Their Monsters

What has saved him from just being a prodigiously gifted relic is Rihanna. The last two times he’s topped the Billboard Hot 100, it’s been with her at his side: Love the Way You Lie, in 2010, and The Monster, last year. Both are songs with turmoil at their core, by a pair of artists with often differing ideas of how to communicate it. But these songs are slickly bruised, Rihanna’s voice pushed slightly past its typical neutrality, and Eminem channelling his anguish into narrative cohesion.

In total, Eminem and Rihanna have released four songs together — including Love The Way You Lie (Part II), Numb, both on Rihanna albums.

They don’t make the case for an album of duets, say, but they are sufficient pretext for the megastars to take a brief sojourn around the country together, one which arrived at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, recently for the first of two shows.

For Eminem, who’s become reclusive in recent years, both during and after his struggles with drugs, this was an increasingly rare high-profile occasion. For Rihanna, this was like a mildly distracting side project. If Eminem only wanted to remain a hero to nostalgists and to rap purists, he wouldn’t need Rihanna. But here she was, because Eminem needs more.

Eminem and Rihanna have a few things in common — careers built on disobeying and pushing outside the lines, a taste for the gothic and a sense of theatre inspired by king-size rock music. But Rihanna only uses the mirror to check her appearance; she rarely digs deep and looks hard at herself. Eminem, on the other hand, stares hard, seething with self-loathing, and then breaks the mirror into tiny shards.

Still, this was a mismatch: of sonic styles, of performance approaches, of audiences. When it came to commitment and technical accomplishment, this was asymmetric warfare: Eminem laser-focused and professional, Rihanna sticking to her 10-mile stare and repertoire of half-dance moves. Like many in the crowd, Rihanna spent much of the show lip-syncing to Rihanna songs.

And yet she seemed grander than Eminem, who has remained resolutely blue-collar in demeanour and work ethic. At times, it feels as if he’s rapping merely to satisfy himself. But her evident lack of interest is enrapturing, her unwillingness to work hard the mark of someone who knows all the cheat codes. Her performance verged on the philosophical: What is the bare minimum Rihanna must do onstage in order for an event to qualify as a Rihanna concert?

She opened her solo set with abrasive, narcissistic numbers like Phresh Out the Runway and Birthday Cake, songs where she stands coolly still as the music slashes and burns around her. Eventually, she loosened up in full with the house-diva tempos of Where Have You Been and Only Girl (In the World). During a chaotic Rockstar 101, she thrashed against the floor while her guitarist Nuno Bettencourt shredded, as if she were sign-language translating for him.

Like Eminem, Rihanna has become darker as she’s evolved, but she never had his pep. As a result, his solo set was more frenetic than hers, teasing the crowd about illicit substances one minute, then, not too long after, delivering a searing performance of Not Afraid, about his battles with addiction.

But their interactions were negligible and forced, and they largely stayed clear of each other’s orbits when they were both onstage. Their hug at the end of the night was that of two people who once shared an awkward intimacy and bump into each other in a hotel lobby several years later.

What was more noticeable was what they each denied the other. Rihanna was without her natural sensuality, and Eminem didn’t have his raw rage. They were two strangers brought together by expediency, both itching to retreat to their own dark corners.