Rihanna Kept Us Waiting
She was three hours late. Three hours of standing in a venue, watching the drinks tokens disappear one by one, listening to the crowd shift from excited to restless to actively hostile. By the time Rihanna finally walked onstage, the room had cycled through every stage of a relationship—adoration, doubt, frustration, resignation—and then she started singing and most people forgave her immediately.
The set moved predictably from ballad to banger and back again, the kind of hits-heavy production you get when someone has too many good songs to fit into ninety minutes. I couldn’t give you a setlist at this point. What I remember more clearly is that Congorock played the opening—an Italian DJ absolutely on it, the kind of relentless energy I’d have paid full club entry for at 3 a.m. under different circumstances. That part was worth standing for.
Willy came with me, which helped. I ran into Jessie and her partner somewhere in the crowd. Nike was there too, visibly unimpressed by the whole production. I spent a chunk of the waiting time talking to DENA about savings banks and flea markets, which felt like either a very Berlin conversation or a very strange one—hard to say after the fact.
The best moment of the night had nothing to do with Rihanna. Two women were standing directly in front of me, both short enough that they’d spent the entire concert watching through a raised digicam just to see above the crowd. They knew every word of every song. They moved to all of it, unselfconsciously, completely gone. Whatever this evening was for the rest of us—a media event, a free ticket, something to write about—for them it was the only thing happening in the world. I genuinely wanted to carry them to the front row and hand them every backstage pass in the building. They’d earned it in a way the press contingent hadn’t.
And to Rihanna herself, who definitely reads everything written about her online: if you make us stand around for three hours next time and warm up the room with thirty minutes of David Guetta afterparty music, I want something in return. Show the right one. Or write a song about how much you like me. Either works. Thank you for your consideration.