Ene thing that goes with a big show by a big pop star is an outfit change. If the pop star is female, it usually means that the artist wears less afterwards than before. Beyoncé, Shakira, J-Lo, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry have already done this on the Super Bowl halftime show. But away with all the comparisons, all the superlatives, they won’t be needed in 2023. Then Rihanna appears. And she doesn’t undress on stage, she puts on!
While the game is said to have been exciting this year, it was clear from the start that the sport would be secondary to an event that managed to get Rihanna to perform live. It hadn’t existed for seven years, and that’s a small eternity for an artist who has already released ten albums by the age of 34. Especially for the fans. And so there were also some prominent admirers of Rihanna in the audience. For example, Cara Delevingne wearing a shirt that read, “A Rihanna concert interrupted by a football game. Weird, but whatever.”
No comeback?
So, with all the pre-hype, you would have guessed that Rihanna was under a lot of pressure to use the Super Bowl halftime show as a stage for her musical comeback. But far from it! Rihanna delivers perhaps the most relaxed performance in the history of Super Bowl performances and pairs it directly with the message: This is not necessarily a comeback. More of a stage for the next announcement: Because Rihanna wears a red jumpsuit by Loewe, the zipper is open at the front – and a small red ball bulges underneath, which she sometimes lovingly caresses. The singer is pregnant for the second time, as confirmed after the performance. In May she had become the mother of a son.
Rihanna is picking up on a style element that she emphasized during her first pregnancy: her baby bump. With her underwear label Fenty Savage, Rihanna has always made a point of presenting different images of women’s bodies. “When you become a mother,” Rihanna said in a pre-show interview, “then something happens to you. Something that makes you feel like, ‘I can do anything.'” Rihanna said, while the Super Bowl’s massive stage is daunting, “it’s also an exhilarating challenge.”
Rihanna is alone above everything
And the music? Rihanna, who spends a large part of the performance on a floating stage, has an armada of dancers with her, she performs all her big hits, sometimes dances along casually, then again she levitates above everything on her own, puts on a red coat, and with them eyes sparkling with diamonds she sings “Diamonds”. All alone, all by yourself. Unlike many of her predecessors, she has not brought any other star to her stage, she does not share the limelight, not even with Jay-Z, with whom she sang her hit “Umbrella” and that of excited ones in the stadium fans was spotted.
And Rihanna doesn’t seem to care that the choreography has to be perfect, the singing to the point: she’s Rihanna, and that’s enough. Before the show, Rihanna, who is from Barbados, said her laid-back demeanor has something to do with her Caribbean origins. And you really didn’t see many stars smiling so relaxed into the camera during this performance.
Rihanna has shaped and shaped pop culture for almost a decade. In a decade in which the pop mainstream was rather mediocre overall, in which every singer, no matter how talented, would rather have her songs spoiled by David Guetta with fairground beats than not being successful, in which everything sounded kind of tinny and so, when when it just needed a decent rig to plug into, Rihanna definitely stood out, especially her 2016 album ANTI (although she only played one song).
The Super Bowl stage is considered one of the largest ever, but she also had creative control over the performance. Rihanna, the billionaire entrepreneur with her own fashion, underwear and cosmetics label, likes to have everything under control, she says so herself. In the interview, she describes herself as “bossy”, as someone who likes to be the boss. “If it flops or if it flies – at the end of the day I have to put my name on it. It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m the annoying woman who wants to be in the picture about every little detail and talk about it.” And so in the end the control boss succeeds in what only very rarely does anyone succeed: She smiles , she’s rocking, she’s pregnant. And completely calm. Rihanna is just having fun. On stage. With millions of people watching from all over the world. More professional is not possible.