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Rihanna has revealed where her youngest son Riot got his name.
In her interview with Harper’s Bazaar published on Saturday, the “Umbrella” singer said that Pharrell Williams came up with the name for her child.
“He gave us this name thinking it was going to be a girl, because he had seen something online,” she told the publication. “Pharrell is very deep. He’s not surface. He will never say anything and just leave it there with a full stop. He will have the entire history: the energy, the time, the month that it is.”
The name Riot also seems to have a musical connection as Rihanna’s husband and father of both of her children, A$AP Rocky, collaborated with Williams on the track “Riot (Rowdy Pipe’n).”
This isn’t the first time that the nine-time Grammy Award winner has discussed the origins of her one-year-old’s name. During a 2023 interview with Entertainment Tonight, she said that Riot’s middle name, Rose, was influenced his one of his father’s passions.
“Not everyone knows this, but Rocky loves flowers — he loves having fresh flowers in the house, he loves decorating with flowers, and he even had real flowers in his grill once,” she told the outlet at the time.
Although the couple have yet to mention the possibility of a third child, they revealed that it would be called Joe, after Rocky’s lawyer Joe Tacopina. Rocky was found not guilty of felony assault last week, but had been facing decades behind bars.
“Rihanna and Rocky said to me in the courtroom yesterday, they grabbed me and they said, ‘Listen, our next baby is A$AP Joe,’” Tacopina told Billy Bush on Wednesday during an interview with Extra. “I said, ‘I’m gonna hold you to that!’”
During another part of her interview with Harper’s Bazaar Rihanna opened up about how she felt regarding the ageing process. “Getting old is s***, but it’s also a blessing,” she said.
“My legacy is right now,” she added. “That’s all I have the most control over. My legacy is what I do with my time at this moment. How am I present with the people around me? How am I grateful? How am I making this a happy moment? How am I making a memory?”
Rihanna, who was born in Saint Michael, Barbados, also reflected on her upbringing, explaining that her tenacity in her early years came from a dedication to her family, and a determination to become a success.
“I’ve always been afraid of how much is me versus what I’ve been influenced by,” she said. “I left home as a teenager, and I left everything I knew: my family, my friends, my food, my culture. And I came to a big city by myself, and the only option for me was to win. I knew that I had to win.”
She continued: “The suffering that I felt not being a part of anything that I knew, there was only one way to make that worth it, because I knew that my family was suffering without me too. And so I was like, ‘There’s no way. This has to pay off.’ And that was my fight, my goal, my everything. Every single day. I only got to see my family at Christmas. So I spent the year just going for it until I saw them.”
