【搬运】【译】Pitchfork评Rihanna 2016年专辑《ANTI》（反了）
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Wendy Lee/Ryan-Chopin/GwenStefaniLove
校对：Joonly EC
推送：Lynn Liu
Anyone hoping that ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, some grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a fun and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its smallest and most idiosyncratic. If the album has a narrative arc, it’s about disappointment: the ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how lonesome that can feel.
任何希望《ANTI （反对）》成为Rihanna的豪华巨作的人，可能会失望。《ANTI 》是个有趣且矛盾的流行唱片，相比其他的唱片，它最小也最另类，这反倒让它最有趣。如果专辑有一条叙事主线的话，那么“失望”这条线索就稳了：自己信任的人最终还是寥寥无几，留下的依旧是无尽的孤独。
Part of Rihanna’s appeal is aspirational: survey the photographic evidence, and she seems to spend a pretty good chunk of her time wearing jewelry on yachts, smoking terrifically robust marijuana cigarettes, and making goofball faces at jokers trying to stealth-snap pics of her as she parties deep into the night.
Rihanna的魅力令人神往：翻开她的照片会发现，绝大部分时间，她都会在游艇上度过。戴着贵重的珠宝，叼着后劲十足的大*烟，对别人做鬼脸，因为他们试图在半夜宴会正酣时偷拍她。
Yet somehow, those hijinks don’t lessen her seriousness; they merely amplify it. Rihanna’s sureness regarding her presence in the world—in the work that she’s made, in the ways in which she has earned the right to palm a cocktail and chill on a beach—is bold and motivating, like Actual Confidence always is. Hearing her deliver a line like "Don’t act like you forgot/ I call the shot-shot-shots" (from 2015’s "Bitch Better Have My Money") with a kind of preternatural calm—it’s hard to imagine anything ever feeling Better than that. It is hard to imagine anyone inhabiting a pop career with more ease or aplomb.
但是不知怎的，这些狂欢作乐并未削弱她（对音乐）的严谨，反而把它们放大了。Rihanna展现给世界的沉着自信既勇敢又鼓舞人心，可以说她就是自信本人了。她的作品，她如何获得鸡尾酒，如何在沙滩上放飞自我都是有力见证。当她唱到“Don’t act like you forgot/ I call the shot-shot-shots（别给老子装憨，我才是老大）”（来自15年单曲"Bitch Better Have My Money（婊子还钱）"）时表现得异常沉着，很难想象还有啥比这更流畅了。也很难想象还有哪位流行歌手可以像Rihanna这样放松、泰然自若了。
Still, ANTI—her very-long-awaited eighth LP—arrived tentatively, almost meekly. The build-up, of course, was extraordinary. There’d been rascally fake-outs, three singles (none of which made it onto the actual album), whole social media accounts teasing its release. Then, last Wednesday afternoon, a track listing appeared (that a gang of disembodied song titles still constitutes a noteworthy breach surely indicates something about our desperate times), followed by the announcement that ANTI would be streaming exclusively on Tidal for its first week of release (who cares)—two meager dribbles of intel that were quickly overshadowed, perhaps rightly, by Kanye West hollering about pants.
《ANTI》作为Rihanna的第八张唱片，早就让人期待已久了，它姗姗来迟，甚至轻柔到悄无声息。当然，唱片组成堪称非凡。包括淘气的“骗局”——三支单曲（都未出现在《Anti》中，审注：分别为婊子还钱、四五秒和美利坚氧气，三支单曲发行后日日宣布专辑回炉重造），网友们纷纷表示都被副业天后这波操作整笑了。进而上周三下午，一张曲目列表出现在公众视野（这些毫无依据的曲名依然让我们在绝望的等待中看到了丁点希望）。紧接着宣布《ANTI》在发行的第一周只会在Tidal上独家播放（who cares）——这做法也许很恰当，毕竟两笔微不足道的小新闻很快就会因为Kanye West对裤子的吐槽黯然失色。
Then, suddenly, the album appeared in full. Anyone hoping its delayed release might suggest something about its ambition, that the three-years-in-the-making ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, a grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic. It’s not crammed with bloodthirsty, dance-oriented jams and feels distinctly smaller, more inward-facing than her previous records, as if it were intended as a kind of spiritual stock-taking, a moment of reckoning for both Rihanna and her fans. Her grainy, mesmerizing voice is paramount here, the sun in ANTI’s universe, the thing everything else orbits: "I got to do things my own way, darling," she announces over a stuttering, distorted beat in opener "Consideration," a prickly collaboration with the R&B singer SZA. The sentiment feels deliberately placed, meant as a way to read everything that follows.
