Rihanna - Loud Album Cover

Unlike the Katy Perry album cover I analysed, Rihanna's cover for her album Loud uses a close up of her face rather than showing her whole body. In fact, the album cover is completely of her face and only part of her hair & shoulder is visible. She has her eyes closed which limits the interaction with the audience but gives a sense of mystery which intrigues the audience to find out more as nothing is revealed. Her face is quite plain, with minimal make up used and dark eyelashes, but her lips and hair are both very bright red which indicates some degree of sexiness, which correlates with many of her songs. Although some aspects of traditional representations view women as sexual objects, which to a certain extent is shown by this album cover, the way that Rihanna's face dominates the whole cover shows a more modern representation of females too.



The back of the cover, in contrast with the front, has used much softer colours making Rihanna seem a lot more vulnerable and soft than she does on the front. The angelic image will appeal to young girls in our target audience as its very feminine and pretty but still has an edge with the use of the red tint and the red writing. The writing used is fairly plain and simple, just using capital letters for each song and keeps to one side of the cd, leaving space for another picture of Rihanna.

The inside of the cd uses a picture similar to the one on the front cover, but its a bit softer, as the colours aren't as bright. Again, an extreme close up of Rihanna's face is used but this time one of her eyes are open whilst the other is hidden under her hair. This gives off the impression that she's quite mysterious like on the front cover, but also gives a bit more interaction between her and the audience. Her lips aren't red in this photo, making her seem more innocent than on the front cover, but she is holding a red rose close to her mouth which again indicates sexiness, but also femininity at the same time.

Overall, I think that the pictures used in Rihanna's cd case really give the audience an idea about her and her music. I think the Loud cd gives the impression that her music, and Rihanna herself, is quite sexy but feminine and powerful at the same time. Rihanna's fan base probably is a bit older than Katy Perry's but probably is largely female dominated, but I think this cd case has helped as I think that we should reflect the type of music and meanings behind the songs when we produce our ancillary task.