Rihanna/ Only Girl (In The World)

Less than a year after "Russian Roulette" launched the Rated R album, Rihanna comes right back with the lead single from a forthcoming album allegedly titled Loud, and it looks like any of the profundity we enjoyed from the last album was thrown down and now lays shattered across the dirty, sticky floor of an after hours gay club.

On Rated R, Rihanna got real. She forwent all the silly vapid pop that had elevated her to a level of universal appeal, and opened herself up wide about how the events of her years with Chris Brown had affected her. And she dared to not only express the expected sentiments of anger and hurt, but also the love and tenderness she still felt through the more spiky emotions. Rihanna showed the world in a very unashamed way that abuse in a relationship is such a complicated thing, and admitted to the things you're not supposed to, like still loving the one who hits you, wanting to forgive and forget when you know you shouldn't, and that despite more common approaches, it is possible to walk away from a situation like that and still remember the better moments instead of just thinking that it all has to go up in smoke in order to move on. Admittedly it wasn't her most commercially successful album, it didn't really score a huge hit until "Rude Boy" dropped as the album's 4th and final domestic single, but it did go almost triple platinum over the course of the album's life, so clearly someone was listening. But rumor was that within weeks of "Russian Roulette" failing to make much of a Top 40 impact, work on a follow-up album began for fear that Rated R was going to tank and they wanted the momentum of all her media attention post-beating to continue to catapult her higher in the public consciousness. Say what you will about how Chris treated her, it was all the sympathy over that incident that really elevated Rihanna's fame. Before all that she was just another pop singer that a lot of people enjoyed, after that she became someone we all respected and wanted to get in deeper with.

So now we've got "Only Girl (In The World)," the next in the lineage of urban-pop-gone-gay-dance music, and what will doubtlessly be as huge a hit as "Disturbia" was as it follows a similar format. Produced by Stargate, responsible for Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music" and Ne-Yo's recent [and similar sounding] "Beautiful Monster," as well as a long list of other urban-to-dance radio hits, "Only Girl" sounds like every club track from the late 90s and early 00s, and woke me up on the morning of its debut on Los Angeles' KIIS FM with the thought of "what the hell is my Thursday night youth doing coming out of my clock radio?" It's completely addictive, and essentially just fun Top 40, and a clear statement of "we're never doing substance again." Or at least not personalized substance. Maybe that's where the shock came from with Rated R — while she'd done controversial subject matter before, she'd never done her own controversy. When she released "Unfaithful," it was a bit shocking with its theme of infidelity from the perspective of the "cheater" not the "cheated on," as is the more common female vantage point. And for the life of the single she was playing the part of the bad girl, but no one actually thought "this is who Rihanna is," it was just a song and an idea. But had she actually cheated on someone in her own life and then released that single, it would've rocked the boat hard and made people really examine the words and justifications as it relates to how she handled the situation herself. And when she came back following the beating and media frenzy, comparing her being with Chris Brown to having a loaded gun to her head and spinning the cylinder, it jarred everyone because for the first time her music had relevance, not just hook appeal. The world knows how to appreciate music as music, but it's surprising how many pop fans have absolutely no idea how to digest music as statement and commentary.

No word yet on what else to expect from the Loud album, but if this single and current trends are any indication, it's pretty much a given that it's going to be loaded with club-sounding euro dance pop, and its success is already guaranteed.