Just to be clear pt. 2...

[skyecaptain]

...Can't keep up with the various threads, but has anyone talked about the plot of "Te Amo" yet? This is what I wrote on Lex's thread:

Has anyone talked about how "Te Amo" seems to be about Rihanna being hit on by a woman in a club and cautiously kind of going with it? "Just watch your hands!" Or is she singing from the perspective of the

Comments

[skyecaptain]

"Maybe if I keep saying 'te amo' I will start to feel it" -- oh, that pesky desperate pathological reasoning. Has anyone written a song about this idea before, that one can keep saying "I love you," hoping its connotations will somehow rub off on them and create feeling, and still failing miserably? Damn, this is really good song!!!

[alexmacpherson]

Definitely - the use of repetition throughout the whole album is really interesting. Crops up more on the swagger tracks, almost like Rihanna's grinding her image into your face, unrelenting and uncompromising, but even there it also works with the "trying to convince self of this" interpretation.

[edgeofwhatever]

It works with a "slow realization" interpretation, too. The same way the repetition of "stupid" in "Stupid in Love" carries Rihanna from defeat to standing up for herself, the repetition of "te amo" and "I love you" carries her from being kind of whatever about the situation to maybe actually loving this girl. The first few times "te amo" appears, it's clearly attributed to the girl; the next time, in the chorus, it's Rihanna saying it in a way that makes us think for a moment she's returning the sentiment; then it comes up again in the second verse with no attribution. Likewise, in the beginning "Don't it mean I love you" / "Think it means I love you" are pretty clearly an extension of her asking, "Won't somebody tell me what she said?" but by the end (after Rihanna's said she feels the love) they and "te amo" and the phrase "I love you" by itself are just floating around, not attached to anything -- like, hey, you said "te amo" and I hung around and danced for you, doesn't that mean I love you, in some way?

[skyecaptain]

Except for Rihanna love connotes fire, gunplay, and violent death, so surely this quiet and intimate moment must be something else...

[edgeofwhatever]

True. Maybe she actually is disgusted by lesbians. Fuck.

[skyecaptain]

Haha, tbh I actually wanted to interpret it that the tenth-through-fifteenth time I listened, but the song is too damn bittersweet for that, wouldn't be fair. My suspicion is that she's disgusted by heterosexual romances but is (unfortunately?) just plain not gay, so she has no choice but to deal with it in all its messiness. What's interesting is that I'm usually really pissed at songs that seem to purport homosexual relationships (usually between women) as this sort of "innocent" or pretend-love thing that provides respite from how awful boys can be, but here Rihanna is doing something more complicated: she recognizes that the love this woman is expressing is something alien to her -- and at this point, it seems like something completely alien to her might work much better for her than what she knows, but she also understands that she's not feeling it, and if she doesn't feel it its (promising) alienness is a moot point. So the song just kind of fades out ambiguously, us not knowing quite where they leave off.