATEST HITS PLAYLIST PLUS
In this perfect world I’ve created in my head, Rihanna’s two-disc Greatest Hits (four if you get the deluxe) would cover every era-defining banger, every mid-paced sex-jam and every tear-stained ballad, plus have room for FourFiveSeconds, American Oxygen and the sonic assault that is Bitch Better Have My Money. When Madonna – arguably the definitive singles artist of the 1980s – released The Immaculate Collection in 1990 it was to draw a line under her 80s imperial phase and, via the new songs (Justify My Love and Rescue Me), hint at where she was going next on 1992’s Erotica album. What a greatest hits album would have allowed her to do is honour and celebrate that back catalogue – she’s released 34 singles, two-thirds of them being in the upper echelons of incredible – but also carefully plant the seeds for where she wants to go next. While those words cut like a knife to anyone who’s lost themselves to We Found Love, drunkenly screamed “oh na na, what’s my name?” or waggled an umbrella to Umbrella, no one can deny that Rihanna hasn’t earned the right to shake things up. “I find that when I get on stage now I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. “I wanted an album that I could perform in 15 years, not any songs that were burnt out,” she continued. That was followed by American Oxygen, a politically charged statement that peaked at No 78 in America.
This need to create music with real soul first emerged in January with the release of FourFiveSeconds featuring Kanye West, Paul McCartney, one of Wilson Phillips and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors fame. “Not that they weren’t real music, but I just wanted to focus on things that felt real, that felt soulful, that felt for ever.” “I’ve made a lot of songs that are just really big songs … they just blow up,” she moaned while promoting the animated film Home. Rihanna herself outlined this need to distance herself from her previous discography back in March. But this could have all been saved if she’d done the one thing no one seems to think about any more and released a palette-cleansing, Abba-Gold-level-amazing Greatest Hits album, drawn a line under her past and started anew. Unfortunately, the effortlessness of old has vanished, replaced instead by the messy, endlessly drawn out and Samsung-sponsored Anti album campaign one that’s so far been defined by its desire to shake off the commercial shackles of being a massive pop star and its lack of actual new music. There’d be a tour, loads of magazine covers and some incredible Instagram shots perhaps involving baby monkeys. As November approached you could rest easy knowing there’d be a 9/10 lead single, a vaguely controversial video, a semi-amazing album and a lovely ballad.
In a pop world complicated by staggered release strategies, buzz singles and endless teasing, Rihanna was always a beacon of reliability.
Before that she’d knocked out six albums in seven years, or seven in seven if you count a repacked version of Good Girl Gone Bad featuring three new massive hit singles (in other words, a standard Rihanna album). It’s been more than 1,100 days since Rihanna last released an album, 2012’s Unapologetic.