Let’s Talk Talent & Motherhood: Rihanna’s SPECTACULAR Super Bowl LVII Performance

We Found Love
Umbrella 
Love on the Brain
Pour It Up
Where Have You Been
Hate That I Love You
Wild Thoughts
Birthday Cake
Take Care
Man Down
Diamonds
Only Girl 
Love the Way You Lie
Pon de Replay
Don’t Stop the Music
Run This Town
Needed Me
All of the Lights
This Is What You Came For
Stay
Work
SOS
B*tch Better Have My Money
FourFiveSeconds
What’s My Name
S&M
Disturbia
Rude Boy
Take a Bow
Kiss It Better
Loyalty
Lift Me Up

Fenty Beauty

Savage x Fenty 

9 Grammy Awards
12 Billboard Music Awards
13 American Music Awards (including the Icon Award)
7 MTV Video Music Awards (including the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award)
A CFDA Fashion Icon Award
Harvard’s Humanitarian of the Year

Billionaire

Mom

I’m not a HUGE Rihanna fan. I wouldn’t call myself a part of the Navy, nor do I run when a Fenty product drops. I do LOVE her music, the personality she shows us, her fashion, her entrepreneurial spirit, and her love for her home — so imma support her, period. 

Last night, I set an alarm for 7:50 to make sure I turned the TV on to catch the Halftime Show.  I peeped the last 53 seconds of the first half and a few commercials before the only part that mattered began. 

When the camera zoomed out from her face to show her fit that featured her belly and the subsequent rub, I was HYPE. I was hype because I thought she was flaunting her postpartum belly. The fact that I had that thought proved one thing—Rihanna is the type of celeb to praise and parade a totally natural, and fully accepted, body. Let’s recall how she started the trend of wearing an exposed pregnant belly, which has been followed by Fat Nwigwe, Jessie J and others. 

This singular thought made me want to run in the streets belly-out, for the first time ever—I felt seen and empowered. 

*cues the pregnancy speculation* 

I had thoughts about people’s discourtesy and ignorance of what a postpartum body could look like. Why would y’all jump to that conclusion without a blatant overture? …I ignored.

Instead of chasing my frustration, I danced around my kitchen, with Tre in tow, screaming every single song in the setlist. Honor joined me, and Kev tapped his foot from his chair. Kev and I discussed the heat that had to be consuming those dancers, the should-be award-winning videographers, and how fantastic Rihanna looked. We had a blast. 

The show ended and I walked away, to put my children to bed, satisfied. 

*cues more pregnancy speculation, disappointment in her pregnancy, and posts about her “underperformance”*

As I said, I’d just put my boys to bed, it was 8:30. I didn’t have time, nor energy, for negativity. 

But I had TIME this morning. 

I woke up, got myself ready for the day, dropped the boys off, came back home, cooked a lil brekkie, did a lil scrolling - and I remembered (aka IG and Facebook ticked me off). I saw the slander from the night before, some that had even trickled into my sunny morning. By this time my girl’s pregnancy was confirmed, so, NOW I have thoughts and time (and Lord, if this ain’t all I need to start a fire😂). I began on Facebook with this, 

“The comments about Rihanna giving anything less than the 10 she gave proves our culture’s pursuit of perfection, especially without the awareness of personal unattainability. 

What do I mean? 

In spite of Rihanna maintaining the stamina and grace to perform a 13 minute show on the world’s biggest stage while pregnant, less than a year postpartum, and having not performed a single song in over 6 years, y’all wanted more. In spite of Rihanna’s catalog hosting most of the greatest party songs of all time, y’all think she needed accompaniment. In spite of her mid-air suspension, y’all wanted back-flips and belly rolls. 

Y’all have become so accustomed to remarkable feats (ones most of us could never accomplish) that your brains warp reality. She’s Rihanna, she was asked AGAIN to do the Super Bowl because her MUSIC speaks for itself. Check your standards. 

I thought I was done, but matter of a fact, this also shows our culture’s bias toward work and motherhood. Stay tuned for the blog. Y’all annoying.🤣✌🏽” 

I’ll finish here with this: 

(1) I know you’ve been told, but let me remind you. Don’t EVER assume a woman is pregnant so much so as to say it out loud. Have the thought and wait ’til it’s confirmed. That is a life skill and advice that could take you far if you let it. 

(2) When I saw reactions to Rihanna’s pregnancy filled with the gall to say “We won’t get new music now,” I was disgusted. As if the decisions she makes about her life and body are about y’all and what you want. If Rihanna never makes another song again, she’s given us the best of the best already and continues to flood us with more of her greatness in other ways.

After I released my Facebook post, I thought about it some more and realized how parallel I felt Rihanna and I might be (I wish we were parallel in money but that’s another thing for another day 🤣). Rihanna stopped making music in 2016, and pivoted to beauty, I felt this was similar to how I shifted from hair to communications. Not that, for either of us, these were huge leaps from our interests and talents before, but maybe, just maybe, moving in the second direction was more fulfilling, exciting, and aligned with what we should be doing with bigger parts of our lives.

Maybe, y’all aren’t getting new music, not because she’s having babies but because she’s found what sings to her heart in Fenty and Savage. Maybe y’all aren’t getting new music, not because she’s tired of music but because she can make more money with less energy pursuing other arenas. Maybe y’all aren’t getting new music, not because she wants to lay low but because y’all are selfish and she ain’t no people pleaser.🤷🏾‍♀️ 

(3) You see the stats at the top. That woman has already won every which way, and for anyone who’s never performed so much as a talent show to have so much hurrah over a pregnant woman’s Super Bowl performance, shame on you. The same culture that shames and assumes still expects her to perform to the same level as a non-carrying 20-year-old—the audacity. She didn’t need to twerk or do a single trick to let her gift speak for itself, nor did she need A MAN to help carry her performance (because not a single person mentioned another woman that she should’ve brought out—are those crickets I hear?…Oh.). She sang, moved and bodied hit after hit after hit. And THAT was enough. 

It’s due time for our culture to level-set our expectations. No one we know is superhuman. No one can meet our unrealistic standards of perfection. No one can be everything all at once. We can all just do the absolute best we can—and I’m not sorry to anyone who disagrees, Rihanna’s best is better than ALL OF OURS after last night. Give that woman her flowers, she deserves every good thing. I can’t think of anyone who could have outperformed her under the circumstances, but I’d love to see someone else try.

To be pregnant and talented is to be pregnant and discounted, even if all the work up until that point adds up to a literal billion. To be a mom and have a career is to make tiny decisions every day about what’s best for almost every single person you encounter because of how you feel you’re perceived—less than a good mom, less than a good coworker, less than a caregiver, less than a success. I have no doubt Rihanna thought tirelessly about putting on the best show for y’all and taking the best care of her baby, for y’all to turn around and drag her hard work. Nah, we’re not going to have that.

To moms everywhere, let Rihanna be a symbol that, first of all, you can do ANYTHING! Let her performance model a healthy work-life balance, where you can give it your all and still have boundaries. Let her guiding decisions on the timing of her Super Bowl show, be a lesson to us that not everything has to happen at the time society says it does—she’s YEARS out from new music and they still called her, even after she declined the first time. Let the steps she’s taken in her career remind us that it’s okay to change our minds, pick a different direction, have a new idea, and slay it. Let her influence help us acknowledge that becoming a mom doesn’t have to mean becoming irrelevant. Let her choice to perform by herself prove that we’re enough all by ourselves. 

It’s a gift to remember how good you are. She gave it to me last night, I’m giving it to you.