Counting The Crotch Grabs At A Rihanna Concert Can Be Very Tiring

It’s not my proudest daydream, but the main thought I had throughout Rihanna’s Sydney concert last night was, “Hmm, she must masturbate a lot.”

Amongst endless video projections of her seductively licking rocks and blowing spliffs, the popstar performed with hand on crotch throughout most of the gig, perhaps as a subtle nod to the King Of Pop, but probably more because what else is she gonna do with her hands? I started counting the crotch grabs as a ‘hilarious’ hook for this review, but sadly lost my way after hitting ’17’ during the first song. Whatever, it was a perverted idea anyway.

The twerking children, though! Woah, even safely far away from my rich people seats, I could spot the rhythmic gyrating of pubescent kids on molly (or whatever children are doing these days) down on the dancefloor, happily rolling along to excellent songs like ‘Talk That Talk‘ and that other one about getting got down on when it’s not even your birthday. It was a sight to behold, a symbolic example of Rihanna’s standing with our younger generations, but once again I felt perverted and ashamed.

Perhaps echoing my soul, the gig began somberly, with Rihanna clad in a black cloak, singing some ballad on a stage populated by ancient columns and dancers dressed like evil pharaohs. Much like the universally despised ‘ballad encore’, the ‘ballad opening’ is something that shouldn’t exist at young people concerts. Young people want beats, maybe some keytar?  The immediate excitement at Rihanna’s long-awaited appearance (she was about 40 minutes late) was already a little muted by the time the second song came ’round.

Maybe this is why Rihanna was late? Who knows.

Earlier reviews from the other side of the country highlighted such distractions, from the delays to the pronounced backing tracks to the uneven setlist. It’s probably not a great idea for popstars to group their songs into mood blocks: the ballads section!, the old songs and other section! (including a casual rendition of ‘Umbrella’ and just her own bits from Kanye’s ‘All Of The Lights’), the Euro dance section!, the lover’s rock section! (“Sydney, what you know about this reggae music?” she yelled to the audience. “Not much!” the audience yelled back). It resulted in a few energy lulls, as did the regular costume changes where the gig transformed into something like a Steve Vai concert, some long-haired dude getting front-and-centre for a spot of Wyld Stallyn-style guitar noodling while Rihanna dropped down a stage hole to put on a slinky red dress or some sequined space-skirt get-up like an R&B Tank Girl.

Nobody really seemed to care, though. By turns sultry and goofy, she regularly stopped to chat to the crowd (“I love you Sydney, I can’t wait to come back here!” she said, about six minutes into the concert) and steal people’s drinks. She made everyone instantly stompy with the Calvin Harris collabo ‘We Found Love’ (on the way home, whatever radio station that was sponsoring the “official Rihanna after-party” replayed the live moment about four times in the space of an hour due to listener requests). And she’s also a pretty underrated dancer (as you might’ve guessed from her new ‘Pour It Up’ video): she did some floppy Caribbean-inflected irie dancing during ‘Rude Boy’, and something that looked like a drunken C-walk that I need to learn before my next hoops pick-up game to intimidate tall people.

I video’d a whole bunch of this stuff on my crappy phone in order to share it with you all, but then I got home and re-watched it and deleted it out of spite because I was really hangry. Sorry. Here’s a shaky thing I found on YouTube instead, you get the idea.

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Rihanna’s Australian tour ends tonight with another performance at Allphones Arena in Sydney. Get all the details here. Have fun. 

[lead image from Rihanna’s Perth concert via Daniel Bedford]