EVAN ROGERS GREW up loving Stevie Wonder; his friends liked Elton John. Raised in Storrs, Connecticut, a university town, Rogers was always the white guy in R&B bands. As a teenager he hooked up with a local soul outfit called Too Much Too Soon; they modeled themselves on Earth, Wind & Fire, the ’70s post-funk group. The band played all over New England—high school and college dances, and at clubs that played Top 40; sometimes they had six gigs a week. Among their go-to numbers was “I Wanna Be Your Lover” by Prince; “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire; “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” by McFadden & Whitehead; and “Brick House” by the Commodores. Rogers was having such a good time that he decided to put off college, upsetting his parents, both Cornell graduates; his two sisters had gone to Middlebury. Finally, he convinced his parents to let him take one year off from a real career path to give the music a try. “And I’m still going,” he says, forty years later.
Another white guy, Carl Sturken, joined the band. Sturken was a skilled guitar player who had graduated summa cum laude from Wesleyan. They wrote a few tunes together—some early Sturken & Rogers originals. The band traveled farther out once in while, and on a road trip to Barbados in the mid-’80s, both Rogers and Sturken met Bajan women who would become their wives and, in a roundabout way, would determine the direction of urban pop. But not for another thirty years.
The band broke up, and Sturken and Rogers moved to New York and focused on songwriting. Rogers handled lyrics and melody while Sturken did rhythm and chords, although they exchanged ideas about both. Their first cut was a song called “Heartbreaker” on Evelyn “Champagne” King’s 1984 album So Romantic. But then Rogers got signed as a solo artist by RCA, and in 1985 he released an album called Love Games, featuring Evan on vocals and Carl on guitar, doing their own songs. The album stiffed, and RCA dropped Rogers, but Capitol picked him up and put out a second album, Faces of Love, in 1989, which didn’t sell either.
Their writing and production career was blossoming, however. Sturken & Rogers had had a cut on the soundtrack of Beat Street, the influential 1984 film about early hip-hop culture in the Bronx, and that gave them some cred in the urban community, and led to writing and production work with Cheryl Lynn, Stephanie Mills, and Jennifer Holiday.
In 1989, the pair embraced their pop side, writing and producing half the tracks on Donny Osmond’s comeback album, including the hit single “Soldier of Love,” which Rogers had originally written for himself. Donny Osmond had been a teen pop star back in the heyday of bubblegum music. His cover of “Puppy Love,” the song Paul Anka wrote for Annette Funicello, came out when I was thirteen, and it helped mold my teenage music preferences: whatever this song stood for, I was for the opposite. Seventeen years later, the label was so unsure about how to market a thirty-two-year old former teen star whose career was at a standstill that “Soldier of Love” was promoted to radio programmers as the work of an anonymous “mystery artist.”
Set to a New Jack Swing beat, the song got as high as number two, one rung higher than “Puppy Love” (although not as high as Osmond’s 1971 chart-topper “Go Away Little Girl,” a Goffin-King tune from the Brill Building era). “Soldier of Love” showed that teen pop stars could survive beyond their teens. The song also showed that Sturken & Rogers could write pop hits.
Just like Lou Pearlman, Rogers and Sturken took notice of New Kids on the Block’s enormous commercial success in the early ’90s. They decided to start a grown-man boy band with some other former members of Too Much Too Soon, and call it Rythm [sic] Syndicate. The five guys played instruments onstage like a rock group, but also did synchronized dancing like a boy band, and they had boy-band haircuts. It is not something they are particularly proud of, looking back. “The problem was that we weren’t boys,” Rogers notes. Sturken was pushing thirty-five by that point. Nevertheless they managed to have another big hit with their song P.A.S.S.I.O.N; it reached number two in 1991. The band released two albums, and toured internationally, but broke up in 1993 as grunge took over. Rythm Syndicate, in its high cheesiness, probably helped push the Zapoleonic pendulum away from pure-pop doldrums toward the grungy extremes.
But teen pop predictably followed grunge again in the second half of the ’90s, and Sturken and Rogers’s R&B-inflected pop sound, the legacy of Too Much Too Soon, turned out to be perfect for white boy bands. The pair wrote and produced four songs for Boyzone’s 1998 album Where We Belong, which was five times platinum in the UK (Denniz PoP also worked on the album). One of their songs, “All That I Need,” was number one in the UK. They also wrote ’N Sync’s 1999 single “(God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time on You,” which got to number eight. Also in 1999, they had two cuts on Christina Aguilera’s self-titled debut album, and that opened the door for Sturken and Rogers to work with an exultation of teen pop artists, including Jessica Simpson, Alsou, Mandy Moore, Christina Milian, and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton. And, as the 1990s came to a close and the teen-pop fad cloyed and curdled, Clive Davis brought the pair in to work on Kelly Clarkson’s debut album, Thankful. The song they wrote, “The Trouble with Love Is,” was a modest hit, and, thanks to Davis’s string pulling, wound up as a featured song in the film Love Actually.
In the early 2000s, the partners began to expand their business. Instead of just writing songs, they started looking for artists. “We felt like we’d built up all this knowledge over the course of our careers,” Sturken says, “both as artists and as songwriters, about what it takes to be a star, and we might as well put it to good use.” The plan was to sign an artist to a production deal, develop his or her sound, and attempt to broker them to a major label.
