By Alberto Cox Délano | Pajiba 10 | December 8, 2023 |
By Alberto Cox Délano | Pajiba 10 | December 8, 2023 |
As a very cis, mostly straight man (Does Oscar Isaac not count, like George Clooney back in the day?), I’m afraid that I might be doing a bit of a cultural appropriation by writing this FYC. I mean, I discovered her through “Cherry,” her coming out song. But Rina falls into a particular category of mine: Dream Artist. As in, the kind of artists whose work fits exactly into my very Sui Generis, very niche mixture of tastes and interests, in a way that I cannot tell whether they define my taste or I was just lucky to discover them. She is to my thirties what the Manic Street Preachers were to my late teens and twenties: The perfect blend of radio-friendly, delightful sound with lyrics full of nuance, complexity, thought, and… let’s say, heavily influenced by a Social Sciences syllabus. Pop and Rock music made by people who know what a Niklas Luhmann is, read it, and liked it. Though Rina is much better at code-switching between the actual Cambridge graduate and the hip, young artist.
There’s also the fact that she that Mariah-level voice and has that face.
But what completes Rina’s triad of excellence is that she is an astonishing performer. She was made for the stage, she was made to perform live, and it’s not until you see her in concert that you understand that the culture owes her. Owes her more popularity, owes her a following on a Dua Lipa scale. Because her lyrics, as thoughtful as they are, can still be sung-along by an arena. And the only reason I can fathom behind her not being one of the biggest acts in the world is that the Music Industry is racist, sexist, queer-phobic, and … ageist (it works on DiCaprio logic: women don’t exist after 25). Mind you, Rina is already pretty popular, but that’s despite the obstacles placed on her career by the industry.
We have written about Rina a bunch on this website, from reviews of her albums to her potential friendship break-up with fellow Hyper-Pop stalwart Charli XCX. It’s been an eventful couple of years for Rina, her friendship break-up might have something to do with her publicly calling out Taylor Swift’s latest ex and the biggest posh-putz in the British music industry right now: Matty Healy from The 1975, bandmate of Charli’s partner, both of whom own Dirty Hit, the record label that owns her masters.
But it’s also been a great year for Rina following two successful tours promoting Hold the Girl and what will probably be her biggest platform into the mainstream: Her role as Akira in John Wick 4, a role that left a lot of doors open for a follow-up.
She nailed both performances in the movie: The martial arts one and her brief emotional arc. The former is not surprising given her dance skills, nor is the latter, with the way she inflects her booming voice with the proper emotion for every song. But what I also loved is how the character of Akira eschews all the fan-service needless sexualization of female characters in action movies. I mean, she still looks ah-mah-zingh, but she looks practical, deadly, brutal. There’s none of that stupid-ass move where the female character wraps her legs around a large heavy’s head and brings him to the ground, a move that makes no sense (where’s the fulcrum?) and whose sole function is to titillate fanboys. Her character’s big, flashy kill instead is… horrifying. And awesome.
The way her character was developed reflects the way she has managed her image: She has taken everything from the Pop-Stars of the TLR-era, and ripped it from the male gaze. The wardrobe might be similarly sexy, but the choreography, though sensual, runs through a whole spectrum of emotions that are as complex as her lyrics, while still being spectacular. There is nothing, nothing about her artistic persona that is catered to the male gaze, unlike what most female pop artists that influenced us were forced to do. She makes the performance hot on her own terms. In very much the same way she has charged against TERF Island’s reticence to ban conversion therapy, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and in being candid to a fault about her traumas and inspirations. She is too much woman for the music industry as it is. She’ll probably transcend it.
That’s why she deserves to be on Pajiba’s top 2023. She’s had one hell of a year of serving. For all tastes and genders. Now let’s hush and let’s thirst, respectfully.
Alberto Cox’s one humble request if he is victorious campaigning for Rina: A cover of “Motorcycle Emptiness” by the Manic Street Preachers, for his inner 17-year-old and his thirty-something self.