Oh What Was Her Name Again

You know stroppy cow. Used to date what's-his-face. Looked a bit like Whitney Houston.

That's right, Shakira's new song "Can't Remember to Forget You" featuring Rihanna has today been released online; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VMyHr1gIg&feature=youtu.be and is a relatively strong and heavily ska-infused track. Ska music of course started out in the 1940/50's in Jamaica and formed the basis for reggae music. It was probably made most famous though by the British Skinhead/2 Tone scene of the early-1980's that was born out of punk and featured bands like The Selector and The Specials with their song "Hey Little Rich Girl." The downtuned rock guitars are an obvious but not entirely correct reference to UK Ska's punk roots.

Although I've only given it a couple of quick listens Can't Remember to Forget You is certainly much stronger then I was expecting. If you remember towards the autumn of 2013 Rihanna's CIA handlers/Live Nation (the management) were trying to get her to record the track "Timber" with US artist Pittbull. Unfortunately for them Rihanna was already busy working on this song so the Timber track was eventually released with Ke$ha performing the female role at around the time of the COP19/CMP9 Summit.

Rihanna's tour which was going on at the same time was titled "Diamonds" as a little joke about the damage that Rihanna was going to do to resource rich, sub-Saharan African nations such as the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) along with their neighbours such as South Africa. The most important natural resource in these nations and the one that was most relevant to the COP19/CMP9 through the REDD+ program is wood or timber. So if Rihanna had released a track called Timber at around that time it is hard to imagine a way for her to come back from that politically. As such I was expecting Can't Remember to Forget You to be a bit of a rush job drawn up on the back of an envelope in order to keep Rihanna busy and out of trouble.

Shakira of course represents pretty much everything Rihanna isn't. For a start Shakira writes almost all of her own material and manages her own career. Although she's been out of the spotlight in recent years that's because Shakira's been concentrating on her, by all accounts, healthy and fulfilling relationship with Spanish footballer Gerard Pique. In January 2013 the couple celebrated the birth of their first child. Most importantly though Shakira is widely respected within the international development community through her work with the Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation that she set up and has been running since the age of around 17.

In that we get into the management's reasons for allowing Rihanna to work on the track because Rihanna is never going to come off well from a direct comparison to Shakira. Beyond the immediate damage to Rihanna's reputation there is no doubt some hope that people will believe that in singing the lyrics that Shakira wrote for her the boy that Rihanna can't remember to forget is Chris Brown creating speculation of yet another reunion. However I think that the lyrics about doing anything for that boy is more of a reference about the great efforts we've all had to go to keep Rihanna out of trouble this past year. After all Shakira and I have a little bit of a history even if she's not fully aware of it.

Also there seem to be little attempts to cause a bit of controversy in South America in order to resurrect the Diamonds tour with a South American leg. For example in the second verse the way Rihanna sings the lyric "Laying in his bed" sounds a bit like she's singing "Lenin is dead." Along with Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin is considered one of the father's of Communism which is apparently still popular in parts of South America. Therefore some of the more paranoid leaders in nations such as Venezuela and Bolivia could get the impression that by announcing that "Lenin is Dead" Rihanna is trying to energise an anti-Communist movement which is a huge historical issue on the continent due to the CIA's School of the Americas program.

The main message though is an attempt to continue the discussion about what happens now to Rihanna. With it pretty much accepted that there won't be a South American leg of the Diamonds World Tour the management's plan was that Rihanna would now be back in a hugely damaging relationship with Chris Brown and in the absence of a career in the music industry would be instead be focusing on shoddy charity projects such as VivaGlam and the hideous UNICEF(US) campaign against the Philippines. By getting Rihanna to appear alongside Shakira who is very successful in her charity work on a song about remembering to forget people the management were trying to promote discussion about whether anyone in the business would remember Rihanna's name long enough to give a sh*t what charity work she did.


(Originally Posted) 16:30 on 13/1/14 (UK date).