They had an artist called Javier they were excited about, but things didn’t work out (eight years later, Javier won the first season of The Voice). In the wake of that debacle, they changed directions again, deciding they should sign writers, not artists, and share in the publishing—the old Clive Calder approach. “No artists” became their watchword.
FOR CHRISTMAS OF 2003, Rogers and his Bajan wife, Jackie, went to Barbados for the holidays, as had been their custom for years, to visit family and friends. They stayed in a villa at the Accra Beach Hotel.
As often happened when they went to Barbados, Rogers heard about some singers. “There’s always someone who wants to audition, because people know we’re writers and producers,” he says. “I’ll be down at the beach and somebody will come up to me and start singing—it’s like that.”
As it turned out, a good friend of Jackie’s had a fifteen-year-old daughter named Kleanna Browne, who was in a girl group called Contrast with two other teenagers, Jose Blackman and Robyn Fenty. All three were students at the Combermere School, a well-known secondary school for striving West Indian parents. The group had never actually performed in public, but they had worked up a version of “Emotion,” Destiny’s Child’s cover of the Bee Gees song; and “Killing Me Softly,” the Lauryn Hill version; and “Dangerously in Love,” Beyoncé’s song. The friend said they sounded really good.
Rogers arranged to meet the girls at the hotel. They were late, because one of them, the Fenty girl, took so long changing out of her school uniform and fixing her hair and makeup. “The others were saying, ‘Where the hell is she?’ ” Rogers recalls.
“And then she walked in,” Rogers remembers, “and I said to myself, ‘If that girl can sing, then—holy shit! Because she had such a presence! Her makeup was perfect, and she had these capri pants and matching sneakers, with her green eyes and her long supermodel neck.” But of course, Rogers immediately thought, “She probably can’t sing, because usually it’s the pretty one who can’t.”
But Fenty could. Rogers had the three of them sing together, and each sing separately.
“And the whole time I’m thinking, ‘OK I have to have a follow-up meeting with this one.’ ”
The following day, Fenty, her mother, and her mom’s boyfriend came back to Rogers’s villa. The girl was quiet, listening intently. Rogers wanted to hear her voice again, just to be sure, so he taught her the song he had written for Kelly Clarkson, “The Trouble with Love Is.”
“I’d sing a line,” he says, “and she’d sing it back to me, and I was going, ‘I think this girl’s got something.’ She was rough around the edges, but had a very distinctive sound to her voice. She also had a charming girl-next-door quality, Rogers thought.
He called Carl.
Sturken: “When Evan called me from Barbados the first thing he said was, ‘I know we said no more artists. . . .’ ”
Rogers: “But man, this girl is special.”
Sturken: “Go for it.”
Rogers explained to Robyn and her mother that he’d like to bring her to the New York area, to work in their studio in Bronxville, which was called the Loft, located next to the Metro North train station. She would live with Evan and Jackie in their home in Stamford, Connecticut.
“Her mom was hilarious because she was so low-key about her,” Rogers recalls. “She didn’t really get that her daughter had anything special. She was like, ‘Well, if you see something. I just want her schoolwork to be done. Education is very important.’ ” Fenty’s mother wanted to wait until summer vacation, so that Robyn wouldn’t miss any school.
Rogers then turned to the girl. “I said, ‘Look, if we’re going to do this, you should know this business is brutal. Are you sure you love it that much that you’re willing to go through all this?’
“And without any hesitation at all, she said, ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’
“And I was like, ‘That’s the right answer!’ ”
So Rogers signed her to their production company, Syndicated Rhythm Productions.
In a photo taken that day at Rogers’s villa, Fenty is wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, part of her Combermere uniform. Her hair is primly pinned up on her head and she is smiling guardedly at the camera. Her life is about to change, and somehow it is clear that she knows it.
LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS AND Kelly Clarkson, Robyn Rihanna Fenty experienced a childhood fraught with parental discord, a violent domestic nightmare from which fame seemed to offer safe harbor. Her father, Ronald, was descended from the seventeenth-century Irish who had been “Barbadosed” by Oliver Cromwell’s troops and sold to British planters on the island as indentured servants. He was an alcoholic and a drug abuser. Fenty later recalled in a 2011 Rolling Stone interview, “Fridays would be scary because he would come home drunk. He’d get paid, and half of it would go toward alcohol. He’d walk in the door, and it was all eyes on him.” On more than one occasion he struck Fenty’s mother, Monica, an accountant who was originally from Guyana, once breaking her nose in front of Robyn.
Eventually her father lost his job as a supervisor in a garment warehouse, and hung around their home in Bridgetown, getting high. Robyn learned to be wary whenever she saw unwrapped packets of tinfoil in the ashtray at home; it meant Dad had scored some coke. Once, when she was nine, peering through a doorway, she saw her father with his lips around a crack pipe, and when Robyn told her mother what she had seen, Monica made her husband leave the house. Throughout her childhood, Robyn suffered badly from recurring headaches. Doctors feared she had a brain tumor, but CT scans showed nothing. The headaches disappeared shortly after her parents’ divorce, which occurred around the time she met Evan Rogers.
