Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad could serve as a template for pop R & B success. Comely, limber, light-skinned artist who’ll look good on the album cover? Check. Cameo by famous rapper on the single? Check. Two or three tracks produced by Timbaland? Yep. Songs about sex, shaking your booty, loving your good man, and dissing your no-good man? Got ’em. Now just spend an obscene amount on promotion and get ready to rake in an even more obscene amount of cash. Since it came out in June, Rihanna’s album has sold close to 1.4 million copies worldwide.
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If you just asked “Brooke who?” . . . well, yeah, that’s the thing. The Houston native’s full-length debut, Chain Letter, came out in 2005 and peaked at number 16 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart that April, but since then she’s released only a handful of underperforming singles. She appeared on the album’s cover wearing a cropped tank top emblazoned with a big-winged bat and holding a pen topped with a fake eyeball–a mild display of quirky humor that, by the fashion-shoot standards of pop R & B, qualifies as willfully eccentric. One of the booklet photos–Valentine standing in front of a gigantic wall of LPs–is just as odd. Everybody knows divas spend their money on shoes and bling–we’re supposed to believe she collects vinyl?
Yes indeed. Chain Letter is one of those omnivorous, wide-ranging albums, like the Beatles’ Rubber Soul or OutKast’s Stankonia, that turns a genre inside out–R & B becomes the world, and the world is swallowed by R & B. Valentine’s producer and cowriter, Deja the Great, is a hyperfertile genius; every song has unexpected twists, layered bridges, and gimmicks on its gimmicks; you can listen to the album a dozen times before you fully appreciate the tinkling music-box fade-out on “Tell Me Why? (You Don’t Love Me).” On “Cover Girl” Deja and Valentine channel folk rock through Stax; on “American Girl” they bash Prince-inflected funk into riot-grrrl punk, with lyrics that suggest the two genres are bound together by an affinity for pop-culture detritus (“This Disney World’s your underworld / Try to escape it / Just face it, you American Girl”).
It’s not as though Valentine doesn’t have a fan base: Chain Letter sold 340,000 copies, small potatoes by major-label standards but still an awful lot of records. I’ve seen lots of people online bemoaning the delay of Physical Education, and I’ve read plenty of reviews from hipster critics who think Chain Letter is amazing.
