Rihanna's Soul Makossa

dollartheque, originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Listening to Good Girl Gone Bad, the new album by Rihanna, a singer who I'd previously only registered as just another Soft Cell-sampling RnB starlet, I realize that the gothification of pop music runs very deep. This is not about the guitars, these songs owe more to Usher's shivery synth track Yeah, it's more about the general sense of slow-burning real anger and Depeche Modey disaffected dread that seeps from between the pop songs' shiny elements. Just like Omarion's eyelinery Ice Box track, Rihanna's very gloomy summer banger Umbrella, stompingly mad new single Shut Up And Drive, or album track Breakin' Dishes (chorus: "I'm breakin dishes off your head all night, and I'm not gonna stop until I see police and lights.") reintroduce new wavy rock idioms in a similar but more danceable way than Kelly Clarkson's impossible-to-karaoke-without-shrieking Since You've Been Gone.

Posted first on the bilingual beats-blog Fluokids, and produced by Norwegian hitmeisters StarGate, who also did Beyonce' recent spate of incomprehensible hits Irreplaceable and Beautiful Liar, my favorite on Rihanna's album, Don't Stop The Music (mp3), is also the most techno. Like all great dance songs - Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Madonna's Music and LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge - is deeply self-reflexive; it is a dance song about dancing and its structure thoroughly supports that. As the track's tension builds and builds, a Daft Punkian bubbling melody underneath the stomping rhythm and Rihanna's repetitive slowly reveals itself to be the "Ma-ma-ko ma-ma-sa ma-ma-ko-ssa" refrain familiar from Michael Jackson's dancefloor stormer Wanna Be Startin' Somethin. Like that forebear, this is relentless, a late night houseburner that surely deserves summer jam status.

For those who need a little late afternoon summer jamming, I suggest the afro rock classic that 'inspired' Jacko's classic. Originally written and performed by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango in 1972, Soul Makossa introduced the still-infectious chant that now powers Rihanna's track. Out of all the different versions of the influential song (reggae, rumba, house, electro), I picked this coarser-voiced version (mp3) by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band (1974), a funk outfit that fled Long Island for Paris. More angular than the song's original, this Talking Headsy version will have your BBQ parties bumping until it's time to break out the glowsticks and the Rihanna hits.

PS. Also check out Popjustice's hilarious list of one hundred things less brilliant than the new Rihanna album. My top three favorites:

49. 'Imagine' by John Lennon
People think John Lennon's some sort of lyrical genius but did he ever – EVER – come up with this line – from 'Breakin' Dishes – "I'm roasting marshmallows on the fire and what I'm burning is your attire"? No he did not.

52. Making pancakes
Having no eggs in the house will not prevent you enjoying the new Rihanna album.

68. Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica is amazing but at least the new Rihanna album won't hit you over the head with stuff about 'politics' and 'the real world' when all you want to do is watch a load of robots being blown up by fit people. Which is not to say that 'Good Girl Gone Bad' doesn't have a social conscience, because it probably does, somewhere or other.