CLIVE DAVIS’S ANNUAL pre-Grammy party, held at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on the night before the awards, is a ritual unlike any other in show business. It is both a dinner and a floorshow, like the Golden Globes and the Grammys combined. No awards are given; the award is getting invited. The event features the year’s biggest musical stars, performing not for their fans but for their peers. In Davis’s view, “There is not a more powerful or prestigious audience they will ever appear in front of.”
The stars share the stage with a promising new talent or two, along with one of two heritage acts Davis invites, to show the kids what real talent is like. He recalls asking Johnny Mathis to perform one year for that reason. “I wanted these young guys to see what Johnny Mathis was about,” he says. “I’d say to the young artists, ‘You’ve had some success, but think about this. His greatest-hits album was in the top one hundred for ten consecutive years! And there’s a reason for that—because people danced to it, got married to it, made love to it, whether it’s ‘Chances Are’ or ‘It’s Not for Me to Say’ or ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ And I would say, ‘You, Kelly Rowland!,’ and ‘You, Beyoncé! Listen to the phrasing! Listen to the magic!’ ”
Davis emcees the event himself, affecting a stentorian broadcasting voice that sounds a little like Ed Sullivan—a CBS Tiffany network accent that brings a sense of discernment and gravitas to the business of entertainment. “Ladies and gentlemen of the audience, please give it up for so-and-so,” he’ll say, and for a moment Clive’s guests really do seem like ladies and gentlemen, and not the demon-driven strivers they actually are.
But if Davis’s patrician air seems to summon one’s higher nature, the seating arrangement at the party makes brutally clear your importance in his world. It really is all about a continuity of hits. If you are having hits, you are at one of the power tables close to the dais, dining with stars. But the very next year, with no hits, you find yourself seated on the outer rim, along with the press and some luckier guy’s wife and kids. “Other people might think, Oh, he just had a bad year, let him keep his spot at the good table, he’ll be back on his feet soon enough,” a down-on-his-luck artist manager tells me at the 2014 party, sitting forlornly in the back. “But Clive isn’t sentimental about this stuff. He lets you know right away where you stand.” The man smiles ruefully.
At the 2009 party, you were indeed at the top of your game if you were at the table “anchored” by Rihanna and Chris Brown, who were among the biggest stars there and certainly the best-looking couple. Their presence shed fairy dust over the soiree. Davis singled them out in his remarks from the podium, noting that both were scheduled to perform at the Grammys the next day. Rihanna, radiant in a floor-length Gucci gown, rose to acknowledge the industry crowd’s warm applause, while Brown, handsome as sin in a black leather jacket and tie, beamed up at the beautiful face he was about to beat to a pulp.
Chris Brown was a good singer and an exceptional dancer who had taught himself by watching Michael Jackson on TV. Some called him the next MJ because of his triple-threat musical gifts (he can sing, dance, and write). Temperamentally, he may be closer to Marvin Gaye. He was born in a small town in Virginia, where his parents listened to soul music and Stevie Wonder. They divorced when Brown was seven, and his mother married again. Brown later said his stepfather hit his mother, usually at night when Chris was supposed to be asleep. She hid the marks with makeup in the morning, but Chris could see the bruises and the swelling. When he was eleven, he told her, “I want you to know I love you, but I am going to take a baseball bat one day when you are at work and kill him.”
Brown had signed with Jive because the label had Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake on it. Tina Davis, a former Def Jam A&R executive, was his manager. The first single he put out as an artist, “Run It!,” in June 2005, was a number-one hit. He pulled off an unforgettable performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, where he followed Britney’s robotic “comeback.” He had a second number one with “Kiss Kiss,” two years later, and it received a Grammy nomination in the “Best Rap/Sung Collaboration” category, losing out to Rihanna and Jay-Z for “Umbrella.”
“Forever” had an unusual provenance, which gave new meaning to the concept of bubblegum music. The song was actually commissioned by Wrigley’s, the chewing gum company, as a jingle for Doublemint, and the lyrics include the brand’s well-known tag line—“Double your pleasure, double your fun.” Brown wrote the jingle first, and during the recording session, which was overseen by Polow da Don, they worked out a full-length version of the tune, which became “Forever.” A classic four-chord vamp, with lots of squishy-sounding synths and heavy Auto-Tune on Brown’s voice, the song is an urban take on a Euro-disco sound—the opposite of what the Swedes at Cheiron had been trying to achieve in writing for urban artists.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, Davis’s gala broke up and the beautiful young couple left the Beverly Hilton in Brown’s Lamborghini. They hadn’t gone far before Fenty confronted Brown about a long text message from another woman she had discovered on his phone. Shouting, she slammed both hands down on the dashboard in anger. Brown stopped the car in the neighborhood of Hancock Park and leaned across Fenty to open her door, trying to push her out. But Fenty had her seat belt on. Her door swung closed and Brown pushed her up against it, punching her in the left eye and in the mouth. He started to drive again, steering the car with his left hand while he continued to hit her with his right.
