Take A Bow: It's Been 10 Years Since Rihanna's Debut Album Dropped

Ten years ago, Rihanna was not yet a thing.

On August 30, 2005, she unveiled her debut album Music of the Sun. It landed with a thud on the US Billboard Chart (opening at number 10) and didn’t even crack the top 25 of Australia’s urban album chart.

Today, that result for a Rihanna album would be unthinkable.

Sure, her first single “Pon de Replay” dropped in May of 2005 and wound up selling more than two million units, so some might argue that’s when we should mark the beginning of her reign.

Others might claim the Age of Rihanna began in February of 2006, when her sophomore album’s lead single “SOS” became her first number one hit and guaranteed she wouldn’t be shuffled off to the one-hit-wonder graveyard.

But no, we’re going with the dropping of Music of the Sun, her disappointing opening salvo jam-packed with unremarkable songs that would have to fight to find a spot on a three-disc set of her greatest hits.

In August of 2005, there was no way of knowing whether or not Rihanna would fade into the ether, or would continue shining bright like a… you know… a whole ten years later. (Especially when you consider that within a year of Rihanna’s arrival, other ‘it’ musicians like Joss Stone, Daniel Powter and Sandi Thom would bust out in a big way before disappearing, literally, forever.)

The good news is, she hung around. (So much so, that first album - piggybacking off her later successes - crawled its way to two million sales worldwide.) And even with her eighth album imminent, there’s been no talk of an impending downfall. In fact, partnering with Kanye West and Paul McCartney for a throwaway collaboration is pretty much the opposite of cratering, professionally.

Consider the pop culture icons who proceeded her. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera could fit their entire runs of relevancy within a ten-year period. (It only took eight years for Britney Spears to go from …Baby, One More Time to Blackout - and baldness.) In an industry famous for its cruelty towards ageing female artists – yes, Rihanna is only 27, but “ageing” in music industry terms basically means “no longer teenaged” - how has she remained so culturally significant?

Hard to say how one guarantees longevity. Does it involve avoiding scandal? With the exception of her tumultuous relationship with Chris Brown – who was charged with assaulting her in horrific fashion back in 2009 – and the time she (kind of) took a plane of journalists hostage, she has mostly done that. Is it about producing provocative, inventive music videos? Check. (Those videos - and her Instagram account - have consistently inspired far more fascinating conversation and debate over her bona fides as a feminist icon than even the music itself.)

Or, perhaps it involves being killed off during a mainstream Hollywood comedy, as she gamely agreed to in This Is The End. (Then again, Brits was literally exploded in Austin Powers: Goldmember, so maybe we can’t point to this weird trend as a guarantor of continued success.)

Perhaps, optimistically, it’s about the quality of the music. Rihanna has been one of the most reliable pop gem-generators of the last decade, working with some of the savviest songwriters in the business (including, on “Diamonds”, Sia).

With 23 number one singles in the United States, she’s tied with Michael Jackson for having the third most number ones on the US Billboard Chart. Maybe the music game is a meritocracy after all?