Boring Girl Gone Irritating

The season of tedious back-slapping awards ceremonies for film is upon us and as usual i'm not excited. I've only seen one film which has been nominated for any awards and most of the ones that have been nominated really don't excite me, much like the annual music award festivities which are just as dull, celebrating braindead mainstream toss.

This year, the awards celebrating the achievements of the past twelve months are probably all going to be about Rihanna and her dire album "Good Girl Gone Bad". There have been so many singles milked off this album that i've lost count and yet the airplay they are blindly awarded by British radio stations is bewildering, particularly as her turgid, nasal whine isn't even a pleasant experience to listen to.

I'll admit that playground nursery rhyme anthem "Umbrella" was a well constructed pop song, and get that out of the way. Follow up "Shut Up and Drive" was entirely tedium-by-numbers, using paper thin innuendo in an attempt to stimulate the automotive industry. Fellow R&B boredom merchant Ne-Yo was drafted in to warble on "Hate That I Love You", which nobody would be able to sing now, despite it being thrashed for months by every commercial radio station in the country.

"Don't Stop The Music" was the fourth single to be lifted from the album, i presume an ironic preview of the following year of musical misery. This was followed by the mocking ballad "Take A Bow" and utter dross festival "Disturbia", a song which basically eschews any need for song writing for the most part by replacing lyrics with "Bam-bam-de-dam-bam-bam-de-baaam-bam". Its enough to make you want to punch babies. Seventh and please-God-let-it-be-Final release from the album was "Rehab", where Rihanna doesn't wanna smoke on dem cigarettes no mo-o-ooore", a rewrite of album filler track "Breakin' Dishes".

So in total, eighteen months of a-list radio airplay derived from one thrice released and repackaged album. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to have another dose of Rihanna's grating vocals as she guested on rapper T.I's comedy cover version of O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei", now retitled "Live Your Life". Complete with ao-ao-ao refrain and rewriting of O-Zone's original Euro-friendly "ma-i-a-hiiii" to warble on about "fancy cars", just to prove that the American black music industry can't make a mainstream record that isn't materialistic and completely bling based.

TI and Rihanna's donation to future landfill has got to be musical hell. The only possible saving grace of this tripe is the hilarious comedy verse about two thirds of the way through the song where Rihanna tries to rap, which is so bad i almost soiled myself the first time i heard it. Its almost worth listening to the song all the way through once just to hear it.

So there you have it, Rihanna is awful. End of story. Lets hope that 2009 finds a new act that the mainstream radio stations of the UK can wet their pants over every time they belch.