Rihanna’s fans packed the Staples Center Monday night for her Diamonds World tour concert. The show opened with the many floating, rotating video panels covered in a diamond motif and then closed with “Diamonds,” but the diamond theme ended there. It could have just as easily been called her Diamonds, Marble, Fire, Chain-Linked, Smoke, Semi-Truck, Mug-Shot, Shattered-Glass World tour. It was all over the place. Even Rihanna’s hair was part sexy sophisticated and part punk, with the left side shaved and the right side full of long waves in a permanent Jessica Rabbit ‘do. She even completed the image by wearing a red dress with a slit all the way up to her hip for “Stay.”
It’s fitting that her concert would be made up of so many diverse scenes; Rihanna’s musical history is just as eclectic. Her songs range from Pop to R&B to Dance to Reggae to Rock, and she performed some of her best-known and well-loved songs from each genre as well as some of her less mainstream music. Her voice can be delicate and heartbreaking, but she also knows how to get the crowd up and dancing. Rihanna also knows how to be powerfully sexy, to the point of being raunchy. Much of her dancing consisted of a lot of hip thrusting and crotch tapping. Granted, that may have been all that she could do in her white stiletto boots, which were tall enough to reach just below the bottom of her see-through t-shirt. Of course, she did have half a dozen costume changes, and she and her backup dancers did some great dancing later in the evening.
All in all, the concert was damn entertaining and the crowd loved the spectacle. While I don’t need flames shooting from the stage to enjoy a show, I did leave feeling like I just experienced something very special and exciting. Like many, I only really knew Rihanna from her biggest radio hits, so it was great to be reminded of the many sides of her musical personality.
RAWR(for more)
