It Took Seconds

Four minutes and seventeen seconds: “Fire Bomb” is my favourite thing on Rihanna’s last album and grew on me to become one of my favourite songs of last year: an unabashedly epic and sentimental R’n’B power ballad about suicide bombing your former lover. I enjoy so much about it - its central imagery (“The lovers need to clear the road” - what a great line!), bizarro lyrical flourishes like “microwaved in a metal tragedy”, Rihanna’s nothing-to-lose tenderness on “baby we were brilliant”, the sheer enormous GOTHINESS of it. I love how unrespectable it is - of course she knew that people would be scouring her album for songs that might be about Chris Brown but I sincerely doubt any of those rubberneckers were expecting something like this.

But most of all I love the guitars. There are guitars all over Rated R, mostly used in the way they are on “Fire Bomb”: deliberately ugly, vulgar, over-the-top, crass signifiers of “rock” you might say but also there to suggest sheer mess. I don’t think there’s any intention of actually ‘rocking’ - the motion in the songs comes from their choreographed R’n’B hardness. The rock elements are purely textural, scar tissue and scabs on a wounded, angry record.

What would your 4’17” track be?