Fenty didn’t write songs, or play an instrument; she had never had any formal training in either voice or dance before meeting Rogers. Her main qualification as a singer was that she wanted to be one so badly. Rogers sensed that ambition ran deep—“I saw it in her eyes,” he says. But what was “it,” exactly? No mere girlish desire for fame; it was more likely a much more urgent need to escape from the anxieties of a violent home life into the illusion of security and boundless love that a life onstage seemed to offer. That desire, more than any inborn talent, is what fans will connect to, and that is what record men look for in a new artist. It’s the one thing they can’t manufacture.
In the summer of 2004, Robyn and her mother traveled to Connecticut to work with Rogers and Sturken on demos. The songwriters wanted to record four songs that would give A&R departments a sense of their options with the artist. She could be a power diva, in the classic R&B tradition (“Hero”) or she could be more of a ballad singer (as in Whitney Houston’s version of the Isley Brothers’ “For the Love of You,” which she also recorded). In addition to covers, Fenty recorded an original pop-soul song Sturken and Rogers wrote for her, “Last Time.” They also changed her professional name to Rihanna, Fenty’s middle name. Robyn didn’t feel like a Rihanna. She remained Robyn to her friends and family (to this day, she says, she sometimes doesn’t realize people are addressing her when they call out “Rihanna!”). But the Swedish Robyn was well known throughout the world, largely thanks to Cheiron, and two pop artists with the same name would complicate the branding.
In the fall, Fenty went back to school in Barbados, while Sturken and Rogers continued to search for the right song for her—a song with the right amount of rhythmic edge to make it cool and danceable, accompanied by a pop melody that would sound good on the radio.
Several months later, a producer named Vada Nobles sent the partners a rough demo of a song called “Pon de Replay,” a Caribbean-flavored dancehall tune. The demo had drums and some half-sung lyrics, and a sketch of a melody. Sturken and Rogers finished the song, and then called Barbados and said Robyn needed to come back and record it, because this was the song they felt could get her a deal.
They played the song for her over the phone, and she thought it sounded like “a nursery rhyme.” But she agreed to fly up to New York, and they recorded her vocal just before Christmas 2004.
Then Fenty went back home again. Rogers and Sturken started sending their package of four demos, along with some photographs of the singer, to major labels. Record execs generally take long Christmas breaks, filtering back into their offices the second week of January. By the end of January several labels were interested.
In late January, Sturken and Rogers’s lawyer, Scott Felcher, played “Pon de Replay” for Jay Brown, the head of A&R at Def Jam. Brown loved it, and when Felcher passed him a snapshot the guys had taken of Fenty in the Loft, he wanted to meet her.
He went to find his boss, Jay-Z, the president of the label.
“I played it for Jay,” Brown recalled in the Rolling Stone article, “and Jay was like, ‘That’s a big song.’ ” For Jay-Z, Brown explained, “you’ve got to be bigger than the song, otherwise the song dictates to you.” Jay-Z wasn’t sure this girl was that big, but she was certainly pretty, and they decided to invite her to audition for them in the office, to see if she had anything more than talent and good looks.
The phone call came to the Loft. “Jay Brown called us up and said, ‘Where is she?’ ” Rogers recalls. “I said, ‘She went back to Barbados but we can bring her back in a couple of weeks.’ ”
“Why do I have to wait a couple of weeks?” Brown asked. “I want to meet her now.” They scheduled a meeting for the following Monday afternoon.
That was on Thursday. Fenty got up to New York by Friday afternoon, and they had the weekend to prepare for the audition.
“At that point we didn’t know her as a performer at all,” Sturken says. “I thought we were going to have months to work on her presentation. Instead we had two days.”
The rehearsals did not go particularly well. Fenty sounded “pitchy”—out of tune.
“When a person sings a cappella, like they do on American Idol, you can’t quite tell if they’re on pitch,” Sturken says. “But when you sing [along] to an instrument, you can tell right away. And she was pitchy.”
They also had no idea how Fenty would respond to the pressure of an audition. “I mean it’s one thing to be in front of Clive Davis, who she’s never heard of,” Rogers says. “It’s another thing to be in front of her idol, Jay-Z. She could go all to pieces.”
DEF JAM WAS STARTED by Rick Rubin in his dorm room at NYU in 1983, after Rubin produced Jazzy Jay’s album It’s Yours. Thanks mainly to the A&R work of Russell Simmons, with whom Rubin soon joined forces, and some deft MTV dealings, Def Jam brought hip-hop into the commercial mainstream. They broke seminal acts like LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, and signed Run–D.M.C. (“Run” Simmons was Russell’s brother, Joseph) and Public Enemy. The label was bought by PolyGram in 1994 and became part of the Universal Music Group in 1998, which paid Simmons $100 million for his stake, bade him farewell, and merged Def Jam with Island Records, the Jamaica-based label started by Chris Blackwell.
Since 1988, Def Jam had been run by Lyor Cohen, a well-known industry player, who like Simmons had begun as a promoter of hip-hop shows. He is tall and broad-shouldered and somewhat fearsome-looking, and presents himself like some kind of white gangster. His physique adds to his bad-guy-in-a-Bond-film vibe, plus the fact that he travels with bodyguards, several real beefalos—those football linemen types who protect rap stars. His rise to the top, which began when he forced out Rick Rubin, has been replete with cold-blooded corporate executions. He exudes a menacing calm.
