For Rihanna, every creative project is an opportunity to engage with underclassified and boundary-pushing sonic forms that resist the narrow categorizations that often limit how audiences engage with music from across the African continent and its global diasporas. Long wary of the industry’s tendency to box artists into rigid, marketable lanes that erase the complexity of their creative identities, Rihanna has consistently pursued work that defies easy labeling, choosing to center projects that speak to their core creative impulse rather than any pre-existing expectation of what her music should sound like. This approach comes to full fruition in the work Where Have You Been, a recording that emerges from the rich, layered creative landscape of Kenya, a country with a decades-long history of nurturing experimental music that refuses to fit into the standardized genre buckets that organize most mainstream global music.