The story of Rihanna

Growing up in Barbados

Robyn Rihanna Fenty was born on the twentieth of February 1988 in the parish of Saint Michael, Barbados. Her mother Monica was an accountant from Guyana, and her father Ronald was a Barbadian warehouse supervisor. She grew up with two younger brothers, Rorrey and Rajad, in a three bedroom bungalow in Bridgetown, and as a girl she helped her father sell clothes from a street stall. She later said the neighbourhood was not the poorest and definitely not the richest. Music was everywhere. Reggae was simply the standard sound of the island, and at home she sang along to the great voices of the day, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. She sang into her hairbrush so often that the neighbours nicknamed her Robyn Redbreast.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Home was not always a happy place. Her father struggled with alcohol and an addiction to crack cocaine, and Rihanna has spoken about seeing him physically abuse her mother, whom she calls one of the strongest women she knows. With her mother working long hours, the young Robyn looked after her little brother Rajad, who she says thought she was his mom. Her warmest childhood memories, learning to swim and to ride a bike, were with her father, and a school friend talked her out of hating him. As a child she also suffered crushing headaches. Doctors ran several brain scans and at one point suspected a tumour. The headaches eased after her parents divorced, when she was fourteen.[1] [2]

At school she was, in her own words, a nerd who read all the time. She went to Charles F. Broome Memorial Primary and then Combermere School, where a teacher remembered a well behaved student who kept out of trouble. At eleven she joined the Barbados Cadet Corps, and her drill sergeant was an older girl named Shontelle, who would later have hits of her own and co write one of Rihanna's songs. The drills stayed with her. Years later she said the cadet training helped when she played a navy weapons specialist on film. Her idol was Mariah Carey. Rihanna has said that Mariah's Vision of Love made her want to sing, and she performed Mariah's Hero at a school talent show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2003, at fifteen, she formed a singing trio with two classmates. They had no name and no songs of their own, but one of the girls set up an audition with an American producer called Evan Rogers, who was on holiday in Barbados with his Barbadian wife. Rogers later said that the minute Rihanna walked into the room, it was as if the other two girls did not exist. After the group sang Destiny's Child's Emotion, he asked to see Rihanna again, this time with her mother and without the others. Rihanna found it painful. She did not want to betray her friend, but she knew what it meant. Soon she was flying to Rogers's home state of Connecticut in the school holidays to record demos.[1] [2] [3]

Jay-Z, Def Jam and Pon de Replay

With Evan Rogers and his songwriting partner Carl Sturken, Rihanna recorded a demo tape. It included Pon de Replay, a dancehall pop tune whose title is Bajan Creole for play it again. In 2005 she became the first artist signed to their production company, Syndicated Rhythm Productions. The tape reached Jay-Z, the rapper who had just become president of Def Jam Recordings. He had doubts. He felt Pon de Replay was such a big song that a newcomer might never escape it, and he liked to say he signed artists, not songs. Still, he invited her to New York to audition in February 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rihanna later remembered shaking in the hallways of Def Jam as she waited. She was so starstruck and nervous that she felt cold the whole time. In Jay-Z's office she sang for him and the label chief L.A. Reid, including Pon de Replay and another demo, The Last Time. Reid saw fierce determination in her eyes and told Jay-Z not to let her leave the building. They did not. She waited in the office while lawyers drew up a six album contract, and it was signed that day. She cancelled her meetings with other labels, moved to the United States and finished school with a tutor. Reid admitted the label first expected another new signing to be the bigger star, until Beyonce told him Rihanna was a beast.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z's team spent about three months finishing her debut album, mostly with Rogers and Sturken. Pon de Replay came out in late May 2005, pitched as a summer single, and it flew. It reached number two in both America and Britain, and in the United States the only record that kept it off the top was Mariah Carey's We Belong Together, a song by the very singer who had inspired her. Her debut album, Music of the Sun, followed at the end of August and entered the American chart at number ten. The Pon de Replay video was shot in a Toronto restaurant, and it was there, the story goes, that she was first introduced to a young Canadian named Drake.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was no time to rest. She started her second album in September 2005 while still promoting the first, and A Girl Like Me arrived in April 2006, less than eight months after her debut. She was eighteen, and said the songs were about what girls her age go through. The lead single, SOS, had been written for another Def Jam singer, Christina Milian, who passed on it. Built on a loop from Soft Cell's Tainted Love, it became Rihanna's first American number one. The ballad Unfaithful, written by her labelmate Ne-Yo, showed a more grown up side, and it was the first of seventeen videos she would make with the director Anthony Mandler. The album went double platinum in the United States.[1] [2] [3]