Cohen mostly kept Def Jam close to its rap roots—its biggest artists were DMX, Ja Rule, Foxy Brown, and Jay-Z himself, whose label, Roc-A-Fella Records, Def Jam distributed. But Cohen did not succeed in making this new generation of hip-hop stars bigger than their predecessors. Hip-hop’s success was partially due to its aggressive and dangerous-seeming blackness, but that quality also limited its appeal to white soccer moms. The genre also defined itself by a lot of things it was not. It was not pop. It was not sung. And rappers rarely danced, except to swagger suggestively around the stage. With the usual paths to dominant chart success blocked, it seemed there were barriers to how big hip-hop was going to get.
Cohen also signed Mariah Carey in 2002, and created a new label just for her. But Carey’s career languished, and over the course of the next eighteen months Def Jam stopped producing homegrown hits on the hip-hop side too. In January 2004, Cohen departed for Warner. He was replaced by L. A. Reid, whose background was not in hip-hop at all, but rather in pop-inflected R&B, going back to the Atlanta-based LaFace Records, which he co-founded with Babyface Edmonds in 1989, and which signed Toni Braxton, TLC, and Usher, helping put Atlanta on the map as an important center of urban music production.
Reid had a sure hand when it came to dealing with R&B singers like Carey, whose career he helped revive, but he was confident in the hip-hop world. Def Jam’s artists worried that Reid would soften the label’s hard edge. Partly to counter those fears, Reid persuaded Jay-Z to assume the title of president of Def Jam. He also arranged for Universal to buy Roc-A-Fella, the label that Jay-Z and his friends Damon Dash and Kareem Burke founded in 1996, back when they were still street hustlers. Jay-Z started his corporate gig in the late fall of 2004, not long before Rogers and Sturken sent out their Rihanna demos.
For Jay-Z, whose real name was Shawn Carter, the Def Jam job was the culmination of a hip-hop Horatio Alger story. Raised in the Marcy Projects, a lower-income housing development in Brooklyn, Jay-Z had lived the “hard knock life” he later rapped about, working as a small-time drug dealer in a criminal gang. In his 2010 memoir, Decoded, he hauntingly describes his time as a drug dealer, where he and his crew sold “work”—crack and cocaine—to desperate addicts on the streets. He writes that he was saved by his love of words, which led him to writing rhymes.
After appearing on several established rappers’ records, most notably Big Daddy Kane’s, Jay tried to get his own record deal, but the labels he approached, including Def Jam, turned him down. So he and his boys started their own label. They didn’t have a distribution deal; they sold their music out of the back of people’s cars in Brooklyn. His first album, Reasonable Doubt, told stories of the hustling life; and the single, “Ain’t No Nigga,” featuring Foxy Brown, got to number fifty on the Hot 100. He followed that with a new album each year, each stronger than the last, up through The Black Album (2003), establishing himself as the preeminent rap lyricist of his generation. Roc-A-Fella also signed other artists—notably Kanye West, who, like some of label’s other signees, began as a beat maker for Jay-Z himself.
But the knock on Jay-Z as a label head was that he cared more about his own records than those of his artists. Some said he sabotaged his artists if they threatened his top-dog status. That kind of criticism was partly why Jay had announced his retirement as a rapper after The Black Album—in order to focus on his responsibilities as a record man: discovering and developing talent. To assist him, Jay-Z brought in Jay Brown, who had worked for Quincy Jones’s publishing company, and put him in charge of A&R.
BEFORE GOING TO DEF JAM on Monday afternoon, Sturken and Rogers took Fenty to a morning meeting at J Records, Clive Davis’s label. They were well known at J because of their work with American Idol. “So we walked in,” Rogers says, “and we are sitting there waiting for our meeting with Steve Ferrera,” the well-respected head of A&R for Davis, who died in 2014. Rihanna said she had to go to the bathroom. No sooner had she gone than the elevator doors opened and out came Clive Davis himself, returning from the weekend, trundling a suitcase behind him.
“Hello, guys, what are you doing here!” Davis exclaimed.
They explained about their artist Rihanna, who was with them, only she happened to be in the bathroom right at that moment; perhaps he could wait until she came out. Sturken was saying to himself, Rihanna, get out of the bathroom! After several minutes Davis said, “Well, I got to go,” and went into his office, never seeing the girl.
Might Davis’s antennae have picked up the bat squeak of incipient stardom emitted by the young singer? Maybe; however, his lieutenant, the late Steve Ferrera, did not. Rihanna sang, “For the Love of You” for him, accompanied by Sturken on acoustic guitar. Ferrera was unimpressed. He suggested she try “Pon de Replay,” in front of the marketing team, who happened to be meeting in a nearby conference room. When she finished that song they applauded politely; an excruciating fifteen seconds of silence followed. Sturken and Rogers thanked everyone and beat a retreat to the sidewalk with their artist.
“We were all a little shaken by that,” Rogers says. “We went to lunch around the corner and we were saying, ‘This is going to be tougher than we thought.’ ”
After lunch, they went to Def Jam, located on the twenty-eighth floor of the Worldwide Plaza building at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-First Street. Fenty was very nervous. She had stayed up almost all night trying on outfits, finally choosing white jeans with a pale-green blouse and white high-heeled boots. It was the dead of winter in New York, and she looked like she was ready for the beach.
