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Monday, May 24, 2010

Rihanna sat down with YOU Magazine (Britain) for an all new exclusive interview. The entire interview is posted below so enjoy! PS - I also find it funny how she denies Matt Kemp as her boyfriend yet he claimed her as his girlfriend LMAO. Damn.



It’s difficult to calculate exactly how many people there are in Rihanna’s entourage on the day we meet. Two huge grey people carriers with tinted windows have drawn up outside the location for the YOU photo shoot, and out of them a crowd of people (of varying sizes and ages) gradually emerges. Swooping into the building first come several men in dark suits, a tall, tanned, tattooed bodyguard, four or five women pulling large cases on wheels full of make-up and clothes, and a couple more carrying bags of food. After a pause of a few minutes, four more women climb out of the second car, offering protective cover to Rihanna who stands head and shoulders above them.


Five years ago when Jay-Z – then president of Def Jam Records – first auditioned 17-year-old Robyn Rihanna Fenty, he commented that he signed artists because they either had swagger or talent and that, unusually, she ‘had both’. Now 22, internationally famous and rather more worldly wise, Rihanna still possesses ‘swagger and talent’, walking tall in perilously high heels.


‘That’s funny, I never heard that quote,’ she says. ‘Back then he was a father figure to me. I was very young and I had flown in to New York from Barbados alone. But now that I have grown and we have worked together and made music together, he’s like a big brother to me. Still a good friend and definitely still a mentor – he is the first person I ask on anything,’ she adds, just a little nervously, as she sits down in a chair pulled close to a big electric heater (she hates the cold, and the unseasonably cool spring weather is the only thing she doesn’t like about London, her favourite city outside Barbados or the US) for our exclusive interview.



Rihanna’s progression from the naive young girl who had never encountered a celebrity before auditioning for Jay-Z to the confident, assured and highly individual woman she is today has not been without its difficulties. Born in Saint Michael, she is the eldest of three children of Ronald Fenty, a warehouse man, and Monica, an accountant. With a working mother and a father addicted to drugs (her parents divorced when she was in her mid-teens), Rihanna had a tough childhood, often having to care for her younger brothers Rorrey and Rajad. At 15, her potential was spotted by American producer Evan Rogers, who was introduced to her while on holiday in Barbados and who, over the next year, helped her to record the demo that gained her an audition with Def Jam Records.
Her first two albums – more reggae than R&B – were only minor successes, and it wasn’t until she made her third, Good Girl Gone Bad, that she achieved critical acclaim, worldwide fame (with the international number-one ‘Umbrella’ in 2007) and began to develop her distinctive personal style (which she says she owes to Cruella de Vil). But in February 2009 an argument with her then boyfriend Chris Brown escalated into violence that became public when police pictures of her injuries were released (Brown was subsequently sentenced to 180 days’ community service and five years’ probation for assaulting her).


One of the reasons, you sense, that Rihanna (known to her fans as ‘RiRi’) has embarked on her current promotional tour is to overcome the effects of that mortifying incident and put out the message that she has moved on. She has, she says, said everything she needs to say in the song ‘Cold Case Love’ on the new album, and although the subject is off-limits today she admits that it was a ‘very dark time for me’, and that playing out the drama in the full glare of the media made it doubly difficult.


‘Nobody wants anybody to know that is happening in a relationship, and seeing it plastered over every news channel I felt like it was a natural disaster happening. Every time I turned on the television, if it wasn’t “breaking news” it was the line at the bottom of the screen. I feel like it is behind me. I have a good balance in my life now, but it is something that people will probably ask me about for the next two years, unfortunately.’


Recent rumours suggest that the ‘balance’ in her life now is a new romance with US baseball player Matt Kemp, 25, but – perhaps because of that past experience – she is wary of confirming that they are an item. ‘Matt is not my boyfriend. He is nice. He is really nice, but we are not an official couple or anything,’ she says, in a way that suggests that might soon change (she has subsequently been reported to have met his parents).


With men out of the way, RiRi doesn’t just visibly loosen up (I suspect she is more nervous of interviews than interviewers are of her), her voice begins to change from the LA drawl when we first met to a delightful Bajan accent that is regularly punctuated by an infectious laid-back laugh. It’s women, not men, she confesses, who form the backbone of her life, particularly her mother and her best friend from school Melissa Forde, who is called her ‘personal assistant’ but is in effect her constant companion. Melissa has been a major influence in her life since she transferred to Rihanna’s school at 14 – at a time when RiRi herself was an enthusiastic member of the Barbados Cadet Corps (a quasi-military youth organisation) and something of a tomboy.