Early fame came with ugly gossip. Back in Barbados a rumour spread that she had only won her record deal by trading sexual favours with Jay-Z. She later said it made her so uncomfortable that she could not look her mentor in the eye, until he phoned and told her not to let rumours move her. In 2006 she headlined her first tour, started the Believe Foundation to help terminally ill children, and made a cameo as herself in the cheerleading film Bring It On, All or Nothing. But she has said that in those early years the label had a fixed idea of her as a pop princess, and that she felt less like an artist than a money making tool for a big company.[1] [2]

Umbrella and the new Rihanna

By 2007 Rihanna had decided to break out of that box. For her third album she wanted a rebellious, grown up image, and she worked with Ne-Yo, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and the Atlanta producer Tricky Stewart. Ne-Yo also became her first real vocal coach, teaching her how to breathe. Then came the look. Her hairstylist Ursula Stephen gave her a sharp black bob, inspired by Charlize Theron in the film Aeon Flux. A Def Jam representative kept hovering, so on the first day Stephen only dyed and trimmed it, then cut it short the next day at the album cover shoot, away from the executives. Rihanna was thrilled. Her mother, she said, would never have let her dye her hair black.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song that changed everything almost went to someone else. In January 2007 Tricky Stewart was playing with a drum loop from Apple's GarageBand software when the songwriter The-Dream heard it and wrote most of the song within hours. They pitched it to Britney Spears, but her label turned it down before she ever heard it. The British singer Taio Cruz could not get his label interested either. L.A. Reid grabbed it for Rihanna, who wanted to record it the next day. One problem remained, because the writers had also offered it to Mary J. Blige. Reid made them an offer they could not refuse. Jay-Z added a rap, and Umbrella came out in March 2007 as the lead single of Good Girl Gone Bad.[1] [2]

Umbrella was enormous. It topped the charts in nineteen countries, spent seven weeks at number one in America and ten straight weeks at number one in Britain, the longest run of any single there that decade. It won video of the year at the MTV Video Music Awards and brought her a first Grammy, for best rap and sung collaboration with Jay-Z, making her the first Barbadian to win one. Good Girl Gone Bad, released at the end of May, became her biggest album, with about nine million copies sold worldwide by 2023. Shut Up and Drive borrowed from New Order's Blue Monday, Don't Stop the Music sampled Michael Jackson, and Hate That I Love You was a duet with Ne-Yo.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2008 she opened for Kanye West on his Glow in the Dark tour, and in June released a reissue called Good Girl Gone Bad Reloaded. It gave her two more American number ones, the Ne-Yo ballad Take a Bow and the eerie Disturbia, which Chris Brown had co written for himself before deciding it suited a woman better. Rehab, built with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, followed later that year, and her guest spot on T.I.'s Live Your Life spent six weeks at number one. In February 2008 the Barbados prime minister, David Thompson, proclaimed an annual Rihanna Day. And that year she went public with a new romance, with the young R and B star Chris Brown, a friend since 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The night before the Grammys

