Shockingly, RiRi’s performances was actually very good. For once in her life, the Bajan beauty didn’t walk around the stage like a lethargic zombie, occasionally picking up the pace of her usual lazy stroll until it was a skip or a brisk march. RiRi also enthusiastically took part in some of the choreography, twirling around the stage and interacting with her backup dancers. Vocally she was bearable, and even adequate during certain moments — not to mention that she looked absolutely gorgeous. It was easily the best “Only Girl” performance of the Loud era thus far, and if she keeps all her performances at this level then she should be able to shake off some of her critics that often point out her poor skills onstage.

Shakira, of course, was absolutely amazing, but she always is so there’s no surprises there.

Check out both performances below. Warning: Rihanna’s is slightly out of sync.

Rihanna-Diva.com // Rihanna performs “Only Girl” on X Factor Italia !

Shakira – Loca Live ( X – Factor 2010) HD

Love songs melt our hearts and make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. For the best love songs of all time, the website “Love to Know” has narrowed down the top 10 love songs and what makes them so special. For those who are getting married or just looking to create a CD of romantic songs, why not add some of the best to your list.

Top Love Songs

The top love songs of all time were song by some of the most cherished singers of all time, including the Beatles and Elvis Presley. These will forever be popular loves songs and will make a great addition to a romantic CD or wedding reception music.

Don’t ask me to describe ringbang. The drummer of the group in the nightclub put it this way: “Take cadence and merengue, take soca and raggasoca, put them all together and, man, you get real Bajun ringbang.” All I can tell you is it rings and it bangs and it makes everybody jump and wave their arms. Modern Barbados is in its music, while old Barbados, British Barbados, is in its buildings. Nelson’s column in Bridgetown’s Trafalgar Square was there before the one in London and Anglican churches are everywhere.

The Landship and the Tuk Tuk band, half Bajun and half British, are a miracle of both.

TUK TUK

On a weekend afternoon in Speightstown I saw and heard the bizarre sights and sounds of the Landship. On a small piece of parkland were men in replica uniforms of the British navy and women dressed as British nurses, complete with Florence Nightingale hats. Something of a cross between friendly societies and dance clubs, they have existed on the island for 130 years and today one of the groups was performing at a music festival in front of a small group of locals and visitors.

They were founded by a returning Bajun who had served in the Royal Navy and who was nostalgic for its fellowship and discipline. The members do dance movements distantly related to sailor’s hornpipes and country dancing but any connection with the Petronella or the Dashing White Sergeant is mutated into fast arm-waving, hip-gyrating Caribbean action. They all have naval “ranks” and the instructions are called out by the Captain and his Lieutenants. There are no “Figure of Eights” here, but the lung-bursting frenzy of “Man Overboard,” “Full Steam Ahead” and “Clear the Decks”.

The Tuk Tuk band accompanies, with a bass drum and a kettledrum, supposedly reminiscent of the ship’s engine. The melody comes from a penny whistle, apparently a memory of being piped aboard, except that the whistler along with the drummers leaps and cavorts like a dervish on fire. Then the mood changes as a man holds up a maypole with trailing ribbons and, as an altogether loveable absurdity, they each take a ribbon and dance round the maypole to English airs played on the penny whistle, accompanied by the Tuk Tuk drums.

UNIQUE

“That,” said Errol, “is unique. That,” he emphasised, “you will find nowhere else on the planet.” I needed no convincing; it couldn’t be anything but true. We had previously met Errol on the beach at the hotel. “Hello, big tall-up man,” he had greeted me. “You just breezin’, I just breezin’ myself, just coolin’ out and thing. It’s well hot today.” He really spoke perfect English, but he could put on Bajun-speak to draw attention to himself, as a kind of party-piece. “Barbadian, ‘Badian, Bajun, it start right there,” he would explain.

The west coast beach was all the clichés you could call to mind rolled together – white sand, palms, ultramarine water, holidaymakers lazing in the hot sun. Errol came and went to no known pattern. “Mind if we just interfere a while?” he smiled, “If you don’t mind me axing the question. I like we talk up some.” He was no layabout or cadger, no “spreeboy” or “fingersmith” as he said, but a self-employed driver and island guide. After a few casual meetings, he succeeded in fixing to take us here and there now and again. “Let’s break fives on it,” he said, holding out to shake hands.

