The Mirror Of Your Eyes

Rihanna “Dancing in the Dark”

It’s a little too easy to imagine Rihanna as being an EQ setting or an artificial intelligence rather than an actual human singer – even her warmest vocal performances feel vaguely inhuman to me. But I don’t mean this as an insult! Pretty all of her best songs work because of this, or at least the implication that a real, vulnerable person is putting on a sort of vocal armor to keep us at a distance. I think that’s part of why so many people connect with her – most people wish they could so effectively guard themselves against their most painful and conflicted emotions.

There’s not much pain in “Dancing in the Dark,” but it’s definitely a song where Rihanna’s vocal affect pushes a song from good to great. I hear a lot of dancehall in her performance here, but it’s not totally that. It’s kinda like someone was adjusting the settings on the Rihanna bot to dancehall, but something is a little off. Like, every long “I” sound has turned into an “oi,” and she’s hitting each syllable on the verses a bit too hard. But like a lot of songs, the seeming off-ness of it makes it so much more interesting to hear. It’s hard to imagine anyone else actively choosing to do it this way, but it really works.

Buy it from Amazon.