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It all adds up to the feeling of a lot of bustling in one spot-activity, but not necessarily movement. When Rihanna’s voice comes in, so do some signifiers of ’80s and ’90s dance and rap: digital handclaps, distorted shouting. The percussion is subtle, rendered with a skittering sound that recalls the shaking of a kettle. Electronic notes on the low end burble out a more asymmetrical pattern recalling reggae, but they too have the general shape of ascending and descending. A keyboard ping anchors the downbeat and then climbs up, up, down, down, returning to its starting point. The producer Boi-1da’s bright, bubbly beat creates a see-sawing sensation out of a few sounds.

Recommended: Here's a Diagram to Explain the Tangled Web Kanye, Wiz Khalifa, Amber Rose, and Kim Kardashian Weave But there’s something fascinating about the tune, something that elevates it beyond ringtone status. You might call the way it goes about attaining this goal brazen for anyone else but Rihanna: Tempting accusations of boringness, hackiness, and crimes against art, the song offers a hook that practically parodies pop’s love of repetition-and then repeats it, a lot. It is also, of course, designed to get her that paycheck. Days ago, Rihanna took a picture of herself listening to the new album in $9,000 Versailles-inspired headphones.Īnd now, there’s her hugely anticipated single titled “Work.” It’s about working for a paycheck no matter what else is going on in your life. There was the Samsung tie-in, as unapologetic a corporate partnership as a major working musician has ever attempted. There was “Four Five Seconds,” about the necessity for leisure to be undertaken only in the capitalistically proscribed zone between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. There was “American Oxygen,” about material ambition. There was “Bitch Better Have My Money,” about debt repayment. The long and confusing hype cycle for her new album, Anti, has taken this cash craze to new levels. If pop music today is mythology, Rihanna is unmistakably the goddess of money.

Most important, though, was the confession of being obsessed with dollars, which over the years has seemed like her main neurosis, her main message, and her main virtue. “Got my mind on my money, and I’m not going awayyyyy,” she sang, giving us her entire career: In the Snoop Dogg reference, her hip-hop sensibility in the elongated final word, her tendency to use words as putty in the promise of longevity, a prophecy now fulfilled. Rihanna offered her mission statement way back on T.I.’s smash “Live Your Life” in 2008, a time when her place in the pop firmament was just being cemented.