Ollie Millington/WireImageOh na na. No real, true blue Navy fan would throw food at Rihanna onstage!
But someone in the audience of her July 15, 2013, show in Manchester, England, did just that. Obviously, RiRi wouldn't tolerate that kind of disrespect from any rude boy (or rude girl), so she launched into a profanity-laden rant.
The 25-year-old pop star had just wrapped up a performance of her 2009 hit "Rude Boy," and seemed to be relishing in the crowd's cheers and applause. "I like that," she told her screaming fans. "I like that a lot. Actually, I love that s--t. I know y'all were gonna be crazy, but f--k! This is next level."
Warning: Video below contains profanity and is NSFW.
It was then, apparently, that some unruly concertgoers began tossing food onto the stage. "All right, there's a good crazy, and a bad crazy," Rihanna said, understandably sounding peeved. "When you throw s--t up here, that's an epic fail."
"I wanna get your gifts, but I don't want you to knock my people out before we do this s--t," she continued. "I swear to God! Cut that s-t out."
"Chips though?" she ranted. "That's that important?"
Chris Brown's on-off love was clearly not amused by the incident, but like a true professional, she knew the show must go on. "All right, Manchester," she said, turning the other cheek. "For those of you who wanna get jiggy and have a good f--king time, say my name!" Then, without missing a beat, she launched into her next song.
As we all know, though, this isn't the first time Rihanna's put an audience member back in his or her place. During a performance last month in Birmingham, England (aren't Brits supposed to have the best manners?!), one handsy fan got a little too grabby with RiRi, tugging at her outfit as she walked past. Before the Barbadian beauty's security team could deal with the offender, Rihanna herself turned around, smacked them with her microphone, and strutted away.
There will always be a few troublemakers, but by and large, the singer adores her army of fans, affectionately referred to as Rihanna's Navy. "I want them to feel comfortable knowing that I have flaws as well," she explained in a 2012 interview with Oprah Winfrey as part of OWN's Next Chapter series. "I want them to know those flaws because I am afraid of the pedestal that comes with fame and being a celebrity so I keep myself as close to the ground as possible."
Initially, though, Rihanna wasn't constantly interacting with her Navy as she so often does today on Instagram and Twitter. "Well, at first I didn't really use anything in the social network world. I was so anti-social network, which is kind of ironic," she told Complex earlier this year. "I actually first started on a chat room on my fan site. My fans didn't really believe it was me. They were asking all these questions and I was giving them real answers, but they wouldn't believe me.
"I was like, 'Oh my gosh,'" she recalled. "So I said, 'You know what? This is the same thing as Twitter.' Twitter is just like a giant chat room that you can text. Almost like you can text your fans.
"Then I just started talking to them again. They would ask real questions and I would answer. I guess we started building a relationship like that and getting really close. They started to find out things about me, I started to find out a lot of things about them, and you realize how much you really have in common with people," she said. "They're definitely a fun group—they're really funny. It's hilarious even to just watch them. They're so entertaining. As much as they think I'm entertaining, they entertain me just as much, if not more."