“We got off the elevator,” Rogers says, “and when she saw Jay-Z for the first time, down the hall, she began to hyperventilate.”
“That’s when I really got nervous,” Fenty said in a 2007 interview with the Observer. “I was like: ‘Oh God, he’s right there, I can’t look, I can’t look, I can’t look!’ ”
She was somewhat calmed by the fact that Jay-Z was casually dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. He brought her into his office, where an enlarged version of Rihanna’s head shot had been affixed to a wall. They all talked for a while. Also present was Marc Jordan, who would become Rihanna’s manager.
“I was very shy,” Fenty said. “I was cold the entire time. I had butterflies. I’m sitting across from Jay-Z. Like, Jay-Z.”
Jay Brown joined them, as did Tracy Waples, the head of marketing at Def Jam. Tyran “Ty Ty” (pronounced “Ta Ta”) Smith, a friend of Jay’s from the old days who consulted on all A&R decisions, was also in the room.
Jay-Z had a thick shag carpet in his office. Sturken, who had seen it before, had counseled Fenty to remove her boots before she started performing, but when the moment came she forgot. “And I just went, ‘Oh no,’ ” Sturken says, “because I imagined her catching a heel and flying across the room.”
Finally Fenty was ready to begin. The moment that would change her life, and Sturken’s and Rogers’s, was at hand.
She sang “The Last Time” first. “And she did it the best she’d ever done it!” Sturken says. That was when he realized he needn’t have worried about this girl: she was a killer. “I was like, ‘Wow, she brings it when she has to.’ ”
“She was obviously nervous,” Jay-Z later told Rolling Stone. “Now she has a big personality, but I didn’t get that in the meeting. What I did get was her eyes, this determination. She was fierce—like Kobe Bryant.” He added, “I knew she was a star.”
After the first song, Rihanna sang along with and danced to a recording of “Pon de Replay.”
When she was finished, Jay looked at Rogers and Sturken and said, “So what do I have to do to get you guys to cancel all your other meetings?”
Jay called L.A. Reid in, and Rihanna performed again for him. Reid recalled, “We see pretty all the time. Pretty’s a dime a dozen. But those eyes said, ‘I’m going to make it. You’re gonna be on board or not. But this train is leaving the station.’ ”
Def Jam offered Fenty a record contract on the spot. The offer was an intuitive, gut-based decision, rather than a data-driven one, but it had a certain logic to it. A pressure-cooker situation allows labels to leverage their enormous power, bargaining that the artist’s ambition and desire for stardom will work against their best interests. The artist takes the bird in hand even though it is a decoy that conceals a snare, denying themselves the leverage that other offers would provide.
Sturken and Rogers got a piece of Rihanna’s record sales for her first five albums (their deal was later extended to seven albums), and a percentage of her management fees. Plus, they got to write and produce most of the songs on the first album. Finally, as the “furnishing company,” Syndicated Rhythm Productions secured the right to sign off on every penny Def Jam spent on Rihanna’s career.
Jay-Z wouldn’t let Fenty leave the building until she signed, fearing that another label that had also received her demo might swoop in and steal her away. They were all there until three in the morning while the lawyers worked out the details. Fenty later recalled Jay-Z saying, ‘There’s only two ways out. Out the door’ ”—if she signed the contract—“ ‘or through this window’ ” if she didn’t. Was that a threat? “It was very flattering.” She left through the door.
RIHANNA’S FIRST ALBUM, Music of the Sun, was completed in a speedy three months. Sturken and Rogers wrote or co-wrote all but three of the thirteen songs on the album, and they produced all of the tracks, with a notable assist on “Let Me” from a Norwegian production duo called Stargate, who had recently arrived in the United States and who would soon figure largely in Rihanna’s career. For added chutzpah, the producers had Rihanna cover Dawn Penn’s marvelous reggae song “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No),” produced by Wycliffe Johnson and Cleveland Browne (Steely & Clevie), which the sixteen-year-old proved barely capable of handling. In the imaging for the album, Rogers mostly stuck to his girl-next-door notion of Robyn Fenty, presenting her as a doe-eyed innocent in hoodies and sweats.
With Rihanna, Jay-Z seemed determined to prove himself as a record man, and show that he could guide another artist’s career as deftly as he’d handled his own. The singer became his special project. Fenty worked hard to justify his faith in her, putting in long days of vocal and choreography training. Though she lacked Britney’s Mouseketeer grounding as a preteen star, Rihanna learned fast. She continued living with the Rogerses in Connecticut as they oversaw the production of her debut album.
“Pon de Replay,” the first single from the album, was released in May 2005. It became a summer hit, getting as high as number two on the Hot 100 (Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” couldn’t be dislodged from the top spot). Def Jam had thought it was an R&B song, but pop stations played it. The single also performed well in the relatively new realm of digital sales, a harbinger of digital dominance to come.