When the beating temporarily stopped, Fenty sat up and looked at her left eye in the mirror. It was starting to swell, and her mouth was filling with blood. “I’m going to beat the shit out of you when we get home,” Brown reportedly said. “You wait and see.”
Fenty called her assistant and got voicemail, but pretended she was talking to her. “I am on my way home,” she said. “Make sure the cops are there when I get there.”
“You just did the stupidest thing ever!” Brown cried. “Now I’m really going to kill you!” He started punching her again. At this, according to the police report, Fenty “interlocked her fingers behind her head and brought her elbows forward to protect her face.” His blows thwarted, Brown got Fenty in a headlock. She couldn’t breathe and began to lose consciousness. She gouged at his eyes, and Brown bit her left ring and middle fingers, and then released her.
Brown stopped the car and got out while Fenty screamed for help. A resident called 911. When the cops arrived they found a “very upset and crying” Fenty seated in the driver’s seat of the parked vehicle, with Brown nowhere to be seen. He didn’t reappear until seven that evening, when he turned himself in to the LAPD and was booked on assault charges, as the Grammys were going on at the Staples Center. Needless to say, the couple did not perform at the show after all.
Fenty suffered two black eyes, with large contusions under both caused by Brown’s ring, a split lip, and bite marks on her hands and body. More damaging to her image were the pictures of her swollen and battered face that two female L.A. police officers leaked to TMZ, the gossip site, several weeks after the incident. For Robyn Rihanna Fenty, the pain of the beating itself was augmented by the humiliation of the whole world seeing her as the victim of an angry lover, just like her own mother and Brown’s. She was forced to confront in the most public possible way the psychic memento mori of domestic violence that lay underneath the enamel of glamour. In the end, fame couldn’t save little Robyn from the horror of her parents’ marriage, as she had dreamed it might.
AS WITH MANY OF Rihanna’s albums, Rated R, her fourth, began with a writer camp. There was a real danger that the artist’s career could be seriously damaged by the beating, especially among her younger fans, many of whom seemed to be willing to forgive Brown because, as it was said by astoundingly vicious YouTube haters, “the bitch hit him first.” A lot of people had invested a huge amount of time, energy, and money in building up the Rihanna brand, and with “Umbrella” it was poised to become very, very profitable. But in a moment her image had changed. She wasn’t the haughty ice princess of the fashion mags. She was a victim. She bleeds.
L.A. Reid, who was still running Def Jam in the wake of Jay-Z’s departure, was determined not to lose all they had invested in the young star. He put on the mother of all song camps. A-list producers and topliners were summoned to Los Angeles for two weeks and installed in studios around the city, their hotel and food all paid for. It was the kind of immensely expensive undertaking that only a major label can afford to arrange.
Nowhere are the production efficiencies of the track-and-hook method of writing better realized than in writer camp. A camp is like a pop-up hit factory. Labels and superstar artists convene them, and they generally last three or four days. The usual format is to invite dozens or more track makers and topliners, who are mixed and matched in different combinations through the course of the camp, until every possible combination has been tried. Typically, a producer-topliner pair spends the morning working on a song, which they are supposed to finish by the lunch break. In the afternoon new pairs are formed by the camp counselors, and another song is written by dinner. If the artist happens to be present, the artist circulates among the different sessions, throwing out concepts, checking on the works in progress, picking up musical pollen in one session and shedding it on others. At the end of each morning and afternoon session, the campers come together and listen to one another’s songs. The peer pressure is such that virtually every session produces a song, which means twelve or more songs a day, or sixty a week, depending on the size of the camp.
The Rihanna writer camp was an elite affair. Ne-Yo was there, as was Stargate, and Ester Dean. Jay Brown played counselor to the campers, under the aegis of Def Jam management.
For Dean, writing for Rihanna was liberating. In spite of her earthy vocabulary and her ’hood style, Dean was a prude at heart, and her inner Baptist minister regretted her transgressions. But writing for Rihanna set her bad girl free. She became the woman she imagined Rihanna was, a woman Rihanna herself, tall and slim and sexy, would never aspire to be with such urgency: a swaggering vixen. In Dean’s demos for her Rihanna hits, which can be heard on YouTube, it’s hard to tell whether she is channeling Rihanna or Rihanna is copying Dean. “People put comments on my YouTube demos saying stuff like, ‘This cover sucks,’ ” she says indignantly. “I ain’t never covered a song in my life!”