On the eighth of February 2009, the night before the Grammy Awards where both were due to perform, Rihanna and Chris Brown left a party together in Los Angeles. In the early hours an argument in the car turned violent. According to police documents, Brown shoved her head against the window, punched her repeatedly in the face, bit her, and held her in a headlock until she began to lose consciousness. Rihanna was twenty, less than two weeks from her twenty first birthday. Brown was nineteen. She needed hospital treatment, and both pulled out of the Grammys. Brown turned himself in to Los Angeles police that evening, and in March he was charged with felony assault and making criminal threats.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a second violation. On the nineteenth of February, a police photograph of her bruised and swollen face was leaked to the gossip site TMZ and spread around the world. Victims of domestic violence are normally kept anonymous. The Los Angeles police opened an internal investigation, but no officer was ever charged. Rihanna said later that if the police cannot protect you, you cannot be safe, and that she felt completely exposed. In June 2009 Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault. He was sentenced to five years of probation, community labour and a year of domestic violence counselling, and a restraining order kept him away from her. Groups working against domestic violence called the plea deal far too lenient.[1] [2]

In November 2009 Rihanna spoke publicly for the first time, in a television interview with Diane Sawyer. She called Brown her first big love and admitted she had briefly gone back to him after the attack. What changed her mind was the thought of the girls watching her. If they followed her example and went back to an abuser, she reasoned, one of them could end up dead. In another interview that month she said she did not want to be stamped as a victim, and that men, more than women, needed to learn from what happened. She summed up the sudden glare in her own phrase. She said she went to bed as Rihanna and woke up as Britney Spears.[1] [2]

She poured it all into her next album. Recording began a month after the Grammys, and L.A. Reid gathered top producers and writers in Los Angeles for a two week song camp, with Ne-Yo, the Norwegian duo Stargate and the songwriter Ester Dean. Released in November 2009, Rated R was dark and heavy, full of rock guitars, dubstep bass and gothic imagery. Slash from Guns N' Roses played on Rockstar 101, and it was the first Rihanna album without a single song by Rogers and Sturken. The lead single, Russian Roulette, came with artwork of her wrapped in barbed wire. Critics called it her most layered record, and the dancehall flavoured Rude Boy went to number one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Loud, and the relentless years

In 2010 Rihanna came back brighter. She told Stargate she felt great about herself and wanted to make happy records again. That summer she sang the chorus on Eminem's Love the Way You Lie, a song about a couple trapped in an abusive relationship. Many listeners linked it to both singers' pasts, and Rihanna said that was exactly why it hit so hard. It spent seven weeks at number one in America and was Britain's best selling song of the year. In October she switched her management to Jay-Z's company Roc Nation, and in November released Loud. For it, Def Jam rented almost every studio in Los Angeles for a writing camp that produced around two hundred songs. Eleven made the album.[1] [2] [3]

Loud gave her three more American number ones, Only Girl in the World, What's My Name with Drake, and S and M, which went back to the top after a remix with Britney Spears. That made her the youngest and fastest solo artist to collect ten Hot 100 number ones, and Only Girl won a Grammy for best dance recording. The videos kept pushing buttons. S and M was banned in eleven countries, and the photographer David LaChapelle sued, saying it copied his work, a case she settled. BBC Radio 1 played an edited version retitled Come On. Meanwhile she was making her first film, the naval action movie Battleship, and flew straight from the set in Hawaii to Los Angeles to shoot the Only Girl video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fiercest row was over Man Down, a reggae song co written by her old cadet sergeant Shontelle. Its video, directed by Anthony Mandler in 2011, shows Rihanna's character shooting a man in a train station after he rapes her. The Parents Television Council demanded a ban, saying the clip gave premeditated murder a stamp of approval. Rihanna hit back on Twitter that the music industry was not in the business of raising other people's children, and that artists must be free to make art. The actress Gabrielle Union, herself a survivor of rape, praised the video. That summer the Loud Tour sold out a record ten nights at London's O2 Arena, the most by any woman there, and grossed about ninety million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

She barely stopped. Her sixth album, Talk That Talk, was recorded on the road during the Loud Tour, in a portable studio set up in hotels in more than twenty five cities. She would perform, meet fans, and then record from two or three in the morning. She later described waking up one morning and crying uncontrollably from exhaustion after being put on a drip. Released in November 2011, the album contained We Found Love, produced by the Scottish DJ Calvin Harris. It topped the charts in twenty seven countries and spent ten weeks at number one in America, her longest run ever. Its video, shot in Northern Ireland, made her the first woman to win video of the year at the MTV Awards twice.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Unapologetic and the Def Jam farewell

