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Rihanna Iz a Whole Vibe

Thirty-seven tracks, and the striking thing is how few of the obvious ones are here. This is a Rihanna playlist built from album cuts, and it makes a better case than the hits do.

The most adaptable pop star of her generation

Robyn Rihanna Fenty left Barbados at sixteen after auditioning for Evan Rogers in a hotel room, and spent her first few years being handed material — competent Caribbean-tinged pop that could have gone to anyone. What changed was Good Girl Gone Bad in 2007 and, more importantly, her own growing willingness to choose strange records over safe ones.

What she developed is unusual: not a great technical voice, but an extraordinarily distinctive one, with a specific rasp and a phrasing that sits slightly behind the beat. She became the artist producers wanted to work with because she made unusual production sound like pop.

She has since largely stopped releasing music in favour of Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty, which have made her a billionaire and changed what a pop career can be.

What to listen for

"Same Ol' Mistakes" opening the playlist is the boldest choice available. It is a full cover of Tame Impala's "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" from ANTI — nearly seven minutes of psychedelic rock, sung almost identically to the original, on a mainstream pop album. Nobody else would have attempted it.

"Love On The Brain" and "Kiss It Better" are the other ANTI highlights and show her at her most vocally exposed.

"Man Down" is the great underrated single — a reggae record about killing a man, released to considerable controversy, and one of the best things she has done.

"Consideration" with SZA and "Work" with Drake are the two that connect her most directly to Caribbean rhythm.

The early material — "Music Of The Sun," "Here I Go Again," "Selfish Girl," "Watch n' Learn" — is where a playlist like this earns its keep. These are album tracks almost nobody plays, and they show the raw material before the persona arrived.

"Never Ending" and "Yeah, I Said It" are the deepest cuts here.

Go deeper

ANTI (2016) is the album — the one where she took full control and made something genuinely uncommercial that sold anyway. Rated R (2009) is the dark one and the most underrated.

For the Barbadian context, calypso and soca are the island's own traditions, and Alison Hinds is the artist to know.

And the wider point: Rihanna's career is the clearest example available of a pop star who understood that the music was one asset among several. Whether that is a triumph or a loss depends on whether you wanted another album.

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