In terms of popularity and fame, as of now Rihanna has stolen Lady Gaga’s Facebook fan-collector crown outsmarting the blond rival by a staggering one hundred-thousand fans (to be completely honest, on Twitter Gaga is still the winner with 11 millions fan, but we are sure Rihanna can catch up).
You might wonder - wasn’t that supposed to be Lady Gaga’s title? Not, quite Who is the lucky one? There is no point in beating about the bush: it’s her, Rihanna, once a rising star of the r’n’b scene, she is currently the undisputed best contender to the role of queen of pop. At, we have decided to leave this sterile pastime to the guys at Forbes and went straight to the core of the matter by voting her woman of the year. Everything and everybody is quantified, categorized and eventually measured up against a scale of values. Some of that wealth has been diverted to her Clara Lionel foundation, named after her grandparents, which has frequently benefited Barbados with emergency hurricane relief, healthcare and education programmes.Beside arousing curiosity among the readers (mostly interested in finding out who ranks last rather than first), charts also have the unarguably aseptic quality of numbers and figures. Her companies, authentically represented by Rihanna who remains proudly sexual and body positive, have made her hugely wealthy: Forbes estimated her fortune at $1.7bn earlier this year, making her the world’s richest female musician.
Makeup brand Fenty Beauty and lingerie line Savage x Fenty spotted shamefully under-served gaps in the market, namely women of colour and those who didn’t cleave to the slim figures lauded by underwear rivals such as Victoria’s Secret. No new solo music has emerged since (it was once rumoured that she was making a reggae album), but her cultural standing has continued to grow via her remarkable Fenty group of companies. Umbrella installed Rihanna as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, and in 2008 her country’s prime minister David Thompson announced an annual Rihanna Day.Ģ016’s Anti is regarded by many as her masterpiece, and its lead single Work saw her return to the patois of her home region: “He said me haffi work”, a sophisticated double entendre that is both sexual come-on and a call for emotional labour. She continued to branch out with her true breakthrough, Good Girl Gone Bad (2007), which used heavy, highly synthetic guitars while her enormous hit Umbrella rode a hip-hop breakbeat – yet you can still detect Barbados in Don’t Stop the Music’s syncopation. Unfaithful expanded into classic pop balladry, and with an insistent sample of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, SOS had no Bajan swing to it all, giving her a club stomper that even the most inebriated could clomp about to – it diversified her audience and became her first US No 1. The swift follow-up A Girl Like Me (2006) had predominantly the same dancehall, skanking reggae and Destiny’s Child-ish R&B, but with a voice that could be commanding or earnestly vulnerable, Rihanna was capable of more than pretty, summery material. Her Bajan roots shone on debut album Music of the Sun – released when she was just 17 years old – with lilting roots reggae backings, digital dancehall beats, and a cover of Jamaican singer Dawn Penn’s classic No, No, No.