10 Radio-Friendly Songs About Drugs
8. We Found Love - Rihanna
When Rihanna starts harping on about “Yellow diamonds in the sky”, she’s surely just singing about the wonder of the celestial tapestry floating above our heads, right? Wrong.
Despite first impressions, We Found Love is not a radio-friendly EDM-infused tribute to Orion’s Belt, but rather a radio-friendly EDM-infused tribute to MDMA.
From the ascending rush of Calvin Harris’ synth breaks to the dilated pupils and bottles of pills scattered liberally throughout the video, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is an unashamedly druggy tune.
Even that chorus hook, “We found love in a hopeless place”, is a fairly conspicuous nod to the besotted, uninhibited, come-here-I-bloody-love-you euphoria that takes over once that serotonin gets pumping.
Still, in spite of those NSFW references, the song was a worldwide chart-topper, and marked the zenith of a time when Ri-Ri was so popular that - much like rats in London - you were never more than six feet away from a lad’s lad wearing a pair of beige chinos and a Topman t-shirt with her face plastered across the front.