“Rude Boy” was the work of five different songwriters, including Makeba Riddick, who helped Fenty write the bridge, and Rob Swire, who contributed to Stargate’s production work. (Hermansen wrote and played the chord progression on this song too.) The hooks were pure Ester Dean. The first hook comes right away in the song, a sort of rhythmic pre-chorus, followed by the main hook, which will become the refrain of the song. Then a third hook, “take it, take it”—is the full Esta. And then there’s a fourth hook—“what I want want want”—another straight-from-the-mouth classic—which brings us back to the title hook again. The track-and-hook method of songwriting reaches its apotheosis with “Rude Boy”; the song is virtually all hooks.
“Rude Boy” is a concise illustration of Stargate’s gift to urban music. The beats are crisp and hard, but the crystalline synth chords lift the song from its crude lyrical context—challenging a rude boy about his manhood—and makes it sound like a love song. Musically, a Scandinavian snowfall filters down over a sweaty Caribbean drum circle. The stuttering sound that the chords make, created with a software module known as an arpeggiator, would become perhaps the signature Stargate sound.
Stargate had achieved with “Rude Boy” what the Swedes, for all their melodic gifts, were never able to pull off: a perfect hybrid of Nordic and urban. It marked the start of a hot streak that would bring the duo such smashes as “Firework,” “Only Girl (In the World,)” and “S&M”—all collaborations with Ester Dean. In 2010, ASCAP named them songwriters of the year. In 2011 Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World)” won them their first Grammy, for Best Dance Recording.
Most important of all, at least from L.A. Reid’s perspective, “Rude Boy” in particular, and Rated R in general, erased any lingering impression of Rihanna as a victim. The gentle island girl-next-door Evan Rogers signed in Barbados is gone, and a steel-plated Valkyrie is firmly, and coldly, in control. From the Ellen von Unwerth cover photo of the unsmiling artist in mesh and black leather, palm cupped over one of her previously blackened eyes as though it still ached, to the lyrics of the lead single, “Russian Roulette,” and the second single, “Hard,” and the song “Cold Case,” the whole album obliquely refers to the beating; “Stupid in Love” explicitly so, with its line about blood on your hands. Timbaland was on the album, as well as Will.i.am, Justin Timberlake, and many other top producers and songwriters—even Slash, the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist, makes an appearance. A notable exception was Sturken and Rogers. Rated R is the first Rihanna album without a single cut from them on it.
ROGERS AND STURKEN’S SONGS for Rihanna began to wane with Good Girl Gone Bad. “After Good Girl Gone Bad she really grew up and became an adult,” Rogers says, with a note of acceptance in his voice. “She wanted to work with younger, cutting-edge producers. I get that.” Still, letting go wasn’t easy. “There was a bit of a struggle, but we didn’t want to be the guys who were trying to force songs on her.”
The darker and more explicitly sexual turn her work had taken wasn’t easy for them either. As Sturken notes, “It was hard for us to write sexual lyrics for Rihanna, being who we were to her.” But they are philosophical about their situation. “We signed and discovered one of the biggest stars on the planet,” Rogers says, “so after we got over our being mad, we got busy working with other artists.”
Sitting in their studio in Bronxville, they can recall the first time she came there like it was yesterday. “She was sitting right there, right where you’re sitting!” Sturken cries. He digs up some old video of the frantic two days of rehearsals they put Rihanna through at Rogers’s house in Stamford, before her audition with Jay-Z. Up comes the image of Robyn Fenty, in her jeans and T-shirt, singing her Whitney cover in Rogers’ spare bedroom while an NFL game plays on the muted TV behind her. The longtime partners watch the video in silence. They seem moved. When it ends, Sturken says, “This is a gut-wrenching change for everybody, as she grows up and her career moves on. It is earth-shattering. What do we want to be to her?” A long pause. “We talk all the time. And she thanked us at the American Music Awards.”
“RUDE BOY” WAS THE SMASH that changed Ester Dean’s life. It established her as one of the most sought-after topliners in the music business. The next year would bring “S&M,” her second number one with Stargate.
But I’m perfectly good at it . . .
Dean says the lyrics came to her on a Sunday, adding, “Father, forgive me.”
She also wrote the hooks for Rihanna’s “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na-na, what’s my name?”), and for two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass”
Boom, badoom, boom, boom, badoom, boom bass
Yeah, that’s the super bass
and “Turn Me On”
Make me come alive
Come on and turn me on.
Her vocals on the demos of the Nicki Minaj songs provide more than just trace patterns; on “Super Bass” in particular her voice serves as an (unaccredited) second vocal, used to augment Minaj’s less-than-stellar singing voice. The voice that Tricky Stewart had heard coming from somewhere in the crowd at the Gap Band show that night in Atlanta was heard all around the world. Jay Brown himself would take Dean on as a client, putting the resources of Roc Nation behind her.
