In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
His first #1, she had to put it in his hand. His second one, too. Drake was an ascendant star when he appeared on Rihanna’s 2010 chart-topper “What’s My Name.” He wasn’t anywhere near as famous as Rihanna, but he was on his way. Part of that song’s charge is Drake’s clear attraction to Rihanna — the way he nervously blusters and attempts to flirt, doing everything he can to get her attention. It’s weirdly cute.
Six years later, Drake was a huge star, the dominant figure in all of rap. Drake had still never been to #1 on the Hot 100 by himself, though he’d come close. At that point, Drake and Rihanna were clearly on more equal footing, and the combination of those two stars made for another pop event. Still, the dynamic on their song “Work” was still pretty much the same — Rihanna luxuriating in her own sexiness, Drake hopelessly trying to get her to look his way. The effect was the same, too. Once again, Drake made it to #1, but only as a guest on a Rihanna song.
“Work” had its origins in Drake’s songwriting camp, but he’s still lucky to be included in the track. That’s because “Work” would’ve been an event with or without Drake. For nearly the first decade of her career, Rihanna was an absolute hit-machine, cranking out a new album full of smash singles almost every year. But Rihanna’s 2012 LP Unapologetic was her last for Def Jam, the label that signed her when she was a child. When her contract was up, Rihanna moved over to Roc Nation, the management company founded by Jay-Z, the former Number Ones artist who’d signed Rihanna to Def Jam in the first place. Using Roc Nation as a label, Rihanna did not have to be a human hit-machine. She had the space to take her time, and that’s what she did.
In her first few years at Roc Nation, Rihanna released a few one-off singles, but she didn’t get around to releasing another album for more than three years. For her, that seemed like a long time; we had no idea how long we’d have to wait after that record came out. Anti, Rihanna’s seventh album, doesn’t sound much like her others. It moves just as fluidly among genres, but the songs, “Work” included, aren’t gleaming artifacts of the pop system in operation. Instead, they’re loose and evocative mood-pieces — catchy ones, though. An unknown singer might’ve had a hard time taking a track like “Work” to #1, but Rihanna was the exact opposite of an unknown singer, especially when she had Drake riding along with her.
When Rihanna made it to #1 with her 2013 single “Diamonds,” she was deep into a hit streak that seemed like it might never end. Later that year, she was back on top, guesting on her old collaborator Eminem’s hit “The Monster.” But Rihanna wasn’t in any hurry to keep up her hit streak. In 2014, she officially parted ways with Def Jam. A year later, she teamed up with Kanye West and Paul McCartney, two artists who have been in this column plenty of times, to release the weird acoustic go-crazy anthem “FourFiveSeconds,” which peaked at #4. (It’s a 9.) All three collaborators had lead-artist billing on “FourFiveSeconds,” but it felt like a Rihanna song, and maybe like the launch of her next album. Nope. “FourFiveSeconds” was a one-off, and it never appeared on anyone’s album.
More one-offs followed. Shortly after “FourFiveSeconds,” Rihanna played one of the leads in the forgettable cartoon movie Home and kicked in the forgettable soundtrack song “Towards The Sun,” which peaked at #76. Then it was the slinky and anthemic “Bitch Betta Have My Money,” one of the great Rihanna singles, which only made it to #15. Finally, the ballad “American Oxygen,” a Kanye West production, stalled out at #71. If Rihanna were any other pop star, those singles releases might’ve looked like desperation moves, failed attempts to launch a new album cycle. But Rihanna has never seemed desperate about anything. The great songs found their audiences, while the mediocre ones were easily dismissed as idle fuck-arounds.
Rihanna did have a new album in the works, but she wasn’t beholden to anyone’s timetable. Tons of different songwriters and producers came in to work on Anti, and you have to assume that there’s a treasure trove of outtakes and rejected tracks out there somewhere. “Work,” the song that would become the lead single from Anti, was a product of Drake’s extremely busy music braintrust. Drake will start appearing in this column on his own soon enough, so I won’t get too deep into his history here, but he’d become a very big deal. In the years between “What’s My Name” and “Work,” Drake released four album-length projects, though two of them were confusingly labeled as mixtapes, as well as tons of one-off bangers and guest-verses on other people’s tracks. He cranked out hits with industrial efficiency, and he assembled a squad of likeminded producers and songwriters under his OVO banner.
By the time that he popped up on “What’s My Name,” Drake had already reached #2 with his breakout hit “Best I Ever Had” and as part of the Young Money posse cut “BedRock.” (“Best I Ever Had” is a 6, and “BedRock” is a 7.) After “What’s My Name,” Drake dropped six top-10 hits and made guest appearances on another four. One of Drake’s hits was another Rihanna duet: The gorgeously mournful “Take Care,” which reached #7 in 2010. (It’s a 10.) Somewhere in there, Drake and Rihanna had an off-and-on romantic thing going, and even the most detached and casual observer had a good idea that he was more into her than she was into him.
