Due to live Tweeting I am now in a position to write up a review of Rihanna's concert in Toronto last night (18/3/13). However as a day clearly hasn't made much difference it will be a very short review. This suits me because I've always held the position that no news is good news.
Rihanna took to the stage at around 22:00 which +/- 15 minutes should be considered the official start of her set. She then proceeded to perform the seven acts of the show in the allotted 1 hour and 45 minutes. She did though flip acts 2 and 3 with act 3 being performed first. This is something she also did during Friday's (15/3/13) show in Hartford and is a clear attempt to keep the show feeling fresh. This actually highlights one of the main pressures Rihanna is under on this tour. On one hand in order to keep the angry men with machine guns happy the tour needs to be run like a tightly controlled military operation. However on the other hand she needs to let the fans feel like they're getting something new every night in order to stop them complaining that her performance is too mechanical and they're been ripped off. Personally I'd focus on keeping the angry men with machine guns happy. After all I'm sure the fans will be understanding once they've had the problem explained to them.
It's just a shame the person doing the explaining also thinks that if fans really wanted to show their support for Rihanna on this tour they'd simply refuse to buy tickets for it.
Although I've yet to hear any of the performance I strongly doubt that Rihanna's voice has recovered much in the past 24 hours. However this didn't stop her trying to prove her doubters wrong by performing "Loveeeeeee Song" and "What Now" from the Unapologetic album with very little support from backing singers or a backing track. Obviously I will need to hear these before giving a final verdict. However even through a poor quality recording and tinny computer speakers from the last couple of performances it's clear that Rihanna has lost the top part of her vocal range. Therefore for fear of doing permanent damage I would try to avoid showing off until there's something to show off.
To give you an idea of how uncontroversial Rihanna's concert last night was the main excitement has come not from the show or even Rihanna's team. Instead a local station posted a picture on Twitter of a bus bearing the slogan "Yolo" on the side. YOLO is also an acronym meaning You Only Live Once that was coined by Rihanna's former boyfriend Drake. Therefore the radio station was suggesting this was Drake tour bus in order to create excited speculation that Jewish Toronto native Drake was visiting Rihanna on tour. While I haven't yet had Drake's whereabouts at the time confirmed considering the fight between Drake and Chris Brown in June 2012 I would think this extremely unlikely not least because describing the incident as a 'fight' rather overplays Brown's role in the altercation.
The Yolo Bus Company however is a long established public transportation company operating out of Yolo County in Southern California. The Yolo bus company is owned by Veolia Transportation a subsidiary of the French multi-national Veolia. They have some controversy over their operation in the Israeli occupied West Bank and over accusations they've been trying to 'Greenwash' their public image by running a tiny proportion of their fleet of vehicles on alternative fuels such as natural gas. They also provide bus services in Toronto, Canada so this was someone playing silly b*ggers rather then a government to government provocation.
We are now trying to work out if the subsequent bus crash in India was in any way related and if it was are the Indians trying to tell us that they're in on the joke or they're not.
10:10 on 19/3/13.
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