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Pon de Replay

music and words by Alisha Brooks,

Vada Nobles, Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it

THIS, IN A NUTSHELL, is the song. Rihanna is ‘on the dance floor wanting some more’ music, pleading with the DJ to turn up the volume and put that song upon the replay. In contrast to Shakespeare’s Orsino, who reasons that if he consumes enough of love’s food he will finally lose his appetite for it, Rihanna’s musical needs seem insatiable.

‘Put another nickel in / In the nickelodeon / All I want is loving you and music, music, music,’ sang Teresa Brewer half a century before her, but for Rihanna, loving barely comes into it: music and dancing will be enough.

The song was the first track on Rihanna’s first album, Music of the Sun, in 2005, and it was her first hit single. It was the work of a team of writers, but far from the beige blandness that so often emerges from committee work, this song created a vivid musical personality for its singer, obvious from its title alone, which is Barbadian or Bajan Creole.

There were several versions of the song: the radio edit, the album version, the internet version and numerous remixes and dub versions in the style of Caribbean dance hall. Some of the recordings had a kind of male hip-hop chorus, some just featured Rihanna herself. What they all shared was a distinctive beat – an up-tempo shuffle with a lazy dotted rhythm – and a striking use of the aeolian mode.

The aeolian mode is perfectly common. It’s the scale behind many folk songs (including, as we’ve seen, the tune that Vaughan Williams borrowed for his hymn, ‘O God of Earth and Altar’), and its uses in pop music include everything from REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’ to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. But it is also close to the so-called ‘Hindu mode’, which is an aeolian without the flattened third – a sort of major aeolian.

It comes to mind in ‘Pon de Replay’ partly because of Rihanna’s use of elaborate ornamentation, especially around that flattened fifth and sixth, complete with quarter-tone inflections that are strongly suggestive of Indian music. With the swinging rhythm of the drumming and the song’s moderately fast tempo, ‘Pon de Replay’ has many of the hallmarks of a Bollywood dance song. Is this deliberate? Perhaps it’s related to the Indian influence on Caribbean culture, dating back to colonial times.

Another possible explanation for the rhythm is entirely local. The tuk bands of Barbados, playing tuk (or rukatuk) music, date back to the seventeenth century, when African slaves adopted the percussion instruments of the British army’s marching bands in their own music. These included the bass drum, side drum and triangle, but with the double-headed bass drum central to the music. Tuk drumming typically employs the lazy, swinging dotted rhythm heard in ‘Pon de Replay’.

Who knows for sure what went into the writing of the song? It was made in America, not Barbados. Four writer-producers were involved and they knew how to fashion a hit. Just as ‘Pon de Replay’ is a song about music, it is also about musical style.

Songs about music abound – they always have – and there are also a good many, a subgenre if you like, that deal with the need for music. But ‘Pon de Replay’ belongs to a subgenre of a subgenre, because it’s addressed to the provider of the music at one remove. It’s a surprisingly large category, because the DJ is a powerful figure: out on the dance floor, the DJ is in charge. As Pink posited, ‘If God is a DJ, life is a dance floor’.

‘I am the Lord thy God’ we read in the Book of Isaiah. ‘I am a DJ / I am what I play,’ sang David Bowie (‘DJ’ rhymes with ‘play’ in these songs as surely as ‘moon’ once rhymed with ‘June’ and ‘baby’ with ‘maybe’). But even the most devout believers can feel anger with their god.

‘I get tired of DJs / Why’s it always what he plays?’ Joe Jackson demands to know on ‘Slow Song’, before deciding to ‘push right through’ to insist on something he and his friend can dance to at the end of a busy day. But the typical DJ song is supplicatory, a kind of prayer to the DJ God.

‘Hey Mr DJ / Why don’t you slow this party down,’ asked R. Kelly in 1992. ‘Hey Mr DJ,’ sang Van Morrison in 2002, ‘I’m in a sad mood tonight / … / Won’t you make everything all right?’ A DJ can make things better. A DJ, as Indeep reminds us, can even save your life. The more usual manner of salvation is not to slow the music down, but pump it up.

‘Hey Mr DJ,’ sang Zahné in 1994, ‘Everybody’s ready to party / All night, all night.’ ‘Hey Mr DJ,’ sang Madonna in 2000, ‘Put a record on / I want to dance with my baby / … / I never want to stop.’ ‘Hey Mr DJ,’ sang Rihanna in 2005, ‘Song pon de replay.’