1/1/2023 0 Comments Rihanna freaking weekendShe's too busy playing host to a crowd of whiskey- and sunglass-brand product placements and drinking-song allusions. Not that Rihanna's worrying about any of that stuff, on the face of it. And, in the title of a Temptations single from the same year, it was "Don't Let the Joneses Get You Down." "The Joneses," in those days, were all-purpose oppressors, partly thanks to the old phrase "keeping up with the Joneses"- that's who people kept up with before the Kardashians - and partly because of Bob Dylan's lacerating portrait of a "Mr. Sly and the Family Stone's " You Can Make It If You Try" encodes it as "don't let the plastic bring you down" at that point, "plastic" was a countercultural insult on the order of "bastard," thanks to its memorable appearance in the 1967 movie The Graduate. "Don't let the bastards get you down" is a variation on a phrase that goes back at least as far as World War II - "don't let the bastards grind you down"- which was popularized through a pseudo-Latin translation, "illegitimis non carborundum." There couldn't be any "bastards" in pop music at that time, of course, so it entered pop music rather late: it showed up in disguise in two different 1969 hits. The chorus of "Cheers" has the oldest toast in the song. Kelly's " Ignition (Remix)." "Got a drink on my mind and my mind on my money" tweaks Snoop Dogg's " Gin & Juice" refrain, "got my mind on my money and my money on my mind." (That's a hip-hop commonplace now-see, for instance, Nicki Minaj's "Mind on My Money," as well as Flo Rida and Youngbloodz songs of the same name, or Lil Wayne's "Money on My Mind.") And "money," naturally, rhymes with "honey," as it has since long before Fats Domino's "Blue Monday." Before she's stopped to breathe, Rihanna's given us the "freakin' weekend" bit from another let's-kick-back-and-drink bounce, R. Once the lyric kicks in, the allusions to other party-time songs start flying even faster. (Lavigne actually turns up briefly in the video, along with various other pop celebrities.) It's also how the seemingly very straightforward three-chord pop song "Cheers" ended up with ten co-writers, none of whom are Rihanna herself: "I'm With You" was credited to Lavigne and the three members of the production team The Matrix. The very first voice we hear is pronouncing a familiar incantation, a variation on the "yeah yeah yeah yeah" hook from Avril Lavigne's nine-year-old single " I'm With You." That's this song's gesture toward Riri's musical signature, the single-sound repetition that's turned up in the lion's share of her hits, from " Umbrella" (".ella ella") to " S&M" ("M.M.M."). Even before Rihanna starts singing, "Cheers (Drink to That)" is a patchwork of borrowed ideas, sounds and phrases, a drinking song that doesn't even pretend to be anything that hasn't been said before.
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