In 2012 she was named best international female at the Brit Awards for the second year running and won another Grammy, for All of the Lights with Kanye West. But the year also reopened old wounds. In March she released remixes with Chris Brown, of her song Birthday Cake and his Turn Up the Music, and many were dismayed given their history. Battleship opened in the spring. She played Petty Officer Cora Raikes, and prepared with a soldier who yelled in her face and refused to call her Rihanna. The film flopped, though the New York Times said she was just fine in a generic role. That year she also founded the Clara Lionel Foundation, named after her grandparents Clara and Lionel Braithwaite.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Her seventh album, Unapologetic, came out in November 2012, and it finally gave her an American number one album. The lead single, Diamonds, was a slow electronic ballad written by the Australian songwriter Sia with the producers Benny Blanco and Stargate. Sia reportedly wrote the words in fourteen minutes. It became Rihanna's twelfth Hot 100 number one. The next single, Stay, a bare piano duet with the singer Mikky Ekko, jumped to number three after they performed it at the Grammys. Unapologetic later won the Grammy for best urban contemporary album. To launch it she tried something nobody had done before, seven concerts in seven countries in seven days.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The 777 Tour began in Mexico City on the fourteenth of November 2012 and ended in New York six days later, by way of Toronto, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin and London. Rihanna, her crew, a group of fans and about one hundred and fifty journalists from eighty two countries flew together on a chartered Boeing 777. It turned into a publicity headache. Reporters complained about delays and about the star skipping the parties on the plane. She explained that the short flights were her only chance to sleep and save her voice. Still, the week ended with Unapologetic at number one in America, with Diamonds soon on top of the singles chart. A documentary about the trip aired on Fox in May 2013.[1] [2]

In early 2013 Rihanna and Chris Brown got back together, although he was still on probation for attacking her. They were seen cuddling at the Grammys that February. By around May it was over, and Brown said he could not focus on settling down with someone so young. That spring her Diamonds World Tour opened, with ASAP Rocky supporting on the North American leg. She made a cameo in the comedy This Is the End, and at the end of the year topped the charts in America and Britain again, singing the hook on Eminem's The Monster. In 2014 the two co headlined the Monster Tour. The same year she left Def Jam for Roc Nation, gaining the rights to her album masters.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Anti

After an album almost every year for a decade, she wanted time to do whatever she liked creatively. The singles that followed showed her range. FourFiveSeconds, released in January 2015, was a stripped back song with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, who played acoustic guitar, while the trio Wilson Phillips sang backing vocals. It gave McCartney his first American top ten in about twenty nine years. Then came a snarling single known by its initials, B B H M M, with a violent video she co directed about punishing a crooked accountant. It was inspired, she said, by a real accountant who cheated her. She also voiced Tip, the heroine of the DreamWorks cartoon Home, and curated its soundtrack.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album itself took years. Rihanna wanted songs she could still perform in fifteen years, not burnt out hits, and she has admitted she felt numb and even feared she had disappointed God. She signed a twenty five million dollar deal with Samsung, which sponsored the album and its tour. On the twenty seventh of January 2016 the record, titled Anti, went up early on the streaming service Tidal, which she co owned, and leaked in full. Samsung gave away a million free downloads. The cover, painted by the Israeli artist Roy Nachum, shows Rihanna as a small child, from a photo taken on her first day at day care, with a crown slipping over her eyes and a poem written in Braille.[1] [2] [3]