Drake had been a Rihanna convert since literal day one. 17-year-old Rihanna filmed the video for her 2005 debut single “Pon De Replay” in Toronto, and Drake, who was one of the teenage stars of Degrassi at the time, was an extra. He later said that he was smitten with her from the moment he saw her and that she paid him no mind on that shoot. Drake is two years older than Rihanna, but she became an established superstar long before him. If you really wanted to reach, you could maybe argue that Drake spent much of his career ascending to star status just as a way to impress Rihanna. I would not make that argument, but it’s fun to think about regardless. In any case, Drake came within spitting distance of the #1 spot with his 2015 hit “Hotline Bling,” but a single-rollout hiccup meant that “The Hills,” a song from Drake’s Toronto rival the Weeknd, relegated that track to #2 status. (“Hotline Bling” is a 5.) Drake wanted the #1 spot bad.
Lots of things conspired to keep Drake from landing a #1 hit, but the biggest culprit was just technology. Drake is probably the signature star of the streaming era, and services like Spotify and Apple Music weren’t as important to the Hot 100 in those years. Drake was a huge deal, but he didn’t get the same kind of pop-radio burn as, say, Rihanna. Soon enough, things would swing in the other direction, and Drake had a stretch of racking up #1 hits seemingly without ever trying. We’ll deal with that run soon enough. For “Work,” the important thing was that Drake had a defined aesthetic — moody, minimal, finely sculpted instrumental tracks that were equally well-suited for rapping and singing — and he had an entire team of producers who knew how to make that sound for him. Sometimes, those producers had pool parties at Drake’s house when Drake wasn’t even there. “Work” came from one of those pool parties.
One day in the summer of 2015, a bunch of Drake-affiliated producers were sitting around the pool at Drake’s Calabasas mansion while the man himself was someplace else. One of those producers was Boi-1da, the Toronto native who’d been with Drake for years. He was the guy who produced “Best I Ever Had,” and he’s been in this column for co-producing Eminem’s “Not Afraid.” (Boi-1da’s work will be in this column again.) Some of Boi-1da’s regular collaborators were there, too. One was Allen Ritter, a musician who grew up in Connecticut and who worked with Boi-1da on Drake’s 2013 track “The Language,” which peaked at #51. Sevn Thomas, another Toronto guy, was newer to Drake’s circle, but he and Boi-1da co-produced the 2015 Drake mixtape banger “10 Bands,” which peaked at #58.
That day at the pool, Boi-1da and Sevn Thomas, both of whom are Toronto-born sons of Jamaican immigrants, came up with a dancehall-inflected track. Boi-1da had the idea to come up with a version of the Sail Away riddim, a 1998 dancehall instrumental created by producers Richie Stephens and Mikey 2000. In true dancehall fashion, stars like Beenie Man and Sean Paul recorded tracks on the Sail Away riddim, which itself was a riff on Alexander O’Neal’s 1985 R&B single “If You Were Here Tonight.”
Monte Moir, the former keyboardist from the Time, wrote and produced “If You Were Here Tonight,” and that led to him getting writing credit on “Work” even though those two songs sound nothing alike. That means that Moir joins Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis on the list of former Time members with credits on #1 hits. Prince actually died while “Work” was sitting at #1, and it’s wild to think that the tendrils of his Minneapolis sound extended all the way to the song that was the biggest in the world at the moment that he left it. In any case, Allen Ritter helped out on Boi-1da and Sevn Thomas’ instrumental track, which took about half an hour to put together. When it was done, they took it to another Jamaican-Canadian musician in Drake’s OVO orbit.
Jahron Brathwaite, better known under the unwieldy handle PartyNextDoor, is a singer and songwriter who specializes in horny, vibed-out R&B, and he’s been part of Drake’s OVO team since the 2013 album Nothing Was The Same. Unlike most of Drake’s OVO guys, PartyNextDoor has actually become pretty famous as an artist in his own right, and he’s got a handful of Hot 100 hits to his name. But PartyNextDoor is still mostly famous for being one of Drake’s guys. The story that I’ve always heard is that Drake wanted to sign the Weeknd to OVO after the Weeknd assisted on a bunch of tracks from Drake’s 2011 record Take Care, and he was furious when the Weeknd said no. You could argue that PND has played the role that the Weeknd turned down, working to sweeten up the harmonies and melodies on Drake records. I can’t picture the parallel universe where PartyNextDoor went off on his own and became a Weeknd-level star, but maybe it’s out there.
