The Singles Jukebox

All about that green…

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[6.67]

Alfred Soto: If you grew up in South Florida, you remember AMG’s very minor hit in 1991. I’m happy Rihanna reappropriated the phrase, and by imitating Young Thug she’s trying to piss someone off, maybe the haters, hopefully Paul McCartney. It doesn’t work but as someone who’s said since 2006 that she’s the era’s most vacant pop star I watched Girlhood transform “Diamonds” into an anthem as essential as “Vogue.” We’ll see.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Maybe I like the idea of this more than its actual existence, but after the conciliatory pap that was “FourFiveSeconds,” hearing two-three minutes of Rihanna spitting, squeaking and off-key shouting over clanking-machinery, near-drill percussion and machine-gun blaaats is downright refreshing. Extra points for the last minute or so: among the most gorgeous bits of music I’ve heard all year, in the most unlikely place.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Oh, how she spits with anger in this, and how the production runs somewhere close to Chicago’s drill — even the Auto-Tune is closer to King Louis than it is to T-Pain — suggests an ambition for both newish sounds and new capital.
[9]

Thomas Inskeep: She’s no Minaj, but Ri can spit angry over a bumping trap beat, and I’m so good with that. This is no dance-pop, no gentle balladry (zzzzzz), this is attitude: her “New Slaves,” if you will (and co-produced by ‘Ye, to boot). I’m no fan of Rihanna’s in general but I kind of love this, nasty and swaggadocious, and the “Your wife in the backseat of my brand-new foreign car” line is delicious. This is nothing like I expected from her, especially coming off the dull-as-paint “FourFiveSeconds,” and it’s all the better for it.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: “Yeah, yo,” shrugs Rihanna, at her most careless. “Yeah, yah.” She’s barely even paying attention. “You should know me well enough.” And we should, only Rihanna’s based her career on being unknowable. She never emotes; rather, she makes herself such a perfect blank that her songs are made to feel for her. In “Umbrella,” she was so steely that, buffeted by that storm, she became loyal. For “Only Girl (In the World),” she was a void so empty that she could insist on becoming your everything. And on “Bitch Better Have My Money,” she erases herself into a blizzard of bloodless thirst and machine gun sound-effects. Your wife is in the passenger seat of her “brand new foreign car,” but did she choose to be there? “You just bought a shot,” but, wait, are we still talking about Louis XIII? Rihanna’s spent a long time suggesting she’s grimier and less patient than your average pop star is permitted to be. When she feels stifled, she doesn’t fight it. She shrugs.
[10]

Will Adams: The bad-ass dress-up of Rated R had its charms. In the past six years, Rihanna’s become more convincing as the Hard Rockstar 101 toting Guns 4 Life, but “Bitch Better Have My Money” is a cartoonish shout-fest; it’s no accident I heard the gun onomatopoeia “bla bla bla” as “blah blah blah.” An extra point for the outro, which shows instead of tells.
[5]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Rihanna is at her best when she’s shouting refrains. The “shots shots shots, like brrap brrap brrap” bit is especially evocative. Her very presence heightens what could have been just another trap song; like Beyoncé rapping on “7/11,” it’s refreshing and cheeky, as well as slightly silly.
[7]

Brad Shoup: It’s neat that Rihanna’s club of the mind plays this particular Rihanna song all the time. For sure, Deputy put care into this: the bass burrows under the surface, while everything else — Rihanna’s rejoinders, the piano, the synthbrass — drifts to the ceiling like steam. But the singer hasn’t gotten much further than the hook and a rasp. She kicks the shit out of her surroundings, just not into a compelling shape.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Rich Homie Quan through the filter of Bibi Bourelly’s offering of the ratchet-kin flaunting that we’d already been hit in the head with on Unapologetic, “Bitch” is an acrid stomper that would’ve screamed Travis $cott long before I got a chance to glance at the writing credit. It’s also a return to the mean-faces of Rated R, much to my chagrin. It’s also a more tolerable lift of the former dynamic duo of Quan and Thug than anything coming from Travis or Rihanna’s on/off paramour Drakk, so let it plunge into the depths as it will.
[6]