Interview: Rihanna, singer

'BARF!" Rihanna squeals, at the sight of a pair of pale pink satin Brian Atwood stilettos. In her world, this is a compliment. "Usually it's 'ill' or 'I want to throw up on it,'" she says. "But barf is the worst," meaning the best. "Barf is 10 out of 10."

In a no-frills rehearsal space near Los Angeles's Burbank airport, the R&B star is picking out the sickest outfits for her next few weeks of appearances. "This whole line is barf," she says, pointing to a row of aggressively designed suits and dresses laid out by her stylists. It's the day before the American Music Awards, at which she will perform a medley of two songs from her new album, Rated R, and team Rihanna – a group as big as 30, including hair and make-up artists, dancers, musicians, managers, wardrobe wranglers, production designers, a trainer, a doctor, an assistant, a videographer and one very patient best-friend-forever – are bustling to prepare.

While Rihanna slips behind a screen to twirl around in gowns, a few hippie craftsmen bolt decorative bullets on to microphone stands nearby. The look for Rihanna's performances will be sexy-tough, the diva you don't want to mess with; her slogan, she says, is "I'm such a freaking lady," and that's the media-friendly version.

At the end of a pass through her set, she raises her arms in a fierce warrior pose and sticks out her tongue, a rare reminder she is just 21. Rated R is her fourth album, and probably her most risky, another step in the evolution of a persona that is, as the title of her 2007 album put it, Good Girl Gone Bad. It is also her most personal album, a response to her break-up with the singer Chris Brown, who assaulted her in February after a pre-Grammy party.

Brown pleaded guilty to assault and got five years' probation, six months' community service and a year of domestic-violence counselling. Horrified by the attention the assault received – especially the leaking of a photo that showed her face swollen and bruised – Rihanna retreated for months, emerging only recently to talk about the abuse amid a whirl of promotional appearances for her record. But though she is reluctant to be a symbol for domestic-violence survivors, she insists the experience helped her make what she calls in her liner notes "the album of a lifetime", to turn bad into good.

"As traumatic and as terrifying as it was," she says, "and sometimes I wish it never happened, my whole life changed in the most amazing way after I went through that. If I didn't go through that, I swear, you would've been interviewing a completely different person."

It's a strange time to be Robyn Rihanna Fenty (her intimates still call her Robyn). Good Girl Gone Bad spawned numerous smash singles, including Don't Stop The Music and Umbrella. Her taste for catwalk looks has made her a fashion-world favourite; she even has a name-brand haircut, the Rihanna, short with punky, skater-boy bangs. By 20, she had achieved the level of success she had often imagined while growing up in St Michael, Barbados, where she began performing living-room concerts at six. She left at 16 to begin a recording career in the US.

She found an audience quickly – she had a dancehall hit with Pon De Replay on her 2005 debut, Music Of The Sun – but chafed at her lightweight, club-vocalist image. "In the beginning, everything was a little more manufactured," she says after rehearsal, over dinner at a Italian restaurant in Santa Monica, where she orders spaghetti. "It had to be safe, and in order for it to be safe, it had to be done before, which made no sense to me."

Her appearance, down to her lipstick colour, was monitored by the label, she says. "I was like, 'What do you mean, I can't cut my hair? It has to be long and blonde, like every other female singer in the game? No, I'm not doing that.'"

Gradually, she outmanoeuvred her spunky teen reputation with something raunchier, darker and less conventional. That aesthetic is on full view on Rated R, which has more muscular beats, ominous lyrics and a bass-heavy sound Rihanna said is "a lot more grimy".

LA Reid, chairman of her label Def Jam Records and an executive producer of the album, says Rihanna had always been confident in her own point of view. "She's not looking to be a consensus builder, she's not looking to see what the room thinks," he says. "The people that work with Rihanna execute what she thinks."

But when Rihanna entered the studio just two months after being battered by Brown, she wasn't prepared to get personal. "It was exactly what I tried to stay away from," she says. "When I was about to start the record, that was the first thing I said: 'I don't want no sad songs. I don't want no songs about love.' I turned away eight ballads: 'I don't want to do that, that's totally expected.'"

At the time she was not speaking, publicly or privately, about the assault. "Everyone wanted me to see a therapist to just talk about it, and I refused," she says. "In Barbados, we don't do that. We keep it in our family and figure it out and move on. I just put my game face on and went on with my life. But deep down inside I had some things to get past and it came out in the music."

She helped write nine of the new album's 13 songs. Mushy they're not. "While you getting your cry on," she sings on Hard, "I'm getting my fly on." (Eventually she relented about the therapist and, she says, "I was able to talk about it in a comfortable way, in a very calm way, and the anxiety wasn't there any more.")

Reid, who has known Rihanna since she was 16, says of the album: "What I expected was for her to make a statement. It's all about having artistic expression and having a point of view, rather than being a little pop girl that you give songs to."

Rihanna's taste is sometimes surprising. When asked to name others with whom she would like to collaborate, she mentions

Depeche Mode. Credited as an art director on Rated R, she spends her free time looking at fashion photography for visual inspiration. "Jean-Paul Goude is amazing," she says. "Helmut Newton is by far my favourite, because not only is everyone almost always naked, but they look good naked, and a lot of them have weapons in their hands."

She may talk tough, but in person Rihanna is soft, quick with endearments and shoulder squeezes. She manages to be composed – suffering with a tummy bug, she excuses herself several times during dinner because she thinks she might be sick, but perseveres – and simultaneously open, telling embarrassing stories about being recognised during a bikini wax (bad time to ask for an autograph).

Later, the American Music Awards performance goes off without a hitch, though it isn't really because of the hours of rehearsal. Rihanna breezed through by choice. She doesn't care much for being scripted. "I like to go for it in the moment," she says. "That's what rock stars do."

Rated R is out now on Def Jam, www.rihannanow.com

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on December 6, 2009