Though my distaste for US female pop stars was because I couldn’t relate to them, my dislike of Rihanna was for the opposite reason. Looking back now, I felt constricted and resented being hypervigilant. At the time, being this way felt like it would keep me safe. I always appeared composed, and I had no sexual identity whatsoever. I never went anywhere near cannabis, alcohol, or anything that would jeopardize my tight control. Not wanting to actualize my family’s fears, I became just as stiff and bottled up as Rihanna at her performance. Before I left for school, my family warned me not to be a Caribbean stereotype. When I looked puzzled, she divulged, “ We are crazy, do voodoo, smoke reefer all day, and want sex all night.” She warned that if I became what people thought I was, they would take advantage of me. “You know what they think of us,” my mother would say. I left my Caribbean family bubble on the West Coast for an Ivy League college with a tiny Black population and a minuscule immigrant Black population. On some level, I understood Rihanna’s discomfort. She didn’t seem the least bit comfortable in her clothes or her skin. While her dancing was stiffer and more controlled than Spears or Beyoncé, it was just as typical of the time. When she performed at my school, she sang standard-issue US pop songs in perfectly accented English. With Music of the Sun, her debut album, Rihanna promised music that represented her culture, but most of the songs sounded like the dance pop from her American contemporaries. I expected more from the pop star whose Caribbean heritage seemed to be a significant part of her marketing. I could discern it meant “put the song on replay.” Still, other than the choice of song title, nothing about Rihanna exuded Caribbean to me, whether in dress, speech, or musical style. While none of my US-born friends knew what Rihanna meant when she sang “Come Mista DJ, song pon de replay,” her Bajan Creole wasn’t far off from the Belizean Kriol I heard growing up in my household. Her debut single, “Pon de Replay,” did not appeal to me. Rihanna had arrived on the scene a couple of years before with music I found tepid at best.

She dutifully performed a few hits between two lifeless dancers and exited the stage almost as quickly as she had entered it. Rihanna’s performance didn’t ooze much of anything. So, when Rihanna showed up to perform at my college in 2006 with her midriff covered in a baggy navy-blue T-shirt from the Gap, I was relieved that she didn’t ooze sex. I couldn’t summon the confidence required to sing “Don’t you wanna dance up on me?” or “I know you want my body” in front of my classmates. The few times my friends cajoled me into partying, I hid behind the wall farthest from the dance floor. When everyone else was swiveling their hips to Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” or Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” at parties, I was holed up in my dorm room in silence, studying for the next day’s pop quiz. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a crop top or with a belly button ring. They sang about their sex appeal, something I didn’t have or understand. I had nothing in common with these women. When I went to college in the mid-aughts, sexy female pop stars in crop tops and elaborate belly button rings-think Britney Spears and Beyoncé in their early twenties-were in vogue.

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