Once he got that instrumental, PartyNextDoor wrote and recorded a kind of dancehall-flavored breakup track over it. Drake heard the song and loved it, and he added his own guest verse. The PartyNextDoor reference track leaked soon after “Work” reached #1, and it’s surprising how well the song works even without Rihanna. PND and Drake talked about releasing “Work” as a PartyNextDoor track, and Alicia Keys, someone who has been in this column a few times, apparently had some interest in recording the song, too. But when Rihanna heard the track, she loved it. She played it around the house constantly.
When Rihanna recorded her own version of “Work,” she apparently changed enough about the song that she got a writing credit. Her regular collaborator Kuk Harrell produced her vocals, and Drake’s regular collaborator Noah “40” Shebib did some production on the track, too. That’s a lot of cooks for such a simple song. One thing that really strikes me about “Work” is that it doesn’t sound anywhere near as labored and machine-tooled as many of Rihanna’s other hits. It’s not Rihanna making dancehall-flavored pop, as she often did from the very beginning of her career. Instead, it’s pretty much Rihanna just making straight-up dancehall, patois and all.
The “Work” beat brings a subtle, insistent sense of percolation, with lots of syncopated bloops and bleeps winding their way through. The song is full of ear candy — a computerized flute-whistle here, a blinking bassline there. PartyNextDoor sings backup harmonies throughout, just as he does on so many Drake tracks. Rihanna leans into the beat hard, finding little pockets all through it. Her voice is sometimes a throaty growl and sometimes an Auto-Tuned squeak. On the bridge, Drake comes in with a verse that’s halfway between rapped and sung, and he and Rihanna sound like they’re flirting even if they recorded their parts in different places, at different times.
There are tons of little hooks sprinkled all through “Work” — melodies that only bubble up for a few bars before disappearing — but the main part of the chorus is just Rihanna singing the word “work” over and over, taking it beyond patois and into a kind of slurred-out playground chant. My friend Jon Caramanica wrote that Rihanna’s delivery “can be post-verbal,” which is both funny and accurate. Rihanna’s vocal on “Work” is less about conveying meaning, more about the way she rides that beat. 2016 turned out to be a banner year for pop stars sexily chanting the word “Work” over dancehall-adjacent instrumentals; that summer, Fifth Harmony reached #4 with their Ty Dolla $ign collab “Work From Home.” (It’s a 10.) This was nothing new. It’s probably part of the same continuum as Harry Belafonte requesting you to “work, work, work, señora” on the biggest-selling album of 1956. But it’s funny that that was the main hook of two huge hits in the same year.
It’s possible to analyze the “Work” lyrics, if you really want. It’s a sexy song, but it’s also about being too busy to give someone the attention that they might want. Rihanna’s narrator doesn’t want to be abandoned, but she also doesn’t want to hold the person too close. If that person really wants her attention, they’re going to need to work. When Drake comes in, his character is just as distracted. He thinks that people are trying to kill him, and his pickup lines — “If you had a twin, I would still choose you” — might not be his A-game material. Still, he just wants time to lock in and get close to someone, and his voice glides on the track almost as gracefully as Rihanna’s does.
“Work” doesn’t hammer you over the head with its melodies. Instead, it slip-slides and insinuates. The chorus is definitely the kind of thing that can get stuck in your head, but it might not always be welcome there. Still, the song’s sticky, breezy repetition felt like pure summer-jam material even though it technically came out in January. “Work” is not tropical house, but it fits nicely with the hits of its moment. The popular tropical house tracks of 2015 and 2016 all drew heavily on dancehall anyway; “Work” simply takes that sound closer to the source.
When “Work” came out, it seemed like a return to Rihanna’s imperial hitmaking streak. When he wrote about the song shortly after it reached #1, my friend Chris Molanphy wondered if Rihanna was on track to break the Beatles’ record for most #1 hits in Hot 100 history. “Work” reached #1 even before the premiere of its video — which, weirdly, was really two videos. First, there’s a dancehall vibe-immersion that Director X filmed at the Real Jerk, a Caribbean restaurant in Toronto. Then that video ends, and if you leave the YouTube clip going, you get a different video for the exact same song. This one, from the Swedish director Tim Erem, is just Rihanna and Drake dancing and making eyes at each other in a pink room. They both radiate charisma, and there’s a lot of nipple in that second video. In both of them, Rihanna looks incredible. I’m asking because I don’t know: If you watch the full “Work” video, does that count as one stream or two?