Anti was quieter and stranger than anything she had made. It moved through dancehall, doo wop, psychedelic soul and trap, and even included a cover of a Tame Impala song. Its lead single, Work, with Drake, grew out of a 2015 session at Drake's house, and the Canadian singer PartyNextDoor first wrote it as a breakup song. It spent nine weeks at number one and became her fourteenth American chart topper, passing Michael Jackson's total. Needed Me and the soul ballad Love on the Brain also reached the top ten. Rolling Stone later placed Anti among the five hundred greatest albums of all time, and it became the only album by a Black woman to spend five hundred weeks on the Billboard 200.[1] [2] [3]

The Anti World Tour ran from March to November 2016. That summer she sang on Calvin Harris's This Is What You Came For, and at the MTV Video Music Awards she received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award from Drake, who told the audience he had been in love with her since he was twenty two. In 2017 she featured on DJ Khaled's Wild Thoughts and Kendrick Lamar's Loyalty, which won a Grammy. She also turned to acting, playing Marion Crane in the final season of Bates Motel and a shape shifting performer in Luc Besson's space epic Valerian. Then the music largely stopped. After the 2018 Grammys she would not perform live again for five years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fenty and the billion dollar turn

The silence had a reason. In September 2017 she launched Fenty Beauty with the luxury group LVMH, holding half the company, and put it on sale in more than one hundred and fifty countries at once. The big idea was foundation in forty shades, including skin tones the industry had long ignored. Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year, and rivals rushed to widen their ranges in what became known as the Fenty effect. In London, fans queued for up to three hours outside Harvey Nichols. She uses her surname for business to keep it apart from her music, and in 2018 she followed with Savage X Fenty, lingerie in a wide range of sizes and skin tone shades.[1] [2] [3]

In May 2019 she launched a fashion house simply called Fenty with LVMH. She was the first woman to create an original brand for the group and the first woman of colour to lead one of its houses, and it was LVMH's first new fashion house since 1987. It did not last. In February 2021, during the pandemic, the partners put it on hold. Fenty Skin followed in 2020 and Fenty Hair in 2024. In August 2021 Forbes declared her a billionaire, worth an estimated one point seven billion dollars and the richest female musician in the world. There were stumbles too. In 2022 Savage X Fenty agreed a settlement of one point two million dollars in California over its paid membership scheme.[1] [2] [3]

Success brought a painful family fight. In January 2019 Rihanna sued her own father. She alleged that Ronald Fenty and a business partner had set up a company called Fenty Entertainment, claimed to act for her, and tried to book a fifteen million dollar tour of Latin America without her knowledge. Her lawyers called it a fraudulent effort to solicit millions of dollars. The trial was due in September 2021, but she dropped the case weeks before, with American media reporting a settlement out of court. There were other frights. In 2018 a man broke into her Hollywood Hills home and spent about twelve hours inside before her assistant found him. He later pleaded no contest to stalking her.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna also used her platform. In 2018 she criticised Snapchat for carrying an advert that appeared to make light of domestic violence, and nearly a billion dollars was wiped off its parent company's value. In 2019 she revealed that she had turned down the Super Bowl halftime show in solidarity with the quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who had knelt in protest against police brutality. In 2018 Barbados made her an Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, and on the thirtieth of November 2021, as the island became a republic, Prime Minister Mia Mottley named her a National Hero. She was only the eleventh person to receive the honour, and the second woman. Privately, from 2017 to 2020 she dated the Saudi businessman Hassan Jameel.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Motherhood, the Super Bowl and beyond

