7 Gigs, 7 Nations, 7 Days.

And very nearly one hell of a resignation letter.

Rihanna's 777 tour has now finished. I don't know how it was for you but it very nearly killed me. Therefore a fuller review will have to wait until at least tomorrow because I'm seriously considering checking myself into hospital at the moment. I do though need to comment on the now naked hatred felt by the press over their almost total lack of access to Rihanna during the tour because it is in part my fault. To a certain extent all entertainment is dependent on illusion - for example Hugh Laurie is not really a doctor and Claire Danes is not really a CIA agent. Take it from me that once you peak behind the curtain and that illusion is shattered the entertainment becomes much less entertaining so it was never going to be Rihanna and the media chilling out on the plane watching in flight movies. However I thought more of an effort would have be made with Stockholm being a sort of model to follow. The decision to delay the departure from London from 03:00 to 11:00 with the press already on the plane was indefensible though. It was though quite transparently an effort to make it look like Britain had a really cool secret that everybody wanted to hear in order to drag everyone into Britain's barrage of drivel including but in no way limited to the Church of England's vote on women Bishops, it's report on abuse and sexual exploitation and that Danny Nightingale the jailed SAS sniper saga. The idea was to give Britain the upper hand in negotiations over the European Union (EU) Budget although quite why the Yanks wanted to thank the Brits for all their help in getting Mitt Romney elected President is still a mystery to me.

I think by way of contrition it would be nice for Rihanna to explain what the hold-up was because it's hardly that important and has got to be cheaper then deleting the new album because the "Unapologetic" title is a big joke and sadly it's on her.

20:05 on 21/11/12.

Edited at around 14:55 on 22/11/12 to add: I'm still feeling a bit frayed around the edges so simply popping down the shops is a bit beyond me at the moment meaning that this is unlikely to be my best work. However you don't need to be a psychiatrist (or indeed listen to it) to deduce from Rihanna's new duet with Chris Brown "Nobodies Business" that she is transferring her frustration that Brown will never be the man she wants him to be onto the media. Therefore Rihanna's motivation for the 777 tour was to use it as a punishment beating for the media. The problem is that because of the Brown thing the vast majority of the media have actually been very gentle with Rihanna (using kid gloves is the expression). So the US intelligence community suggested the tour was to provoke blowback from the media which can go as far as a total blackout meaning no airplay, no magazine covers and no reviews. Although Rihanna already has a established fan base this would make her much more dependent on media outlets such as Facebook which have a very close relationship with the US community. Obviously it's too late to recall the hardcopies of the album but I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if iTunes made one copy of the album available with the Chris Brown duet and one without. 

Now bring on the cartoons.

15:05 on 22/11/12