“ You know, like in Jamaica, you’ll have a riddim and it’s like, everyone has to do a song on that… Imagine that in rap, or imagine that in R&B…” Moreover, The Fader also pointed out that the video for “Hotline Bling” visually paralleled music videos for Jamaican dancehall artists Sean Paul and Kardinal Offishall.
(Sidenote- Do you recall last year’s “Hotline Bling”? Do you recall Virginia rapper D.R.A.M.’s “Cha Cha” that came out in 2014? Well, Drake used a “sunnier” version of D.R.AM.’s production to build “Hotline Bling” and when The Fader asked about him about it a few months ago, Drake defended his choice by citing Jamaican musical culture: Photo source: And alongside all of that, I am talking about the way that Bajan Rihanna harnesses her Caribbean-ness through Jamaican dancehall sexuality on “Work.” I’m talking about how a Canadian rapper with no Caribbean roots continues to channel Jamaica with his contribution to “Work” where he even uses the Jamaicanism “forward” to coax Rihanna closer. It’s early 2016 and I’m talking, rather bluntly, about the bittersweet exotification of Caribbean women and sex. I’ve included a loose translation in italics and parentheses.I could be talking about slavery and the sugar plantation, à la Kara Walker’s 2014 installation “A Subtlety” (see video above), but this is not the 17th, 18th, or 19th century, nor is it 2014.
Rihanna hails from the island of Barbados, but has incorporated patois heavily into many of her hits, including Rude Boy and Man Down.įor those curious, here is a break down of the song’s lyrics from. Although Shaggy, Beenie Man and Sean Paul had respectable runs in the 90s and 2000s. Rihanna is perhaps the highest profile musician to bring patois to the American mainstream since Bob Marley. You can hear it on Kendrick Lamar’s Blacker the Berry (spoken by Jamaican Dancehall DJ Agent Sasco), on Kanye West and GOOD Music’s Mercy (in a sample from Super Beagle’s ‘Dust a Sound Boy’) and on Damian Marley’s Road to Zion which features rapper Nas. The language developed in the 17th century, when slaves from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned and nativized the vernacular and dialectal forms of English spoken by their masters: British English, Scots and Hiberno-English.”Īnd this is not the first time Jamaican patois has been featured on a hit American song. “Jamaican Patois… is an English-based creole language with West African influences (a majority of loan words of Akan origin) spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. Rihanna is not speaking gibberish, but Jamaican patois. I thought there must be some hidden meaning in there somewhere, so I looked it up online, and apparently it’s “a lust filled narrative of two lovers.” What I heard, however, was something completely different.” ““Work” has already gotten a lot of attention, not because it came out of the blue or the fact that it features Drake or even the fact that it was the most-heard song on the more than 1,200 radio stations on its first day, but because it is literal gibberish. “And “Work” just works, in all its gibberish filled madness.” And after only one listen, that nagging “wor wer waa wahhhhh wa” hook is thoroughly cemented in the mind.” But if Max Martin has taught us anything, it’s that great pop music doesn’t have to have great lyrics – often a melodic hook is enough. Trying to decipher exactly what the song is about, then, is a futile effort. Repeated listening is genuinely hilarious. What begins as slurring soon just devolves into gibberish, “work work work work work” becoming “wor wer waa wahhhhh wa”. “Either way, her singing voice isn’t doing much work on this new single, the latest to be taken from her highly anticipated new album ‘Anti’. The futuristic Caribbean song has gotten generally great reviews, but some have blasted the singer for speaking “gibberish.” Here is a sampling of reviews: Some Americans are not at all happy with Rihanna’s new single Work.
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