Rihanna rode into Las Vegas’ Country Music Awards with a simple goal: prove her country music chops. With her sometimes signature crimson coif, she took to the stage with Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles for a duet on the song “California King Bed.” The Barbadian beauty has in the past shared with her audience an ever expanding interest in music by collaborating with Eminem, Slash, Maroon 5, David Guetta, and U2’s Bono and The Edge.
With over 25 million albums sold and 45 million singles worldwide, Billboard named Rihanna, Digital Song Artist of the last decade. She has achieved nine number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 since first appearing on the chart in June of 2005 — the most by any artist during that time span. Currently on a publicity tour to promote her starring role in the Peter Berg-directed $200 million dollar flick, Battleship, Rihanna has been on the covers of Vogue and Rolling Stone recently. Years away from deuxième partie phase of her career, it is doubtful she will pursue episodic television anytime soon. However, we do hope Rihanna (ever the trailblazer) engages the burgeoning medium of mash-ups. If Seth Grahame-Smith’s literary mash-up of a Jane Austin classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, can sell 1 million copies, imagine the interest a Rihanna inspired literary mash-up collaboration would generate? We suggest a production of Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy to The Living is Easy With My Smith & Wesson, the story of an upper-class family of black covert operatives hell-bent on liberating Haiti once and for all. Now, that’s a crossover hit.
