Memories of school bus ride to discovery with Rihanna for company

For a gay man who had yet to come out, some songs were tough territory

Pop singer Rihanna’s recent half-time show at the 2023 Super Bowl marked the first time she has performed in four years. She has not released any new music for seven.

There was a time when Rihanna’s music was a part of mainstream life, whether you sought it out or not. Between 2005 and 2012, she released eight studio albums. More than 40 of her songs have charted in the UK Top 40.

These were the years I was at secondary school. Her songs played on the radio during the bus ride to Kemnay in Aberdeenshire. Classmates sang the lyrics and debated which songs were best. During friends’ birthday parties at Aberdeen’s Sunset Boulevard, the music videos played on the screens above us as we bowled.

I did not realise that I’d come to associate Rihanna’s music with my school days until she stopped releasing any. Without new tracks to play, her songs circulated less on the radio – and, when they did, it was singles from years gone by.

I became an adult. I don’t think I particularly noticed whether Rihanna was releasing music or not. But, suddenly, I would find myself thrust into a memory from school when one of her songs came on in the supermarket. Once this happened a few times, I realised that her records were a kind of time capsule that encapsulated an era of my life.

I did not seek Rihanna’s music out when I was young, but I liked it enough to notice when it was on. It isn’t the same as the significance that I attributed to Taylor Swift at the time, where I imagined that her songs explained, or at least reflected, situations I was going through.

The memories I attach to Rihanna’s songs do not return easily because they were never put there on purpose. They come piece by piece, fragmented, and inconsistently from listen to listen.

Watching her Super Bowl performance, hearing many songs in a fast-paced medley, no memory comes as a discrete thing. It’s a flurry of feelings, vibes, half-remembered scents and colours, noises and sounds.

Even now, I can’t organise the feelings that the songs bring forward into coherent anecdotes. I just have to dwell in the general nostalgia that they summon and see where that leads.

The track Diamonds reminds me of bus journeys to school because it came out the year we got a coach where the driver always played Radio 2 in the morning. I remember the people who sat around me, why everyone sat in these configurations, the conversations we had between headrests and what we said when the single that got radio play from that album shifted to Stay.

I remember where I was when Diamonds was stuck in my head, lines from the chorus repeating even though I hadn’t heard the song in days. I remember the way it sent me to YouTube on the family computer on weekday evenings, MSN Messenger chat boxes flashing orange, to watch back the songs I hadn’t clocked when they came out.

I remember how I became obsessed with What’s My Name? I could not get enough of how Rihanna’s voice shifted so deftly through the lyrics of the chorus. I realised that I had liked the song when it was released but, then, without even thinking about it, I had dismissed it as not for me. I hadn’t come out as gay then. I had not felt it was safe to be seen loving the song.

I remember what was being discussed in those online conversations on the family computer, which was safe to use only because my parents were watching TV in the living room. I remember the feelings I felt able to type on the keyboard, the things that others typed to me – things that we did not and perhaps could not say to each other in person.

So much can be bound up in one song that the artist never put there. I invest it with my own poignancies. I do not always do so consciously. Understanding what a piece of music means to us can be messy.

Memory, so often, is like a scarf being pulled from a magician’s sleeve. You think you are getting something small, compact and complete, only to find that an entire thread is coming

out in your hands. You do not know where it will end, which can be frightening.

I might assume that, because I’ve already lived them, there is nothing in my memories that can shock or surprise me.

Weaving together so many of her hits into a tightly packed medley, Rihanna will have set faint bells ringing in lots of people’s heads, the world over. And, in those heads – in the dormant memories people have not realised they are holding on to – is the power of a life lived to make itself known anew.

Understanding what a piece of music means to us can be messy

COMEBACK QUEEN: Rihanna’s halftime show at Super Bowl will have woken many a dormant memory in fans who have now grown up.