Rihanna strips down in San Jose, but it’s not what you might expect
At a stop at the SAP Center in San Jose on Friday, the 28-year-old Barbadian singer, known for her racy Instragram posts and raunchy pop hits, opened the concert not with one of her many club bangers but the mournful piano ballad, “Stay,” as she stood draped in an oversized canvas hoodie atop a bare white platform in the middle of the arena floor.
Rihanna, who made her appearance 30 minutes after her set’s scheduled start time, also made a vague reference to some backstage troubles but promised the sold-out room, “I’m going to do my best to make it up you all.”
Rihanna spent the first part of the concert squirming on a clear plastic catwalk above the crowd - revealing she was not wearing pants but rather some very high reaching boots -- dancing along and occasionally mouthing the words to the numbers “Woo” and “Sex With Me” before making it to the actual stage, where she joined her live band.
The breezy Caribbean vibes of songs like “Rude Boy” and “Man Down” felt chaotic, altered to match the spaced-out mood of Rihanna’s latest album, also titled “Anti.”
Rihanna is bigger than the music now - a star of social media, couture designers and supermarket tabloids.
The concert was arranged in four thematic parts but they all felt alien - seriously, the stage director must have watched “The Force Awakens” like a hundred times - until a final flourish when Rihanna seemed to suddenly snap to life, her body, voice and music regaining its familiar fluid splendor for sweaty, knockout performances of “Diamonds,” “FourFiveSeconds” and “Love On the Brain.”
The opening act, the Houston rapper Travis Scott, never appeared, sending out an all-caps apology on Twitter that said, in part, “Craziest accident happen which got us in late.”