突然间，整部专辑亮相，任何希望它推迟发行的人都可能暗示一些专辑的雄心，也就是说，三年磨一剑的《ANTI》可能是Rihanna的作品，然而这个宏大的意图宣言可能并不会给人留下什么深刻的印象。《ANTI》是一个意蕴丰富又充满矛盾的流行唱片，最有趣之处莫过于它最另类的地方。唱片并未充斥着血腥、以舞蹈主打的混乱场面，只是感觉非常小，和从前的唱片相比，更多的是深入内心的反省，它似乎意欲成为一个精神宝库，让Rihanna和她的粉丝都能进行一次灵魂的盘点。她沙哑的嗓音魅力十足，在唱片中极为重要。太阳便是《ANTI》的宇宙，一切事物都围绕它转：在开场曲目"Consideration（关心）"中，伴着一系列跃动感极强的节拍，她宣告“我有自己的选择，有自己的路要走。”（词源网易云音乐）这首歌由她和R&B歌手SZA合作完成。情绪似乎是故意这样展露的，让听众带着节奏继续听下去。
Ironically, if the album has a narrative arc buried underneath the fuck-off, broad-strokes empowerment now so omnipresent on pop radio, it’s about disappointment: The ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how catastrophically lonesome that can feel. It’s also about self-isolation, and how being good at being on your own ("I can be a lone wolf," she sings on "Desperado," her vocals deep, crackly) can become its own kind of albatross, a cage that bars from the inside.
讽刺的是，如果在这糟糕的广泛授权之下（现在这种授权在流行电台中无处不在），专辑能有一条叙事主线，那么串联起来的无非是失望的故事了：你真正信任的人最终还是寥寥无几，真切感受到的只有灾难似的孤独。满满的自我隔离，告诉人们如何独处。这些都可以变成枷锁，也是一个从里面锁起来的牢笼。正如在"Desperado（亡命之徒）"中，她用深邃沙哑的声音唱到 “我可以孤军奋战”。（词源网易云音乐）
The dancehall and dub-indebted single "Work" hints at an intimacy in what is otherwise a fairly transactional Rihanna single: Drake is here, sounding weirdly buttoned-up and too articulate, like a grown man wandering onto the beach in a pair of ill-fitting jeans. The hook is Rihanna babbling about getting it done—"work-work-work-work-work-work"—her vocals devolving into something more instinctive than language, as if it gushed forth from some underground spring instead of her throat. But the words suggest that another Rihanna, a more wounded and wary version, is hovering nearby.
“Work”这种节奏感极强的歌最适合在舞厅放了，歌曲中暗含了一种亲密关系，没有这层关系的话那这又是一首相当标准的属于Rihanna的商业单曲：Drake在这首歌中听起来像是在边唱歌边举止古怪地扣着扣子，吐词过于立体，听起来像一个成年男子穿着不合身的牛仔裤在海滩上漫步而哼的歌。歌曲中最吸引人的部分要属Rihanna喋喋不休地声称“要把事情做完”——“努力工作，努力工作，努力工作，努力工作，努力工作”——这些词已经发展成了一种她自然而然发出的声音，其无意识形态已经超过语言本身，仿佛这声音不是从她的喉咙里发出来的，而是从某个地下泉里喷涌而出。但这些词也表明，另一位受伤更重、做事更谨慎的Rihanna逐渐出现在大众视野中。
"Yeah, I Said It," co-written and co-produced by Timbaland, is a crawling, steamy ode to two people slamming up against a wall (literally): "Yeah, I said it, boy, get up inside it/ I want you to homicide it," Rihanna purrs over a sparse, hazy beat. "Never Ending," which nicks a vocal melody from Dido’s "Thank You," is a gooey, vulnerable dirge that reiterates how Rihanna experiences love, how it helps her navigate and recognize her physical self, the way she feels its absence physically: "I knew your face once, but now it’s unclear," she sings. "And I can’t feel my body now."