But the second single, “If It’s Lovin’ that You Want,” didn’t do well, nor did the album, which came out at the end of August. Worse, the album failed to make it clear what kind of artist Rihanna was—was she island, R&B, hip-hop, or pop? That summer, Jay-Z summoned her and Rogers and Sturken to his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and told Rihanna she had to step up her game. He reminded her that the artist needed to be bigger than the song. “You could be done,” he warned her.
In October, L.A. Reid heard a Europop-sounding dance song called “SOS,” a homage to early ’80s British synth pop (and, of course, ABBA); the song samples the synth riff from “Tainted Love,” made famous by Soft Cell. Reid had originally offered the song, by “J.R.” Rotem, Evan Bogart, and Ed Cobb, to Christina Milian, but she thought it was too pop. So he took it to Rihanna. “SOS” wasn’t the kind of song that the other men steering her career had in mind for her—it wasn’t urban enough, they thought—but Reid said, “Forget all that. She’s Madonna. She’s an international pop star. Let’s make people dance.” The song earned Rihanna her first Billboard number one.
The second single from the album was a sophisticated ballad called “Unfaithful.” Once again, the Norwegian duo Stargate co-wrote and produced the track, which was distinguished by a lovely melody and lyrics from Shaffer Smith, an up-and-coming R&B writer and artist who called himself Ne-Yo. The song also performed well in the charts. The album, A Girl Like Me did not do that well—album sales would never be Rihanna’s strength. But as album sales declined across the board, thanks mainly to the singles-based pricing model of iTunes, they came to matter less to an artist’s success. Rihanna would emerge as the consummate singles artist, always ready with a new product for the market regardless of whether it was attached to an album. Lacking an overriding artistic vision for her music, she is well supplied with a diverse and expanding clutch of vocal personalities, which adds variety and allows her to make a strong impression in the three or four minutes a song lasts.
But that eclecticism also worked against her. Two albums into her career, it still wasn’t clear who Rihanna was. To her detractors, and there were many, she was just another wannabe-yoncé who sang through her nose and couldn’t really dance. To prove them wrong, she needed a song that would define her as an artist.
LIKE MANY AN ARTIST’S signature song, Rihanna’s breakout, “Umbrella,” was actually written for someone else.
The song was the work of three men: Tricky Stewart, a producer; Terius Nash, a singer-songwriter who called himself “The-Dream”; and Kuk Harrell, a vocal producer. Together they make up the songwriting team at RedZone Entertainment, a music production company and publishing firm based in Atlanta.
Tricky Stewart comes from a musical family. His uncle Butch was a successful commercial jingle writer in Chicago, and owned an advertising company with his father, Phillip. His mother, Mary Ann, and her sisters, Vivian and Kitty Haywood, put out two records as “Kitty and the Haywoods,” and also sang on the jingles as needed. The Stewarts created jingles for Coke, McDonald’s, and Anheuser-Busch, among many other top brands. Their children Laney and Mark, joined by cousin Kuk Harrell, and Kuk’s sister Cynthia, sang on the jingles too. “They were always looking for kids to sing on a spot,” Mark remembers. “So that was our exposure to the process and to paying attention [to] making records. We were studio rats.” Tricky, born Christopher Alan, the baby of the family, was a musical prodigy. As a drummer he had started playing on records when he was thirteen, and planned to be a session musician. But Mary Ann convinced her son to learn music production, because the horizons were higher. (Good call, Mom—producers would put session drummers out of business.)
In the 1980s, the younger generation started their own jingle house, but their real ambition was to make records. First Laney got a publishing deal at Sony. “And because Laney got in the door,” says Mark, “he got a joint venture that pulled the rest of us in the door too.” In the mid-’90s, with an investment from L.A. Reid’s LaFace Records, the Stewarts established RedZone in Atlanta. Tricky, later joined by Kuk and Dream, handled the songwriting and production work; brother Mark managed them; Laney ran the publishing, and Mark’s wife, Judi, handled administration.
According to Kuk Harrell, the secret of their success is that they approach songs like they are jingles. “We all learned from an early age to approach music as a business,” he explains. “As opposed to some other guys who may do it for fun or whatever. We were trained to do exactly what the client wants you to do, and do it when they want it. So if they have to have it by Monday, then you give it to them on Monday. It has to be precise.” He adds, “See, with a lot of guys, you’re getting someone who is a track guy, but he’s not an experienced producer—he just makes beats. And when you put him in a pressure situation where Rihanna is sitting there and the label is sitting there, and they want the song and you got to perform right then, they can’t do it. That’s what we learned in writing jingles; you don’t feel the pressure. You’re like an athlete—like, what pressure? You are there to perform.”
RedZone was set up as a mini-Motown, but the hits were slow to come. Tricky had a minor hit, his first, with “Who Dat” for JT Money, a rapper from Miami. In 2000 the song reached number one on Billboard’s rap chart. When Tricky did “Me Against the Music” (2003) for Britney Spears, the lead single from her 2004 album, In the Zone, he seemed poised to enjoy the mainstream chart success that Timbaland and the Neptunes were then enjoying. But for the next five years, until “Umbrella” came along, RedZone had only minor hits.
Harrell describes how the song came to be. “I was fooling around with Logic,” he says, “trying to learn it, and I had gone into the samples and found this high-hat loop, which I put on a beat. Cha chick cha bun tha smoth,” he mouths, making the percussion sounds with his breath and lips.
