The idea that someone needed to “translate” and perform “Work” in order to make it more palatable to other white people is needlessly insulting. Indeed, as British YouTube singer Samantha Harvey wrote about her cover, “I did spend a while translating the lyrics before I could sing it.” Samantha to the rescue! Harvey’s fans went on to praise her for her good work helping them “understand” the lyrics and essentially for making “Work” a much better, more white friendly song. She says mockery of Rihanna’s speech in “Work” “just continues to back up the idea that White people love Black culture and concepts just as long as they’re not being portrayed by Black people.” If that seems like something of a stretch to you, consider the way in which an “anglicised” version of “Work” has been widely celebrated online for its “cleaning up” of the songs lyrics. As Ariel Leconte wrote in Jawbreaker, white pop culture is more than happy to celebrate black culture, but only on its own, whitewashed terms. What is new is our awareness of the misappropriation of culture. Patois in popular music, essentially, is not new. If you want to go further back still, one of the most legendary artists ever to live, Bob Marley, sang predominantly in patois (with his son, Damian Marley, still carrying this legacy). Other contemporary artists have also used patois, from DJ Agent Sasco’s speech on Kendrick Lamar’s “ Blacker the Berry” to Kanye West and GOOD Music’s “ Mercy”, while Shaggy, Beenie Man and Sean Paul all sang liberally in patois throughout the 90s and early 00s, building careers on a pop-reggae-dancehall hybrid.
Both “ Rude Boy” and “ Man Down” pay homage to her linguistic culture. But it’s not like this is the first time Rihanna has sung in patois.
RIHANNA WORK WORK WORK LYRICS FULL
In terms of Rihanna’s “Work”, her patois takes on an even looser form, broken up with full English sentences. Patois is a local dialect spoken in Caribbean cultures, from Jamaica to Rihanna’s native Barbados, including pidgins, creoles and other dialects. Sometimes the underlying implication is that only people who talk English are fully human.” “Birds and animals are said to jabber” he wrote, “so are speakers of a foreign tongue. Mark Abley of the Montreal Gazette addressed the inherent racism of using “gibberish” and other analogous words like “jabber” and “gibber”. You can be an idiot not realising you’re being an idiot and still be an idiot. Just because someone doesn’t know Rihanna is using patois in her lyrics, it doesn’t make mocking what they perceive to be “ slurring” any less stupid. Which, by the way, is not an excuse for casual racism. You wouldn’t do these things because they’re moronic and ignorant. Creating memes making a joke of Rihanna’s speech is like putting a picture of a Chinese person next to crudely white-interpreted Chinese words and laughing at it. The same can be said of other social media, where thousands of people have come out to call Rihanna’s lyrics “ gibberish”.Ĭalling the lyrics “gibberish” is like going to France and disdainfully saying everyone there was inconveniently indecipherable. Beneath the insensitive jokes are hundreds of comments saying “LOL”, “haha” or “this is accurate”. And it’s not just the posters of the memes that are at fault. It’s worth noting that accounts that post this sort of rubbish are just “meme generators” that mostly just steal their “jokes” anyway, but that takes me back to my point – if you’re going to steal a meme, at least know the importance of what you’re stealing. “Work” is nothing less than a jam, but it’s being co-opted by a white pop culture that has omitted to recognise the song’s dancehall roots (outside of music critics and genre fans, of course), essentially rejecting the cultural history on which “Work” is predicated.Īs memes essentially making fun of Ri’s patois have emerged, like the one Le Meme Blog posted of Rihanna’s singing interspersed with Iraqi character puppets from Team America or one posted by Fuck Jerry with the word “Work” typed and followed by a mashing of keyboard letters, it’s hard to not cringe at some people’s sense of humour. Over the past week people have – by criticising Rihanna’s Barbadian patois in “Work” as “gibberish” – once again proved why we can’t have nice things, and why a lot of us need to sit the fuck down. If you’re going to say something on the Internet, in a public forum, for anyone to see, it’s in your best interests to understand what you’re commenting on, so you don’t seem, at a loose best, willfully ignorant, or at worst, pretty racist.
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