Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation
Last night, some guys played football and Rihanna finally performed the concert we’d all been eagerly waiting for. The Barbados-born pop superstar took the Super Bowl LVII Halftime stage to run through her seemingly never-ending list of hits and reveal her second pregnancy. Over the course of her 13-minute set—which notably included no special guests—RiRi sang everything from her 2007 JAY-Z-assisted smash “Umbrella” to her 2016 Drake collab “Work”—just two of her whopping 14 No. 1 hits over the last decade and a half.
In honor of her show-stopping performance, we decided to dig through the data and celebrate Rihanna’s Top 5 songs on Genius, according to pageviews. Our tally includes features, since RiRi seems to turn anything she touches to gold—even if it’s someone else’s song. Keep reading to find out which tracks made the cut.
“Too Good” is one of two Drake collaborations to make this list and RiRi’s fourth time linking up with the Canadian rapper. The song appeared on Drake’s 2016 LP Views, and it features a dancehall-infused beat—cooked up by Nineteen85, Supa Dups, Maneesh, and Adam Martin—similar to the one heard on “Work,” their collab released earlier that year for Rihanna’s ANTI album and the first the pair recorded of the two. Lyrically, the song is about feeling like your efforts to keep a relationship afloat are being taken for granted by your partner, which Ri and Drizzy trade off singing about on the chorus.
I’m too good to you
I’m way too good to you
You take my love for granted
I just don’t understand it
“Too Good” only rose to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100—a not-so impressive feat for two stars who are used to sitting comfortably at the top—but the song continued to fuel rumors about the nature of the duo’s relationship outside of music. Drake argues that’s part of what makes the track so good. “Because there’s something genuine there, we’re not like forcing some story on people,“ he told Zane Lowe. “A lot of the music that we make and the energy that we bring is genuine.”
“LOYALTY.”, Rihanna’s team-up with Compton MC Kendrick Lamar for his 2017 Pulitzer-prize winning LP DAMN, takes the fourth spot on this list. It’s no surprise the song made such a splash on our site—it marked the A-listers’ first time linking up, and of course, they delivered.
Featuring an interpolation of JAY-Z’s “It’s a secret society/ All we ask is trust,” line off his 2000 Memphis Bleek-assisted track “Get Your Mind Right Mami” on the chorus, “LOYALTY.” finds Lamar and Ri pondering the importance of loyalty in different types of relationships now that they’ve found fame and success. Rihanna takes the second verse, where she claims to be the same person she was before she hit it big—it must be the people around her who’ve changed.
Been a bad bitch way before any cash came
I’m established, hundred carats on my name
Run the atlas, I’m a natural, I’m alright
Like “Too Good,” “LOYALTY.” only climbed to No. 14 on the Hot 100, but the song did wind up taking home the Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Performance in 2018.
DJ Khaled reportedly waited seven or eight years to work with Rihanna, and in that time, he kept an ear out for the perfect track to suit her voice. He finally got his wish on 2017’s “Wild Thoughts,” which rides a seductive Latin groove borrowed from Santana’s 1999 smash “Maria, Maria.” “Wild Thoughts” pairs Ri with Bryson Tiller, and the two play lovers who are very into each other and not shy about telling the world. Here’s Rihanna in the opening verse, ensuring you’ll never view laundry day quite the same way again.
I don’t know if you could take it
Know you wanna see me nakey, nakey, naked
I wanna be your baby, baby, baby
Spinnin’ and it’s wet just like it came from Maytag
In the second verse, she compares her man’s sexual prowess to the dominant play of the 1968 New York Jets, who finished the season 11-3 and beat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl.
Kitty, kitty, baby, give that thing some rest (You’re the best)
’Cause you done beat it like the ’68 Jets (Uh)
“Wild Thoughts” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100—one place shy of “Maria, Maria.” Amazingly, it was Ri’s 31st Top 10 pop hit.
Rihanna had already worked with Eminem on three songs—including the 2010 chart-topper “Love the Way You Lie”—when she agreed to sing the hook on “The Monster,” off Em’s 2013 album The Marshall Mathers LP 2. “The Monster” is all about the corrosive effects of fame and other demons Em was battling at the time, and Rihanna’s hook illustrates how we can’t always conquer that which plagues us. Sometimes, we have to live with the darker aspects of ourselves and learn how to manage them.
I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You’re tryin' to save me, stop holdin’ your breath
And you think I’m crazy, yeah, you think I’m crazy
Well, that’s nothin’
That hook was co-written by a then-unknown Bebe Rexha, who hoped that her voice would wind up on the finished record. But once Eminem heard the demo, he immediately thought of Rihanna. “The perception of the record, what it’s saying, I thought it would be a good idea to have her on it because I think people look at us like we’re both a little nuts,” Em told MTV News. “That’s one of the things that I was telling her in making the record: I think that people look at us a little crazy.”
“The Monster” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, matching the performance of “Love the Way You Lie.” It also topped the U.K. charts and earned Em and Ri a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration.
Rihanna and Drake were once pop’s great “will they or won’t they” couple, and on 2016’s dancehall smash “Work”—their third collaboration—they sound like two lovers drifting apart, sort of. “People think [‘Work’ is] a party song,” the track’s lyric writer, PartyNextDoor, told Rolling Stone. “It’s a breakup song. It’s blues. I went from braggadocious to blues.” One reason some people might’ve missed the message is Rihanna’s use of Caribbean patois on the chorus.
Work, work, work, work, work, work
He said me haffi
Work, work, work, work, work, work
He see me do mi
Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt
The Barbados-born singer wasn’t too concerned with people fully understanding the lyrics. “I felt like if I enunciated the words too perfectly, it would just not be the same attitude or the same sass,” Rihanna told Vogue. “Because that’s how we speak in the Caribbean. It’s very broken and it’s, like, you can understand everything someone means without even finishing the words. This song is definitely a song that represents my culture, and so I had to put a little twist on my delivery.”
Built on the “Sail Away Riddim,” a dancehall staple dating back to 1998, “Work” came together at a “beat factory” convened at Drake’s house while Drizzy was out of town. Jamaican Canadian writer-producers Sevn Thomas and Boi-1da got the ball rolling, as Thomas explained in a Complex interview.
“We basically banged this track out in half an hour, and we were just jamming out because we could just feel that island vibe, and we knew that the sound of the industry is sort of shaking up its little island vibe, and we knew we were really authentic, we had the Jamaican culture, and we took it upon ourselves to hone in on that and make our new futuristic dancehall songs that we like to call the new wave,” Thomas said.
“Work” nearly went to Alicia Keys, as Rihanna’s label “didn’t care for Caribbean music at the time,” according to PartyNextDoor. But Rihanna couldn’t stop singing “Work” around the house, and the record company relented. That was a wise move, since “Work” became Rihanna’s 14th No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. It also made her the first artist to score No. 1 hits on seven consecutive studio albums.