Her next great love had been a friend for years. Rihanna and the rapper ASAP Rocky had flirted on stage at the 2012 MTV Awards, and he had opened for her on tour in 2013. They became a couple around 2020, soon after her split from Hassan Jameel. That summer they drove across America together, and she cooked their meals on a cheap grill from Walmart. In May 2021 Rocky told GQ she was the love of his life. Their first son, RZA, was born on the thirteenth of May 2022. That autumn she returned to music with Lift Me Up, written with the Nigerian singer Tems for Black Panther, Wakanda Forever, as a tribute to the late actor Chadwick Boseman.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twelfth of February 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, she headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, her first live performance in five years. She had gone through thirty nine versions of the setlist, trying to squeeze seventeen years of hits into thirteen minutes, and she sang much of it on platforms floating high above the field. Midway through she touched up her face with a Fenty compact. As she cradled her stomach, viewers guessed the news, and her team confirmed she was pregnant again. Around one hundred and twenty one million people watched, then reported as a record for a halftime show. A month later she sang Lift Me Up at the Oscars, where it was nominated for best original song.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Their second son, Riot Rose, was born in August 2023. In 2024 she launched Fenty Hair and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. In February 2025 she stood by Rocky in a Los Angeles courtroom, bringing their two sons, as a jury found him not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend. That summer she was back on the big screen as the voice of Smurfette in the animated film Smurfs, which critics panned. At the Met Gala in May she had revealed a third pregnancy, and on the thirteenth of September 2025 she gave birth to a daughter, Rocki Irish Mayers, keeping the family habit of names that begin with the letter R.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2026 danger came to her door. On the afternoon of Sunday the eighth of March, police say a woman fired around ten shots from a car at the Beverly Hills home Rihanna shares with Rocky and their three children, using a rifle in the style of an AR 15. Rihanna was inside. Nobody was hurt, although at least one round pierced a wall. Officers tracked the car by helicopter and arrested the driver about half an hour later in a shopping centre car park in Sherman Oaks. She was named as Ivanna Ortiz, a thirty five year old from Orlando, Florida, with no known link to the couple, and she was held on suspicion of attempted murder. As of 2026 the case was still before the courts.[1] [2] [3]

As for new music, fans have waited a decade for a ninth album, and as of 2026 it had still not arrived. Rihanna once joked that it was finished but she was refusing to release it, and when a fan asked where it was, she said she had lost it. Her place in history hardly depends on it. She has sold an estimated two hundred and fifty million records, has fourteen American number ones, tied with Drake for the fourth most ever, and nine Grammys. In Britain only the Beatles have more million selling singles. NPR called her the most influential musician of the twenty first century, and Billboard ranked her third among the century's greatest pop stars.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Rihanna

Rihanna and Chris Brown. Friends from 2005, they went public as a couple in 2008. On the eighth of February 2009 he beat her in a car in Los Angeles, and he pleaded guilty to felony assault. Despite a restraining order, they recorded remixes together in 2012 and briefly reunited in early 2013, which dismayed many fans. She later called him her first big love.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and Drake. They met in Toronto in 2005 when she shot the Pon de Replay video. After 2009 they were linked on and off for years and made hits together, including What's My Name, Take Care and Work. Drake said she made him feel like a pawn, then declared his love at the 2016 VMAs. By 2018 she said they were no longer even friends.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and ASAP Rocky. They have been friends and collaborators since 2012, when he rapped on her Cockiness remix, and he opened her 2013 tour. They became a couple around 2020. He calls her the love of his life. They have three children, RZA, Riot Rose and Rocki, and she attended his 2025 trial, where he was acquitted. As of 2026 they live together in Beverly Hills.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rihanna and Jay-Z. As head of Def Jam he signed her on the day of her audition in 2005 and guided her first album. He rapped on Umbrella, she sang on his Run This Town, and his company Roc Nation managed her from 2010 and became her label in 2014. Roc Nation also produced her 2023 Super Bowl show, and he called her a generational talent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rihanna and Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken. Rogers heard her in Barbados in 2003 and, with his partner Sturken, recorded her demo in Connecticut, wrote and produced Pon de Replay and signed her to their production company. They shaped her first two albums and wrote Shut Up and Drive. Rated R, in 2009, was the first Rihanna album without a song of theirs.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and L.A. Reid. The Def Jam chairman watched her 2005 audition and told Jay-Z not to let her leave the building. After the 2009 assault he staged a huge songwriting camp that produced Rated R, and he executive produced Loud. He admitted the label first backed another singer to be the bigger star.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and Ronald Fenty. Her father taught her to swim and ride a bike, but his addiction and violence toward her mother scarred her childhood. They reconciled, then fell out again. In 2019 she sued him for trading on the Fenty name and trying to book shows in her name, before dropping the case in 2021.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and Ne-Yo. Her Def Jam labelmate wrote Unfaithful and co wrote Take a Bow and Russian Roulette, and duetted with her on Hate That I Love You. During the Good Girl Gone Bad sessions he became her first vocal coach, teaching her to breathe and using musical terms she admitted she did not understand.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rihanna and Eminem. Their duets about abusive love, Love the Way You Lie in 2010 and The Monster in 2013, were both American number ones, and many listeners heard their own troubled pasts in them. Rihanna said the subject was exactly what gave the song its power. In 2014 they co headlined the Monster Tour.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and Calvin Harris. The Scottish producer gave her We Found Love in 2011, her longest running American number one, and he opened for her on the Loud Tour in Europe. Harris said the song changed everything for his career. They reunited in 2016 for This Is What You Came For.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rihanna and Hassan Jameel. The Saudi businessman, an heir to the Abdul Latif Jameel conglomerate and a major investor in the electric carmaker Rivian, dated Rihanna from 2017 to 2020. She began her romance with ASAP Rocky soon after they split.[1] [2] [3]