Everything Dean manifested on her vision board would become a reality, except for the most important vision: “Esta the artist.” And the surer her Midas touch with other artists became, the farther her most cherished desire receded from her grasp. Her new manager, Jay Brown, wouldn’t have it any other way; Dean was too valuable as a hit maker to turn her into a star. But Jay Brown wouldn’t be her manager for much longer.
Dean is grateful for her success. (In addition to her talents as a hit maker, she has a thriving second career as an actress, appearing in the Pitch Perfect movies and voicing characters in major animated films.) “It’s a lot better than working at McDonald’s,” she has to admit. But she is weary of the way that producers now expect a hit from her every time she walks into a studio. “Everyone is so hit-minded. They’re always looking at you, going, ‘Didja get it? Didja get it? Is that the hit?’ And I don’t know what I’m going to give them. I never try to tap and find out what it is; I just do what I do.”
That’s why she stopped going to other producers’ studios, with the exception of Stargate’s, preferring to work with Big Juice in her own studio in L.A.’s Brentwood section that her success bought for her. Later, she moved into a still swanker studio in Santa Monica.
The EP that Jimmy Iovine had promised never materialized. A remix of the song Polow da Don had allowed her to record, “Drop It Low,” featuring Chris Brown, did not make much of an impression on the charts, getting only as high as number thirty-eight. But Dean wasn’t worried. Her destiny was to be the artistic reincarnation of Missy Elliott, she would tell you. Beyoncé was Diana Ross, Lady Gaga was Madonna, Usher was R. Kelly, and Dean herself was Missy. Thus, her success as an artist was only a matter of time. She had the title for her debut album already: UnderEstaMated.
STARGATE AGREED TO A week of sessions with Dean, ostensibly to create songs for her own album. But if a potential hit came out of the sessions, all bets were off. Why waste a hit on an unknown artist like Dean, even if she did write it—who cares? Especially when you could give it to Rihanna.
What does Eriksen think of Dean’s prospects as an artist? “A lot of writers want to be artists,” he replies cautiously. “Most of them can sing, and a lot of them can sing really well. But to be an artist, that’s another story. To be able to perform, to be the person everyone looks at when you walk into the room, with all the publicity and touring, and then to be able to get that sound on the record—that’s not easy. You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.”
What is that something?
Eriksen thinks for a while. “It’s a fat sound,” he says, “and there’s a sparkle around the edges of the words.”
It was a cold winter day in the city, but inside the windowless studio, weather doesn’t exist. Dean picked up her usual, an iced coffee at Starbucks, and took the elevator up to Roc-the-Mic. She wore a floppy knit hat, leather jacket, jeans, and boots—her usual casual-but-fly style. Again, Big Juice accompanied her.
Stargate began the session by playing one of their cray-zee-est tracks. It started with a snare drum layered with hand claps, joined by an evil-sounding, guitarlike synth moving in and out of the foreground. Dean listened to the track for about twenty seconds, until she began humming a melody softly. “OK, got it,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
She went into the booth, got out her phone, and, as the music started, she began to vocalize. “How do I get it . . . walkin’ in the cold to get it . . . you gotta, I’m-a wanna.” About a minute in, she hit on the main hook, “How you love it,” in which the words played a syncopated rhythm with the beat. It was classic Dean, freestyle and suggestive-sounding. This was followed by a secondary hook: “Do you do it like this, do you do it like that/If you do it like this can I do it right back.”
In the control room, Hermansen and Eriksen sensed something special was happening, and they worked quickly to capture it in song structure.
“Let’s loop the first half.”
“Do the synth chords and then use the arpeggiator to set the rise.”
“I love the straightness of the beginning. Put a couple more notes in the pre.”
In the booth, Dean touched her shoulder, feeling the telltale chill. Then she put her hands in the air and did a snaky dance, testing the hook on her hips.
Back in the control room, Dean wrote a verse, which Eriksen looped. He double-tracked the vocals to create a choral effect.
They had half of a great song, but Hermansen thought “it runs out of ammo in the middle.” Then Eriksen remembered a rap that Nicki Minaj had written for another Dean-Stargate song that hadn’t made it onto Minaj’s debut album. He stripped out Minaj’s vocal and added it to their new track. “Let’s see if it fits,” he said. It fit perfectly. Another playback. The song sounded sensational.
“It’s a smash!” Hermansen declared.
Everyone was giddy, like children on Christmas morning. Stargate’s managers, Blacksmith and Danny D, came into the control room and listened to the playback, whooping raucously at the choruses, perhaps the very first of countless revelers who would bounce to the song. Dean danced. Aubry Delaine declared it dope. When it was over, everyone cheered.
Then Danny D said, “Let me just interject one word. You know who’s looking? Pink.”
“I’m keeping that one for myself,” Dean said firmly.
“I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”
“No!”
“Kelly Clarkson’s supposedly looking. And Christina!”