联合Timbaland谱写和制作的"Yeah, I Said It,"是首迂回婉转的，se情的颂歌，歌颂两个人撞到墙上的情景，Rihanna在稀疏朦胧的节奏里轻语道： "Yeah, I said it, boy, get up inside it/ I want you to homicide it" ，歌曲"Never Ending”借用了Dido"Thank You"里的人声旋律，是一首感伤而脆弱的挽歌，反复讲述了Rihanna如何体验爱，爱又如何指引她，帮助她认出真我，以一种缺爱的姿态讲述着： "I knew your face once, but now it’s unclear,"她唱道."And I can’t feel my body now."
Do we need access to that girl? Maybe not—there’s plenty here that feels high-stakes and revealing. Rihanna talks more convincingly about sex than almost any other pop star, and some of ANTI’s most striking tracks are also its nastiest: "Love on the Brain" is a retro-leaning doo-wop jam with a crew of backing vocalists that takes an unexpected turn toward the dark: "It beats me black and blue, but it fucks me so good," Rihanna chants, her voice suddenly flinty. Her deployment of "it" feels deliberate, painting her partner as a disembodied force, less a person than a ghost she can’t escape.
我们需要多去了解一下那个Rihanna吗?也许不需要吧，我们已经知道了很多可以让人心跳加速且发人深省的信息了。Rihanna谈论“性”时几乎比其他所有明星都更会说，而在《ANTI》的好几首良曲中，都不乏她能想到的最黄的段子：“Love on the Brain”属于旧时流行的嘟哇音乐（译者注：嘟哇音乐是一种流行于20世纪40年代至60年代的重唱形式），配上背景和声后，风格就意想不到地转向了黑暗风:“它让我伤心难过却又让我如此着迷，”Rihanna在歌中这样唱到,唱到这里她的声音也突然更加坚定了。她定是经过深思熟虑才这么熟练地用上了“它”这个词，歌中她的伴侣被描绘成一种无形的力量，与其说是一个人，不如说“它”是一个缠着她的幽灵。
But it’s "Higher," the record’s penultimate track—it really should be its coda—a two-minute imploration to a distant lover, asking him to just come over, already, that feels the most revelatory. The track was co-written by Bibi Bourelly, the 20-year-old electropop artist from Berlin who also wrote "Bitch Better Have My Money." "This whiskey got me feelin’ pretty, so pardon if I’m impolite," Rihanna sings, her voice raked, raspy, desperate over collapsing strings. Whatever had been holding her together until then—it broke. "I wanna go back to the old way," she admits. "But I’m drunk and still with a full ashtray, with a little bit too much to say." And then, as if it had never happened—as if she deleted the text, pulled the blankets up and went to sleep—the song ends, unresolved.
“Higher”是普通版专辑的倒数第二首歌，但其实它更适合放作尾曲，这首两分钟的歌是对远方情人恳求，恳求他来到身边，这是最具启示意义的一首歌了。该曲由20岁的柏林电子流行乐歌手Bibi Bourelly（曾参与填词“Bitch Better Have My Money”）与Rihanna共同创作。“这杯威士忌让我感觉真美妙，对不起，如果我有所冒犯。（词源网易云音乐）”Rihanna充满怒气地唱到，在断断续续的弦乐衬托下，她的声音飘忽沙哑而充满绝望。曾经支撑着她的东西在那一刻都已支离破碎。“我想回到过去，”她在歌中这样承认。“但我已伶仃大醉，旁边的烟灰缸已满，想说的话太多了。”然后，一切都像从未发生过——仿佛她已删除了那些短信，拉起毯子就睡着了——这首歌就这样结束了，她的心结还是没有解开。
