The Daily Spin, February 12
Rihanna | Good Girl Gone Bad
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Good Girl Gone Bad (2008)
Artist: Rihanna
Link:
Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Audibled out of today’s planned album (which just got slid back to a later date, fear not) to do my personal favorite album by the halftime show headliner - Rihanna.
That album is, of course, 2008’s Good Girl Gone Bad, a snapshot in time of late-aughts electropop, RnB, and teenpop, the sort of friendly-enough music that anchored many an awkward night on the dance floor in middle school. Good times. Don’t ever make me do it again.
Lost years aside, where Rihanna excels here is clearly in a specified wheelhouse of music - songs like ‘Don’t Stop The Music’ and ‘Shut Up And Drive’ do a lot of heavy lifting in production that allow Rihanna to sail overtop, contributing just enough for her hooks to punch without forcing them into heavy lifting, where some of the pitfalls of her work here show through.
It’s easy to see in the fifteen years since its release why the songs that have excelled have done so - ‘Disturbia’ holds all its synths back just enough for Rihanna to balance her vocals on the edge of slipping into the background. ‘Take A Bow’ is a classic in its own right, and the billion-play ‘Umbrella’ is one of Hov’s great features, classically his in production. Timbaland is a wizard at the wheel and it’s very clear that his magic has been worked here, and if Rihanna is along for the ride sometimes, at least she’s smooth at the helm.
Rating: 7.9/10
Best Tracks: Shut Up And Drive; Don’t Stop The Music
Worst Tracks: Question Existing