Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 07/25/2011 at 12:19 PM News

The Popdust Files: cheers (drink to that), rihanna

Rihanna has released seven singles from Loud. That’s more than half the album, and 70 percent of the album if you don’t count “Love the Way You Lie Part II.” There is no way you remember all seven singles–”California King Bed” and “Man Down” didn’t exactly flop, but they certainly weren’t ubiquitous, and you probably didn’t even know “Raining Men” was a single. It’s musical carpet-bombing–put enough shit out to radio, and maybe some of them will whip up the charts like “S&M”! It doesn’t help that Rihanna’s songwriting camps sure sound like content farms, even though this isn’t at all a Rihanna phenomenon so much as the state of pop songwriting in general.

Anyway, “Cheers (Drink to That), announced as the next single in a tweet to Perez Hilton because this is how 2011 works apparently. If this were a drink, it’d be the vat of leftover and/or wasted drinks from the bar. The Avril Lavigne sample from “I’m With You” is the most obvious, but it’s also got an R. Kelly call-out (“it’s the freakin’ weekend”); a Snoop Dogg takeoff (“got a drink on my mind and my mind on my money,” which doesn’t even make sense, because most bars’ entire business model is built on the latter not happening); a “no Tyra” hashtag that’s a takeoff of–ugh, if you don’t know what that’s a takeoff of, far be it for us to introduce it to you; and a good old illegitimi non carborundum reference just because. As you can probably guess, it’s a bit lyrically dense for a song about getting drunk and hitting on people, but then again, everyone’s just going to pay attention to the Avril bit. Certainly the music isn’t a smash, incorporating enough patois and laid-back groove to get mentions but not memory. Maybe it’s time for some fresh material?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqmDKyw3A4