Rihanna and Shontelle. Shontelle was her drill sergeant in the Barbados Cadet Corps when Rihanna was eleven. Evan Rogers's company later helped launch Shontelle's own career with the hit T Shirt, and she co wrote Rihanna's reggae song Man Down.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Rihanna

• As a child she sang into her hairbrush so often that neighbours nicknamed her Robyn Redbreast. Young Robyn sang Whitney Houston songs and A Whole New World into her hairbrush constantly. The neighbours responded with a nickname, Robyn Redbreast, after the bird.[1]
• Her drill sergeant in the Barbados Cadet Corps was the future pop singer Shontelle. Rihanna joined the cadets at eleven. Shontelle, her sergeant, went on to have her own hit with T Shirt and co wrote Rihanna's song Man Down.[1] [2]
• Pon de Replay is Bajan Creole for play it again. Rihanna explained that pon means on and de means the, so the phrase simply tells the DJ to put her song on replay. It was one of the songs on her original demo tape.[1]
• Pon de Replay was kept from number one in America by Mariah Carey, the singer who inspired her. The debut single stalled at number two behind We Belong Together, which spent fourteen weeks at the top. Rihanna has said Mariah's Vision of Love made her want to be a singer.[1] [2]
• SOS was offered to Christina Milian before it went to Rihanna. Milian passed on the song for her album So Amazin, so L.A. Reid handed it to Rihanna. Recorded in about three days, it became her first American number one.[1] [2]
• The co writer of SOS says its second verse secretly strings together eighties song titles. In 2024 Evan Bogart said he stitched titles like Head over Heels and Take On Me into the verse to be clever, and claimed nobody ever noticed.[1]
• The Umbrella beat came from a stock drum loop in Apple's GarageBand software. Tricky Stewart found the hi hat pattern in GarageBand, and Entertainment Weekly noted it could be recreated with the loop called Vintage Funk Kit 03.[1]
• Her famous black bob was inspired by Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux. Stylist Ursula Stephen dyed it black one day and cut it short the next, behind a hovering label rep's back, just in time for the Good Girl Gone Bad cover.[1] [2]
• Chris Brown originally wrote Disturbia for himself. Brown and his team meant it for a reissue of his album Exclusive, but he chose Forever instead and decided Disturbia suited a female singer.[1]
• Justin Timberlake improvised Rehab on the spot over a Timbaland beat. While Timbaland was building a beat for a song he wanted to call Rehab, Timberlake walked in and improvised it. He also sang backing vocals.[1]
• Shut Up and Drive borrows from New Order's Blue Monday, and all four band members got writing credits. Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers built the song on Blue Monday and recorded part of it at a studio in Saint James, Barbados.[1]
• Slash from Guns N' Roses plays guitar on Rated R. He played on the track Rockstar 101. Rated R was also the first Rihanna album without a song by her discoverers Rogers and Sturken.[1] [2]
• The songwriting camp for Loud produced around two hundred songs, and only eleven made the album. Def Jam rented nearly every studio in Los Angeles for two weeks. A typical camp costs about twenty five thousand dollars a day.[1]
• Talk That Talk was recorded in hotel rooms in more than twenty five cities. Her team carried a portable studio on the Loud Tour. She would finish a show and meet and greet, then record until dawn.[1]
• A Northern Ireland farmer stopped her filming the We Found Love video in his field. Farmer and councillor Alan Graham objected to her going topless in his barley field in County Down. They shook hands and parted amiably.[1] [2]