‘When Melissa arrived at school she really stood out. She was a black girl with blonde hair who wore make-up – she was the only girl in school who would wear make-up, because we weren’t allowed. We became friends and she would come over to my house with her older sister’s magazines and we would go through them and say, “Hey, we could do something like that.” That’s when I started to get into fashion and make-up. A year after I met her I dropped out of the cadets. I was like, “This is terrible! They are just screaming at me, I don’t like this!”’ she says, laughing at the memory.
Rihanna still asks Melissa’s advice on clothes (after the interview she enthusiastically introduces us, and she perfectly matches RiRi in height, humour and warmth) and the two young women live together in RiRi’s home in LA, along with Oliver, a three-year-old poodle.


‘Oh my gosh, he is adorable but he is very bad. He knows how much I love my clothes and if he is upset with me he will go and pee really close to them. The other day he was so cross that he peed right over my favourite pair of shoes,’ she says.


The singer’s flair for fashion is such that, according to her European stylists Damian and Avigail, ‘Rihanna is the magic word to designers’. At our shoot she made the beautiful ballgowns her own by adding details such as a Nora Batty hairnet – pulled down below her eyes – that somehow, bafflingly, looked fabulous and edgy. Her fashion mantra is ‘be yourself’ and the people she admires – she mentions Gwen Stefani, Lady Gaga, Grace Jones and British singer La Roux – she likes because they dare ‘to be different from the rest’. Her individualistic approach to clothes, her refusal to diet (although she admits to sometimes getting strict with herself if she gets ‘out of control’) and her shapely rather than skinny silhouette (she weighs nine and a half stone) make her a great role model for young girls, with a refreshing take on the insidious size zero obsession of the fashion industry.


‘You shouldn’t be pressured into trying to be thin by the fashion industry, because they only want models that are like human mannequins. They know that if we see an outfit on a mannequin in a shop window we will love it and want to buy it whatever size we are. That’s why they have size zero models – they want to sell clothes. But you have to remember that it’s not practical or possible for an everyday woman to look like that. Being size zero is a career in itself so we shouldn’t try and be like them. It’s not realistic and it’s not healthy,’ she says with real feeling.


RiRi doesn’t get home to Barbados as much as she would like – perhaps once or twice a year – but she talks to her mother (whom she calls her ‘inspiration’) at least once a day. She is also a dutiful sister to her brothers, encouraging them to get good grades (neither brother has show-business ambitions: 20-year-old Rorrey is studying to be an architect and 13-year-old Rajad is a ‘little nerd’, obsessed with computer science).


On rare days off she likes to do something ‘normal’ like watch comedy shows or movies: she has been offered acting roles herself and says she would like to start with comedy (she is naturally funny, so perhaps a ‘romcom, something that’s fun’). She has a tight social circle, just a few of whom are famous – she ‘hangs out’ with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, is close to Kanye West, Kid Cudi and Mary J Blige, and counts Katy Perry as a ‘real friend’ with whom she has vacationed and is in constant contact.
‘Russell Brand and Katy make such a perfect couple. I met him a few years ago when he interviewed me, and became friends with Katy later, and it’s so funny because I would never have put the two of them together. But then when she told me it made so much sense. I was like, “Of course you guys would be together, you are both hilarious and rude and disrespectful, it’s perfect.” You can really see that they are just so in love.’


Rihanna has no idea what the future holds (‘ten years ago I would never have thought this would be it, so I am excited to find out what’s next’), but music remains important, and, as well as acting, she likes the idea of designing and one day ‘definitely, definitely having children’. In the short term, she says with a grin, she will probably be adding to her tattoos (discreetly hidden, these include ‘Shhh…’ on the back of a finger, her star sign behind her ear, and the message ‘Never a failure always a lesson’ on her collarbone).


‘I have 13 at the moment – a music note on my ankle, a skull with a bow on its head behind my ankle, a Sanskrit prayer here [going down her hip] and ‘Freedom in Christ’ in Arabic writing here on my wrist – oh, and a gun! I will probably carry on until I run out of cool little places to put them,’ she says, laughing as she shows them to me.


Beneath the surface – under those tattoos and behind that swagger – Rihanna is a surprisingly normal, incredibly polite and engaging 22-year-old. Even that formidable entourage, it turns out, is actually a tight-knit group of people, most of whom have been with her ‘since the beginning’. ‘I don’t see them as an entourage,’ she says, as she takes me to meet Melissa and the rest of her team. ‘When you are with the same people – especially when you are on tour – it changes. It becomes like a family.’

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