By
Emily Zemler
•
19 hours ago
.
Last night, as I was in a taxi returning to the hotel from Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club, where Rihanna held her final 777 Tour afterparty, my Editor emailed me asking for a final piece on the experience. In the moment I was concerned that I was still too in the thick of the tour and too caught up in the experience to have any sense of reflection. But after four hours of sleep and another journey to another airport to return home, I think I have a moderate sense of what just went down on the Rihanna plane. And it’s clear that this tour, which started as evident gimmick to get album press, has become something greater and more impactful than originally intended.
.
This tour will, certainly, have lasting consequences on both the music industry and the press world. No experiment is without its results, without some sort of conclusion that either yields change or doesn’t. Several managers and publicists emailed me while on the tour, asking “Are you dying?” and “What the hell is going on?” Several noted that they’d spoken about similar tours with artists they work with, wondering whether this could be done differently or more effectively in the future. If we suddenly see an influx of creative album promotional gimmicks, we can thank Roc Nation and Island Def Jam, as well as Rihanna for being a “willing” participant.
.
Which brings us to the issue of Rihanna. The singer was reportedly pitched the idea of this tour on her last album, Talk That Talk, and she turned it down, only to acquiesce now on Unapologetic. Theoretically, she is a great artist with which to undertake such a project. She seems fun – at least based on her Instagram and Twitter feeds, which are filled with images of her blowing pot smoke out of her mouth and lying naked on furniture. She seems like someone you might be able to party with. But the problem is that even if we assumed there was a chance she’d hot box the plane, that wasn’t the real reason the journalists went on the trip (it might have been why the fans attended, though).
.
I read a comparison on ABC News yesterday that noted the correlations between this tour and the press who follow the presidential campaigns, pointing out notable similarities between the experiences of the music journalists onboard the now-infamous Rihanna plane and those tailing Republican candidate Mitt Romney. And although I see these congruencies, ultimately the results don’t match up. The reporters riding along with Romney had something to report on as they moved around the U.S., each rally and appearance yielding new information and quotes. Rihanna says the exact same thing onstage every night while playing almost the same set, and there is little variance besides the venue and her outfit. (Our favorite thing to do on the plane was to mimic Rihanna’s intro to “Say My Name” by shouting “What did you call me?” and “It’s not Hey-na-a, it’s Rihanna” at each other.)
.
There are a lot of ways this could have worked better and more smoothly, which is not to undermine the fact that this was an impressively run trip, with elements that absolutely found control in the chaos of 250 international travelers, some of whom did not need as much luggage as they hauled around. Roll call, assigned buses, pre-printed plane tickets, hotel key cards laid out by last name and ongoing email communication expedited the arduous processes. But was it too many people? Did efficiency and logic occasionally vanish? Were we all at the mercy of an artist who would rather go lingerie shopping in Paris or hang out with her Battleship co-star Brooklyn Decker in Toronto than participate in the tour that was literally about her? Probably.
.
In the end, the 777 Tour turned into a story about the media rather than Rihanna herself. It became a mirror into the way the contemporary, Internet-based press covers an event. If you read the articles from the last week you can see the coverage devolve, transform from peppy dispatches and excited photos to stressed-out musings on our purpose here and queries on what it all means. Reading back now, I can see how the tone of my own coverage changed. By the last day, because no one could get a quote from Rihanna, the journalists were all interviewing each other.
The coverage was also nearly immediate – the video of the Australian streaker made it online within an hour of us landing in London. I sent photos and updates via email over an international roaming plan on my cell phone while on buses and standing in venues. I wasn’t the only one who wrote almost their entire tour coverage on their iPhone, too. The Rihanna plane became its own meme, a story that has been reported on widely as if it was an actual hostage situation requiring constant updates. Jokes about Ben Affleck using the story as his follow-up film to Argo abound and not for nothing (Rihan-Argo has been the name bandied about). I’m surprised my parents didn’t tie a yellow ribbon to a tree in our yard.
.
The journalists were the story because we created the story via Twitter, Instagram and our own articles, offering an instant look inside a bizarre and seemingly desperate situation. When we landed in New York someone emailed me, “#Rihannajailbreak” and everyone I ran into at the New York show kept saying “She was on the plane,” like I was a character on Lost. Admiration for our survival has been palpable. And that’s fair – this was by far the hardest tour I’ve ever been on (and I’ve toured with artists quite a bit, including earlier this year with Linkin Park), and it’s definitely the most physically grueling thing I’ve ever done.
.
It may be weeks before my body fully recovers, which is to say nothing about my mental state. I can’t promise not to snap into an altered sociopathic reality the next time “Diamonds” comes on the radio. And to those who criticize our public complaining, I can only say that we needed Twitter and photocopied Rihanna “Missing” posters and Instagrammed shots of the prison food we were fed to make it through this without totally losing it. I cried twice in Berlin and didn’t know it was happening until someone pointed out the tears pouring down my face. One journalist openly wept on the way to London. Another puked into her airplane blanket during in-air mutiny that occurred as we left Berlin.
.
Does this make us entitled and coddled? Should we be more grateful for the opportunity? I have no idea. I think it’s clear that most of us wouldn’t survive a real hostage or prison situation, especially if our iPhones got taken away. But if you weren’t there, you can’t really know what it was like to stay awake for 28 hours over the course of three countries all because some pop star wanted to promote an album that was already guaranteed to go No. 1 worldwide upon release and didn’t respect the press who gave up seven days of their lives enough to even answer one question about it. None of us cared about talking to Rihanna; we just wanted to sleep and eat, and that’s where the real breakdown happened.
.
One of Rihanna’s label reps from Island Def Jam joked as we touched down in New York that he’d see us next year on the 888 Tour, eight shows in eight days on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Obviously this is not real, but despite the fact that my body has never been in such extreme distress, I think I’d be in if it was. The 777 Tour is going to herald something, it’s going to be the watermark for future album promotional concepts, and it feels important that both Myspace and myself participated. I’m glad to have been one of the guinea pigs. Plus, I learned that it’s complete bullsh-t that you can’t use electronic devices while a plane takes off. All that aside, though, I’m now going to sleep for three days and when I wake up I’m going to listen exclusively to death metal for the rest of the year.
.
.
.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق