Rihanna umbrella release date
Here, her piercing yet even-keeled alto plays the role so well that we hardly notice its profound lyrical triteness. Blige - for whom the track was intended - so that Rihanna could record it instead.Īnd, of course, credit Rihanna herself, as the R&B star whose mutable persona always seems to synchronize with what's asked of her. Holiday's "Bed" and his own "Shawty Is a Ten," but it has a certain back-of-the-napkin sing-along brilliance here.) So excited was Island Def Jam about the rough demo that it aggressively outbid Mary J. (The superfluous repeated syllable is actually a Nash trademark, if you think about J. Their collective ear for alien-science-synth-meets-crispy-hi-hat beatmaking is very much of its zeitgeist, and their "ella ella / ay ay ay" sounds like throwaway filler turned accidentally into a piece de resistance. What else in "Umbrella" galvanized America during the summer of 2007? Chalk it up in part to the Atlanta-based songwriting-and-production team of Terius Nash (better known as recording artist The-Dream) and Tricky Stewart.
Well, that, and by still finding a way to hitch his wagon to a catchy song every now and then. It's hard not to admire how effortlessly he's reified his pre-eminence by constantly proclaiming it. The man has a certain Teflon to him he's continued to assert his hip-hop kingship throughout this decade even as he's marched inexorably to, and now past, his 40th birthday. It's more or less disposable, but no matter. He was boss at Def Jam Records when a 16-year-old Rihanna first came into his field of view still at the helm some years later, he deigns to publicly cosign her with his opening verse. In unpacking the many strange charms of "Umbrella," it's worth noting that Jay-Z literally (and perhaps figuratively) begins the track. She gives it a go anyway.īy May, it would be the summer jam of the year. "Umbrella" reads at first as ineffably strange, metaphorically obvious, darkly futuristic if her problem heretofore was unclassifiability, here it was in song form. Rihanna's unlikely ticket out arrived in early 2007, when a hastily assembled demo fell into her lap. As a teenager of obvious talent, Rihanna seemed to be throwing known formulas against the wall to see if they would stick the fact that many of them did only complicated her identity crisis. There was her debut hit "Pon De Replay," a dancehall-inspired number which marketed her Caribbean roots "SOS," a radio-friendly electro-pop confection and "Unfaithful," a tactful if mostly conventional, piano- and string-soaked ballad. After leaving Def Jam in 2014 for a spot with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, she took greater creative control for 2016’s ANTI, her most diverse album yet.The summer jam of 2007 can be summarized in seven syllables: "ella, ella, ay, ay, ay."Ĭonsider, for a moment, the early singles of Rihanna. The tracks were inescapable-“Umbrella”, “Don’t Stop the Music”, “Rude Boy”, “Work”-but also had genuine personality, not to mention a carnal sense of expressiveness that set her apart: Rihanna’s changes didn’t seem like the product of high-concept self-reinvention so much as gut feeling. By 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad, she’d expanded the sunny Caribbean pop of her early work for sleek hybrids of hip-hop, R&B, club music and rock. Her 2005 debut, Music of the Sun, went Gold when she was just 17. She was making things up as she went along, but when she went, she went full-steam ahead.īorn in Barbados in 1988, she left high school to pursue music. Describing the chameleonic nature of her clothing line, Fenty-the first female-created brand for LVMH, not to mention its first luxury label run by a black woman-Rihanna said the line didn’t have any fixed look, in part because her own was always changing. Though her biggest tracks have tended toward some variety of dance pop (mixed with reggae, EDM, dancehall, R&B and so on), a closer listen reveals an artist willing to try just about anything-and the uncanny grace to sound good doing it. Fast-forward to the present day and there remains something effortless about Rihanna, a sense of confidence that transcends any one narrative or style.
Most of all, she had ideas and seemed comfortable expressing them. She took a leading role in group activities. A report card for Robyn Rihanna Fenty, first issued by a school back in Barbados’ Saint Michael parish and later reprinted in a giant coffee-table book called RIHANNA, stated, in part, that the young Fenty was positive, sure of herself.