Just as “Work” arrived, we got the slightly bungled release of Anti, which is still the most recent Rihanna album. The record accidentally leaked early on Tidal, the streaming service that Rihanna’s label boss Jay-Z had just noisily launched. There was some kind of deal where Samsung users got the record for free, too. Ultimately, the weirdness of the release didn’t matter because the album is just great. It’s musically all over the place, from the hammering trap of “Woo” to the near-inexplicable seven-minute cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” but it somehow fits together. Anti has aged beautifully, and I can pretty definitively call it my favorite Rihanna record today. (I wasn’t quite ready to make that call when I reviewed the record upon release.)
Anti came out all at once, and that’s usually enough to keep more than one track on an album from really reaching hit status. But some of the songs from Anti went on to chart success, anyway. The stoned, sweltering DJ Mustard production “Needed Me” is about as tough as a breakup song can get, and it reached #7 in early summer. (It’s a 9.) Later in the year, the old-school soul song “Love On The Brain” made its way to #5. (It’s a 7.) Anti is now sextuple platinum; in terms of certification, it’s tied with 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad as Rihanna’s best-selling album. The “Work” and “Needed Me” singles both went diamond earlier this year.
In summer 2016, Rihanna sang on her “We Found Love” collaborator Calvin Harris’ single “This Is What You Came For,” which Harris’ then-girlfriend Taylor Swift secretly ghostwrote. That was another hit, peaking at #3. (It’s an 8.) Rihanna also popped up on “Too Good,” a Drake track that made it to #14 despite not getting released as a single. As of right now, that’s the last Drake/Rihanna collab. I wouldn’t hold my breath for another one. At the 2016 VMAs, Drake presented Rihanna with the Video Vanguard award, and he went up and confessed that he’d always been in love with her. It was not news to anyone. When he said that, she literally rolled her eyes.
In 2017, Rihanna appeared on singles from future Number Ones artists Future, Kendrick Lamar, and DJ Khaled. “Wild Thoughts,” the Khaled single that also featured R&B singer Bryson Tiller and a sample of Santana’s “Maria Maria,” went all the way to #2. (It’s a 7.) For the longest time, that was Rihanna’s last real hit. Rihanna didn’t release any music of her own for years, though she was nice enough to make a rare guest appearance on PartyNextDoor’s 2020 track “Believe It.” (That song peaked at #23, and it’s PartyNextDoor’s highest-charting single.)
In the years after Anti, we’ve heard sporadic reports about a new Rihanna album, which may or may not be a reggae record. It hasn’t arrived. It might never arrive. Rihanna got into other things. She launched the lingerie and beauty lines that turned her into a billionaire. She fleetingly pursued an acting career, starring in the thoroughly meh spinoff-sequel situation Ocean’s 8 and a season of Bates Motel. She had a couple of kids with A$AP Rocky. (Rocky’s highest-charting lead-artist single, the 2012 Drake/Kendrick Lamar collab “Fuckin’ Problems,” peaked at #8. It’s a 9. Drake and Rocky don’t get along so well these days.)
Rihanna has been effectively gone from pop music for the better part of a decade, and her absence has only increased the sense of mystique that still surrounds her. Every once in a while, Rihanna gives some indication that she might deign to return to the grind of pop stardom, and people get excited. It never lasts. In 2023, Rihanna released the ballad “Lift Me Up” on the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack. That song is boring, and it still debuted at #2, presumably just because it was the first new Rihanna song in years. (It’s a 4.)
Last year, Rihanna played the Super Bowl halftime show. I really liked her performance. Those dancers? Those moving platforms? Fucking cool. Others derided the performance for being lazy, but I would counter that laziness is simply part of the package with Rihanna. Even when she’s doing something like playing the Super Bowl Halftime Show, she seems icy and removed, as if she’s only half-there. That quality goes a long way toward making her as magnetic as she is, and it’s one of the reasons that a song like “Work” works as well as it does.
Before the Halftime Show, people thought that it might be the moment that Rihanna announced her grand return. Nope. Instead, the show ended with Rihanna flashing a baby bump. Another kid was on the way. Pop stardom could wait. A few months ago, Rihanna said that she’s just now starting her next album over again, and it almost felt like a troll move. If Rihanna ever does come back with something more exciting then “Lift Me Up,” then there’s a very good chance that we’ll see her in this column again. If not, then “Work” is a pretty great way to end a historic streak.
As for Drake, we’ll see that guy again soon.
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: This column has allowed me to revisit the moment that Los Angeles dance duo DJDS were constantly putting out unsolicited remixes of pop hits, which were always better than the licensed remixes and often better than the original tracks. I like revisiting that. They were so good! They should come back! Here’s the DJDS “Work” rework:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Spanish star Bad Gyal’s video for “Pai,” her Catalan-language version of “Work”:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Rihanna voice: buy buy buy buy buy buy, mumble mumble, buy buy buy buy buy buy.
