In April 2009, Calvin Harris had a UK number one with a song that now looks strikingly prescient. 'I'm Not Alone' was part of a brace of early 2009 hits that re-purposed chart music around electronic dance sounds; while 2008 had seen number one hits for artists like Kid Rock, Coldplay, Kings of Leon and the Ting Tings, 2009 saw guitars virtually excised from the charts. Three key producers, and their imitators, defined the sound of UK mainstream music during 2009: RedOne, who crafted Lady Gaga's trashy, electroclash hedonism; Fraser T. Smith, who broke Tinchy Stryder to the mainstream with a sound like grime inverted, all soft, floaty, synthetic strings; and, of course, David Guetta, whose stadium-sized house ploughed a furrow somewhere between the two, simultaneously trashy and transcendent, hard and soft. Harris' 'I'm Not Alone' centred around one feature in particular - a massive trance riff - which sounded oddly out-of-time in early 2009, but which has since become an inescapable feature of chart music (to the point of Chris Brown more or less ripping off the 'I'm Not Alone' riff for 'Yeah 3x' last year).
While the pop world was suddenly running off into an apparently endless Gaga/Guetta party, Rihanna was, of course, having a pretty horrible 2009, which she ended with the release of her fourth album, Rated R. Overall, it was a dark and cathartic record, incorporating doomy ballads, rock and dubstep; it was strikingly out of step with the light, frothy rave sounds that had come to dominate pop. As if to compensate, and to catch up with the zeitgeist (and the fun), Rihanna followed up Rated R with the colourful party-pop of Loud; the record made her into one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, comfortably doubling the global sales of its predecessor and spawning a series of hits. Her 2011 has felt like something of a victory lap. Now, for the third consecutive November, she's preparing to release a new album, Talk That Talk, for which 'We Found Love' is the lead single.
For it, she's crossed paths with Calvin Harris, who has scored a couple of number 2 hits already in 2011 (the Kelis-assisted 'Bounce' and 'Feel So Close', which just missed out on the top spot thanks to this and this respectively). And I'm driven back to April 2009, and 'I'm Not Alone', the last time Calvin Harris was at number one; its stadium-sized trance riff makes the record sound a lot like a lot of songs that have been released since, but its mood is fundamentally different from most of the party-pop that has dominated 2009-11. It is dance music that is not about dancing, not about the party and the club; it reverberates with a transcendent melancholia, a deep sense of loneliness. The same is true of 'We Found Love' - it is simpler, and better, than just about any of Rihanna's recent singles; it blows her recent attempts at elecropop - the thumping, soulless 'Only Girl (In The World)', the gimmicky, attention-grabbing 'S&M' - out of the water entirely.
As a song, 'We Found Love' is disarmingly reductive. Rihanna's vocal melody is minimal and circular, dominated mostly by a single melodic phrase; Calvin Harris, on production duties, is more active, turning out a dynamic bit of Balearic house, complete with big, intense, distorted-synth builds he's already employed on 'Bounce'. Nevertheless, Rihanna is still the star of the show; her voice is like an icy, spectral presence, occupying soaring Donna Summer-esque heights. The lyric, like the vocal, is minimal but perfectly-measured, revolving around the declaration of the chorus: "we found love in a hopeless place". Hope in hopelessness, beauty amidst desolation, euphoria mixed with sadness - this is what so much of the best pop music embodies. 'We Found Love' works as a straight love song; but around the edges of the song, it is hard to escape the implication that the love in question has been lost as well as found. A lot of pop choruses are written in the present or future tense, but 'We Found Love' is firmly oriented towards the past; the song's other key lyric, outside of that chorus, is Rihanna's philosophical sigh of "I've gotta let it go".
I haven't lived with the song for very long, so I've got plenty of time to change my mind. But right now, to me, 'We Found Love' feels the best Rihanna single for quite some time - since 'Russian Roulette', or perhaps even the towering 'Umbrella' itself. With its past-tense orientation, an inversion of the anticipatory euphoria of 'I Gotta Feeling' or 'Dynamite', the song might even be a subtle comedown after the frantic hedonism of 2009-11 in-the-club pop. It is certainly, on its own terms, a wonderful pop record and one of the very best number ones of 2011.
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