“The contents of Unapologetic are effectively trolling the public. The incident between Rihanna and Brown, and the wider issue it represents, is being reduced to a series of shock-tactic soundbites (with a few lines neatly sampled from Michael Jackson’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’). It’s nobody’s business, they sing, but we’ll tell you all about it anyway, wind you up in the process, and get good publicity material from an issue as trifling as – oh – physical violence against a woman.

This also reveals how the internet often works in the most terrible way. In terms of online popularity, page hits are king. As a result, provocative subjects and statements that prompt instant reactions – and finger-clicks – take precedence. They form the bedrock of comment-board-driven editorial planning, in a world where comments themselves barely get moderated. Debates on weighty subjects on TV and radio are also now all about polarised positions. (As a sidenote, I was asked to be part of a debate about Madonna on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour last year, but was excused after talking to a researcher, because I didn’t simply love or hate Madonna.) This twisted, provocative logic, where extreme positions and statements are everything, is festering within our culture, and infecting it.”

A Sorry State: Pop Marketing & Rihanna’s Unapologetic.

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