BRITISHNESS

Britishness shows most in the mornings. Full English breakfast is everywhere and the sausages are traditional industrial-style bangers. Shops open at 9 and not before, and small boys walk to school with combed hair, shiny shoes and stockings pulled up to the knee. Cars still have boots and bonnets, not trunks and hoods.

It shows especially on Sunday. “We are going to grandma’s to fire a few,” was a typical remark among the groups crowding the pavements of Bridgetown. Dressed in their finest Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes – the men in suits and ties, the women in their best frocks and hats – they were coming out of church in droves and almost all going for a big lunch with their families. They would fire a few drumsticks on the barbecue. Sunday church, Sunday best, Sunday lunch are all but abandoned in Britain but kept alive in Barbados.

There are others, like school discipline, the cane, one hundred percent literacy, prayers, manners, saying Grace, which are becoming distant memories in the so-called mother country. There’s village cricket everywhere, cars driving on the left (most of the time!) and zebra crossings with flashing orange globes which people call “Belisha beacons”.

Bajuns don’t turn corners, they swing corners, so we swung left at the Sir Garfield Sobers Roundabout and swung right of the Clyde Walcott Roundabout to get to Bridgetown’s Broad Street and its sophisticated (and expensive) boutiques and department stores. The Kensington Oval is near the city centre and it is such a shrine that it is open every day for visitors like me to walk across the sward trodden by the great Barbadians like Gary Sobers.

“There are two religions in our country,” said Errol in his best tour-guide manner. “One is Anglican and the other is cricket.”

MUSIC

Music is everywhere; from the west coast across the mountains of the Scotland district to the winds and breakers of the Atlantic east you hear it from passing cars and portable radios. Steel bands play in the market. It rings out from modest wooden homes with yellow alamander and red hibiscus. People walking along paths or standing on corners call to the rhythms and slap their thighs to it.

It does not tell of its verdant countryside ablaze with wild flowers, it is part of it. It doesn’t talk, like the Scots, of heather and mountains, or like the English, of a green and pleasant land. The music paints it from a palette of rhythmic colours.

The island’s steamy heat is not in its lyrics, but in the reggae, the calypso, the salsa and the ska. It goes with miles of sugar cane and accompanies tropical fruits and humming birds in mahogany trees.

RUM

At the end of a day’s touring, a visit to the Mount Gay rum factory in Bridgetown was a good introduction to another Bajun evening. In mid-tour we got to distinguish among many rums by smelling them – light, dark, clear, weak and strong. At the 86% alcohol stuff (1720 US proof) you inhale deeply and the glass of normal strength you are given at the end is as of nothing.

Evening evokes the real Caribbean. The music goes with jug jug (peas, soft meat minced with cornmeal) and cou cou (couscous with sweet potato and breadfruit) which cook in thousands of ovens, while coal pots and barbecues smoke in porches and backyards.

The dark is filled with the screech of crickets and the calls of night birds. There is nothing large enough or small enough to worry you with their bites, like snakes or mosquitoes, but land crabs scuttle drunkenly sideways and toads leap athletically away from your footsteps, while small lizards run vertically up coconut palms.

But mostly the dark is filled with heat and music, especially music. It burgeons out of the open doors and windows of the rum shops.

This small island is graced by one thousand six hundred rum shops, or one for every 200 people. They are everywhere, small and shack-like with wooden floors, walls, tables and chairs, and the sounds of human disputation and hilarity ring out with the music. Most of them are open all day and all night and the clientele, mostly male, sitting under ceiling fans come to smoke, to argue, to solve life’s problems and to buy rum by the bottle.

The music doesn’t suggest you tap your feet, it demands you sway your body, swing your hips, gyrate your elbows.

The clash of steel, the blast of brass and drum celebrate raw, elemental feelings – release and relief, mental, physical, sexual. They restate the human need to dance. People in rum shops get drunk to it. (Oistins, the fishing village, resonates to it as flying fish are barbecued in the street.) After midnight Baxter Road, the street that never sleeps, resounds to it.

Music doesn’t tell the story of the island, it is the story. It stretches from the old hymns of the Anglican church to all-out Caribbean ringbang. And, in between, the exquisite, sublime confusion of the Landship and the Tuk Tuk band.