We found love in a cultural space: what should go in the Rihanna museum? Find out Already
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We found love in a cultural space: what should go in the Rihanna museum?
The prime minister of Barbados hopes to mark the musician’s legacy with a special exhibition
It has been three long years since Rihanna last released an album but, in that time, she has become even harder to avoid. Which is saying something when you consider that, between 2005 and 2012, she released an album a year and alternated her own singles with David Guetta features on a fortnightly basis. Whether she is starring in films (Ocean’s 8), launching fashion brands (Fenty Beauty and Fenty) or swerving unwanted male attention (Drake), Rihanna is now so culturally important that there should be a museum dedicated to her.
If the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, gets her way there will be. During a recent trip to London, Mottley suggested talks were under way with Rihanna’s people for a permanent tribute to the Shut Up and Drive hitmaker.
So what could fill the vast halls of Barbados’s very own Tate Modern, AKA A Girl Like Me: Loud and Unapologetic: the Museum of Rihanna? Well, there’d be a Shade Room in which her classic tweet to Ciara from 2011 – “Good luck with bookin that stage u speak of” – is blown up and hung in a gold frame. Space will also be made for a tapestry of her damning review of Major Lazer & DJ Snake’s Lean On: “This sounds like a reggae song at an airport”.
In the corner could be a looped video installation of her giggling at Ariana Grande’s dancing at the iHeartRadio awards in 2014; that gif of her nonchalantly winding the car window up; and the many, many times she swigged from a diamond-encrusted flask at the 2017 Grammys. Branching off that main room should be a separate piece of video art showing the various times she has tried, and failed, to wink.
From there, on a plinth, we would have the actual butt of the joint she rolled while sitting on the shoulders of her security guard at Coachella, the detritus resting on his bald head like confetti. Next to that, we will need that heart-shaped red cape she wore in 2016, and opposite that a more modern, searingly political rendering of that time she wore a shirt of herself wearing a Hillary Clinton shirt.
Obviously, there needs to be a room – let’s call it Cheers (Drink to That) – full of the many dirty wine glasses she has taken out of restaurants and bars, perhaps next to a vast cabinet displaying her various Crop Over festival looks. If Tracey Emin is free, it might be nice to get her to update My Bed in honour of Rihanna’s ballad California King Bed, complete with “a little last night on these sheets”.
Of course, it will need music – one room dedicated to Work, another playing the We Found Love video on a loop – but perhaps the best bit, as with all museums, will be the gift shop.
Rihanna umbrellas, Bitch Better Have My Money purses, What’s My Name? ID cards: it will all be there. The aim should be to have it ready for the new album, so probably 2022.