Though her dulce de leche skin is lineless and her eyes bright as a baby’s even after a long workday, it’s easy to forget that Rihanna is only 21 years old. Perhaps that’s because she has released four hit-filled albums in only four years, making her debut at age 17 seem aeons ago. Or maybe it’s that her performances are a paradigm of cool self-possession; in the video for “Run This Town,” the Grammy-nominated song she recorded with Jay-Z and Kanye West last year, her voice is so full and centered, her panache so effortless, that she makes the world’s biggest hip-hop stars seem little more than backup singers. Finally, of course, it could be because, over the past year, she has endured not only the now infamous abuse by her then boyfriend Chris Brown but also the subsequent leaking of photos of her disfigured face, months of paparazzi stalking and incessant news coverage. The Barbadian-born pop star, however, has her own explanation for her preternatural maturity: “I’ve been paying my own bills since I was 17, living in a foreign country,” she says out of expertly shellacked fuchsia lips that are almost always perched in a half smile. “And I’ve always been a little older than my real age. People always said that to me, and I always felt that in my head.”
This is not to say that Rihanna doesn’t like to have fun. She is full of sass and teasing sarcasm; most sentences end with a playful chuckle. She loves to blast music by rock ’n’ roll band Kings of Leon and play with her toy poodle, Oliver, who, she explains, is under the impression that he’s a big dog who can protect her from intruders at the Los Angeles house she shares with her closest friend from Barbados. The best part of her day, she says, is “when I’m with my glam team getting my hair and makeup done—we talk so much s---!”
Still, this past year in particular, her old soul has served her well. In the months following the night of February 8, when fellow pop star Brown committed the crime that would earn him five years of probation for felony assault, Rihanna refrained from acting out at clubs or in front of paparazzi cameras. She refused to wage any sort of war or publicity campaign in the tabloids. Looking back, she says she is proud of herself for remaining the quiet eye of the storm. “Not talking was a big thing for me,” says Rihanna, whose 13th tattoo, procured on Avenue B in New York’s East Village just the night before this interview, is visible, still raised and reddened, on the right side of her collarbone. It reads never a failure, always a lesson, but backward so she can read it when she looks in the mirror. “I’m glad I didn’t talk to people, because I was able to deal with things in my own way, without saying the wrong things or giving people the wrong impression.”
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