“Then Tricky comes in and says, ‘What’s that?’ ” Stewart sat down at a keyboard and started playing chords into the box, over the looped high hat and snare sound. Then he programmed a bass line. At that point Dream came into the studio, listened to the track, and the word “umbrella” popped into his head. He went into the vocal booth and got on the mike, singing “Under my umbrella.” And then, inspired, added the all-important echoes—“ella ella ella eh eh eh”—that became the song’s signature hook.
“Umbrella” is basically a four-chord vamp built around that central riff played on the high hat and snare, and underpinned by a heavy, hip-hop bass line. A fifth chord, the B, comes in on the bridge. The wonderful title hook is deployed with almost classical restraint, not coming until the refrain at the end of the first chorus. In the studio, the songwriters worked out a bridge for the song—most urban songs of that period did not have one. In about two hours, the song was finished. The brilliant trace vocal that The-Dream recorded on the demo has all the song’s signature elements, from the Caribbean flava in the “ellas,” to the lovely concluding hook, “Come into me.”
“We knew it was special,” Harrell says, once it was finished. “We didn’t know it was a hit. Nobody knows that.”
Tricky Stewart had known hits. He had not known smashes. What’s the difference? “A hit is just a hit,” as he puts it: “a smash is a life changer.” How? Brother Mark says, “Nothing has been the same since we created that record. We had experience in record making but not hit making. All of a sudden you have major artists blowing up your phone. And we knew exactly how to service them; we reverted back to that jingle mentality—we were prepared for that pressure. So whether it was Beyoncé calling or Bieber calling, we knew how to operate.”
But in order for “Umbrella” to be a smash, the Stewarts first needed to get it into the hands of a top artist. The biggest artist they knew personally was Britney Spears. Tricky had co-written and produced “Me Against the Music” for her.
But by the time “Umbrella” came along, Spears was working on her fifth album, the aptly titled Blackout. Mike Stewart sent a copy of the demo to Larry Rudolph, her manager, who passed it along to Jive, her label. Jive rejected the song, saying Blackout had enough material already. It is unclear whether Britney ever even heard the demo. Just as her career was launched by “. . . Baby One More Time,” a song meant for TLC, so now, at a point when she could have desperately used a comeback hit, a song meant for her slipped through her fingers. “Gimme More,” the highest-charting single from the Blackout album, was a hit but hardly a smash, although it did introduce the line “It’s Britney, bitch,” which became a trademark.
In trying to fathom how Britney could have rejected “Umbrella,” Tricky notes drily that “her personal life was . . . a little out of control” at the time. Britney, the first of the modern teen pop divas, who rose the highest and fell the furthest, was hitting her nadir when “Umbrella” was offered to Jive. She was monumentally innocent, and when that innocence was taken, she broke. In December 2006, paparazzi were on hand to capture an unflattering view as she got out of a low-slung sports car without any underwear on. The following February, Spears checked herself out of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Centre, a drug rehab clinic in Antigua (after staying for one day), flew back to L.A., and walked into Esther’s Hair Salon in Tarzana complaining that her hair extensions were too tight, demanding that Esther Tognozzi, the owner, shave her head. When Tognozzi refused, Britney took the electric shaver and did the job herself as a pap snapped pictures through a window. The strands of hair Spears left on the salon floor were later auctioned for exorbitant sums on eBay. (It was rumored, but not confirmed, that she had cut her hair to remove traces of methamphetamines, which would have undermined her struggle to keep custody of her children.) Now bald, Spears drove to Body & Soul, a body-art parlor in Sherman Oaks, where she got a tattoo of a cross on her hip, and another of red lips on her wrist. She told the artist who did them, “I don’t want anyone touching me. I’m tired of everybody touching me.”
In early 2008, after a drugged-seeming performance of “Gimme More” at the MTV Video Music Awards, Spears barricaded herself inside her home, refusing to comply with a court order to surrender custody of her two children to her estranged husband, Kevin Federline. The police broke down the door and took her away. Not long after that, Spears was committed to the psychiatric ward at the UCLA Medical Center.
After Jive passed on “Umbrella” for Britney, Stewart sent L.A. Reid the demo, and Reid gave it to Rihanna. She recalled, “When the demo first started playing, I was like, ‘This is interesting, this is weird.’ But the song kept getting better. I listened to it over and over.” She told Reid, “I need this record. I want to record it tomorrow.”
But the Stewarts were reluctant to give the song to Rihanna, because she wasn’t an established star. “They had to talk us into it,” Mike says. “I remember Grammy weekend I was being hounded by every label executive to get that record. At parties people were running up on us everywhere. But L.A. Reid and everyone associated with Rihanna—they were the most passionate. Jay Brown put me on the phone with Rihanna, and I said no at the time, and to this day when she sees me she says, ‘Oh you’re the one who tried to take my record away.’ And she’s so wrong—I didn’t try to take her record away! I was just evaluating what was the best situation.” After all, it was still their song.
Finally, after weeks of daily calls from both L.A. and Jay-Z, the Stewarts agreed to give “Umbrella” to Rihanna. She recorded the vocals, with production by Kuk Harrell, in Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Now it was her song. Ten rhythmic syllables, “umbrella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh,” did what the two previous albums together had not done: they defined Rihanna as an artist. She was chilly and warm at the same time, caring and not caring. She had swag, with a dash of island flava, but she also had a heart; the song is remarkably tender, considering that men wrote it for a woman. And, as a commenter on the website Rap Genius wrote of the hook, “These syllables made more money than you will ever dream of.”
