Music of the Sun//Good Girl Gone Bad
in honor of Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show
in 2005, a young singer from Barbados emerged to further cement a Caribbean influence into modern pop music.
she would give us hit after hit for a decade straight before taking a break to focus on her ambitions in fashion, beauty, and philanthropy. by 2016, she had been making successful strides with these other pursuits for years now; music was essentially a hobby at that point. that girl is none other than Robyn Rihanna Fenty, known professionally by her mononym, Rihanna.1
with a career spanning nearly 20 years, Rihanna has proven to be a talented showstopper, a fashion trendsetter, an internet meme savage, and more!
in honor of her taking over the Super Bowl Halftime Show this Sunday (2/12), let’s take a look at the Rihanna memorabilia in my collection. i have her 1st album Music of the Sun (2005) and her 3rd album Good Girl Gone Bad (2007), both on CD.2 i could have sworn i had a disc for A Girl Like Me (2006) too, but i couldn’t find it ahead of making this post. it wouldn’t have the case anyway, so let’s just pretend it’s here.
i had the privilege of seeing Rihanna perform live during the Glow in the Dark tour (Ye antics aside, it’s still GOATED that this was my first concert). so i know firsthand that RiRi can put on a great show!
this also isn’t the first time i’ve written about Rihanna — i wrote the following articles way back when as a Billboard intern:
Good Girl Gone Mogul: A Guide to Rihanna’s Growing Business Empire
Rihanna Announces Lingerie Line With a Set of Seductive Instagram Posts
Rihanna Continues Her Beauty Reign With Latest Fenty Beauty Release
to be honest, i don’t think the persistence of asking Rihanna to release new music is fair — she’s already given us quite a lot to enjoy. not many artists can say they put out eight top-charting albums over the course of 11 years!
like, what teenage girl in the mid-2000s didn’t listen to “Unfaithful” in their bedroom and recreate that video moment? you know when she does that dramatic fall over the piano when the beat drops?
do you remember where you were when you first heard “Breakin’ Dishes”, “Man Down”, “Cockiness (Love It)”, or “Same Ol’ Mistakes”?? the list goes on, but these are just a few of my faves from her entire discography.
considering how far she’s come as an artist, Music of the Sun and Good Girl Gone Bad are time capsules that speak well for themselves. so instead of me waxing poetic track by track, we’ll just enjoy the trip down memory lane together through pictures! on some of the photos, you can even see the holes from where i had the images tacked to my bedroom walls.
where will you be for Rihanna’s Super Bowl? i’m not really a sports fan, so i’ll be patiently waiting for the big moment when she takes the stage.
her name is literally in the dictionary as an example of a mononym.
technically, i have the deluxe version Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, which came out in 2008.