• Sia reportedly wrote the words of Diamonds in fourteen minutes. The finished track was recorded, mixed and mastered within about twenty four hours, with Rihanna sending her vocals from another part of the world.[1]
• For the 777 Tour she flew a chartered Boeing 777 with about one hundred and fifty journalists aboard. The reporters came from eighty two countries. Seven shows in seven countries took seven days, from Mexico City to New York.[1]
• She trained for Battleship with a soldier who refused to call her Rihanna. She said he yelled in her face and made her hide her high heels and pink iPod. Her cadet training in Barbados helped.[1]
• FourFiveSeconds ended Paul McCartney's twenty nine year wait for an American top ten. His previous top ten single was Spies Like Us in 1986. McCartney played the acoustic guitar, and Wilson Phillips sang backing vocals.[1]
• The Anti cover shows her from a photo taken on her first day of day care. Israeli artist Roy Nachum painted her as a child with a crown over her eyes. A poem in Braille by Chloe Mitchell runs across it.[1] [2]
• Samsung bought a million copies of Anti and gave them away. It was platinum two days after release, but Billboard ignored the free copies, so Anti debuted at number twenty seven before climbing to number one.[1]
• Dido has a writing credit on Anti. The song Never Ending shares a melody with Dido's 1999 song Thank You, so she was credited. The album also covers Tame Impala.[1]
• She called the Anti track Higher a drunk voicemail. It was recorded in the early morning with whiskey involved, by her own account, and written with Bibi Bourelly and James Fauntleroy.[1]
• Work was first written as a breakup song, and Alicia Keys was considered for it. PartyNextDoor wrote it after a beat session at Drake's house, then played it for Rihanna at her Malibu home, where it became her family's favourite.[1]
• The Needed Me video was directed by filmmaker Harmony Korine and released on the twentieth of April. She premiered the Miami set clip on four twenty. The song became the longest charting hit of her career.[1]
• She named her record label Westbury Road after the street she grew up on. Westbury Road Entertainment was founded in 2005, and later releases came out through it.[1]
• Barbados has celebrated Rihanna Day every year since 2008. Prime Minister David Thompson proclaimed it on the twenty second of February 2008. It is not an official public holiday.[1] [2]
• As a National Hero of Barbados, she can use the title the Right Honourable. Only the eleventh person and second woman to receive the honour, she was named during the ceremony that made Barbados a republic in 2021.[1]
• Gillette once insured her legs for a million dollars. The insurance came in 2007 after she won a Gillette Venus contest for the best legs.[1] [2]
• Nuno Bettencourt of the rock band Extreme led her touring band. The guitarist signed on for her tours from Last Girl on Earth onward and played solos in the Loud Tour show.[1] [2]
• She was the first woman on the cover of GQ's Men of the Year issue. It happened in December 2012. She has also posed for covers of Esquire, Rolling Stone and many others.[1]
• She went through thirty nine versions of her Super Bowl setlist. She said the hard part was cramming seventeen years of work into thirteen minutes, so some songs had to go.[1] [2]
• Her criticism of a Snapchat advert wiped nearly a billion dollars off the company. In March 2018 she attacked an ad that appeared to make light of domestic violence, and Snap's share price fell sharply.[1]
• In 2013 she became the first woman to pass two billion views on YouTube. Her videos, many with director Anthony Mandler, have long been treated as short films.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.