“When she recorded the ‘ellas,’ ” Tricky says, “you knew your life was about to change.”
Just before the single was released, a remix came in from Jay-Z, which shook up the song’s middle-of-the-road vibe. His rapped intro has prescient allusive verses about the coming financial crisis, finished off with the thrilling envoi:
Little Miss Sunshine
Rihanna where you at?
Jay’s verse injected a little bit of the extremes into an otherwise pure pop song, which made it seem edgier than it actually was: the perfect blend for hits radio.
“UMBRELLA” WAS RELEASED to 133 CHR stations on March 24, 2007—basically all the Top 40 stations in large and mid-sized markets across the United States. Twenty two percent of them put it into rotation on the first day. What was the reason for this remarkable uniformity? There were three possible explanations. It could be that the song itself was just that good. It could be the result of radio consolidation—some Clear Channel chief programmer e-mailed a single playlist to all its programming directors. Or, it could be the label.
In his book, Climbing the Charts, UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman examines this question. He concludes that while Clear Channel provides the corporate structure that makes concentration possible, individual PDs and DJs don’t act in lockstep. He explains, “If stations were playing songs because they are taking orders from corporate headquarters, we would expect to see stations within a company behave the same as each other, but differently from stations owned by other companies. In fact, stations in a given format all act the same, regardless of ownership, and there is no special tendency for stations in the same company to behave similarly.” Therefore the forces behind the ubiquity of “Umbrella” on the radio, he suggests—and by extension, other radio hits—must be coming from the label.
Big Radio is still the best way—some would argue, the only way—to create hits. If the song seems to be playing everywhere at the same time, all at once, so that Zapoleon’s Rule of Three is fulfilled in a day or so, it is perceived to be a hit, and becomes one. To make that happen, a radio promotion team—either on staff at the label, or working for an independent promoter—needs to visit every PD in every important market in the country and make sure they know about that song, and follow up with a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails. Only a major label has the resources for that kind of campaign. According to an NPR investigation, it can easily cost more than a million dollars to promote a single song.
One former program director at a commercial radio station explains how it works. “If you look at a typical record on FM radio,” he says, “the major labels say, ‘We want to add this single on such and such a date. Don’t play this till September thirtieth, because we can get forty other stations to add it on that date.’ And then the label can say to other stations, ‘Look forty other stations just added it, maybe you should too.’ And then the chart game starts from there.” The label works the record, orchestrating enthusiasm, employing a specialized language of “spins,” “power ups” and “heavies” that you see in the ads labels take out for records in radio trade publications. “The label says, ‘Hey, I think we’re seeing something, can you give us medium rotation?’ And then: ‘We’re shooting for heavies now, can you give us heavy rotation?’ ‘Yeah, we can give you heavies now!’ Then the label says, ‘We’re going for number one now. Can we power up to number one?’ And this is how it works at FM radio. And it’s not necessarily illegal, per se. They just all kind of work together on it.”
Radio is integral to the survival of the old hit-making mentality. Clive Davis would spend a fortune to promote songs to radio. In the ’70s, Davis was fired from Columbia for allegedly engaging in payola—a charge he always denied. These days song promotion is mostly above board. The label doesn’t pay for individual songs; it pays the radio station for access to its program directors, so a promotions person can personally pitch the music. Labels also send stars to Clear Channel’s big Jingle Ball Christmas concerts on both coasts and cities in between from which the radio conglomerate profits handsomely in ticket sales (a practice sometimes called “showola”).
Although the labels have lost much since the appearance of Napster, they still have one thing no one else has: their control of radio. The record and radio industries have been engaged in a mutually profitable, though at times adversarial, marriage for more than eighty years, and the old folks still love each other. Radio needs music that’s compelling enough to keep people listening through the ads, and the record companies need radio to sell records. Both need hits.
“UMBRELLA” WAS NUMBER ONE for seven weeks, and helped make Rihanna’s third album, Good Girl Gone Bad, her most successful to date, although once again her fans seemed to prefer to cherry-pick the singles. The video of “Umbrella” received four nominations for MTV’s 2007 Video Music Awards, and won for Video of the Year. Rihanna performed “Umbrella” at the 2008 Grammys, and later that night she and Jay-Z took the stage together to claim the award for best sung collaboration—a moment of triumph for them both.
“Umbrella” marked the arrival of something new in pop: a digital icon. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or twelve songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented world of today, the artist has only three or four minutes to put their personality across, and at that Rihanna would prove to be without peer. She seems to release a new single each month, often recording the latest while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the previous ones. To keep her supplied with songs, her label and her manager periodically convene “writer camps”—weeklong conclaves, generally held in Los Angeles, where dozens of top producers and writers from around the world are brought in and shuffled and reshuffled in pairs over multiple-day writing sessions, in the hope of striking gold.
Last but not least, “Umbrella” was the song that earned Rihanna a prime spot at Clive Davis’s Grammy party the following year, on February 8, 2009—the night her life would change again.