In essence, it's the Rihanna we know today, and in 2007, her arrival echoed across the world to an indelible refrain: "ella, ella / ay, ay, ay." And the video, with all the black leather, metallic body paint and showers of sparks, completes her transformation to a bionic avant-fashionista who transcends category. 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. 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.
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