Authors: Sarah Oliver
The video was directed by Little X (who now calls himself Director X), and the DJ in the video was played by DJ Cipha Sounds. Little X has directed lots of music videos, but he is best known for his work on the Sean Paul videos and R Kelly videos.
In the ‘Pon de Replay’ video, Rihanna wanted to show her love for her home country, and wore a ring
featuring the trident-head design from the Barbados national flag.
The single reached No. 2 in the US charts behind Mariah Carey’s ‘We Belong Together’, which enjoyed 14 weeks at No. 1. At this time Mariah Carey was virtually unstoppable, so Rihanna must have felt that getting to No. 2 was like getting to No. 1; it was the highest anyone could hope to achieve because of the immense popularity of ‘We Belong Together’.
Rihanna told
Glamour
magazine: ‘In a matter of weeks, the first single (“Pon de Replay”) went to radio. Then we shot a video, and the song just took off. I was in the Top 10 with huge artists who I looked up to. Jay-Z kept telling me, “This never happens, so don’t get used to it.” I saw how special that moment was.’
The single didn’t just do well in the US; it also topped the music charts in New Zealand, Japan and Hungary, and landed at No. 2 in the UK and Ireland charts. For many people worldwide, it became the iconic song of summer 2005.
Because ‘Pon de Replay’ did so well, Rihanna was offered the opportunity to do nine shows around the US. The mini-tour was sponsored by Procter & Gamble, who wanted her to promote a new range of their deodorant brand: ‘Rihanna’s Secret Body Spray Tour’ went to Cincinnati, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta. It started on 26 October 2005 and ended on 7 December of the same year. At the beginning of each show, the audience members
were given a free sample from the new range and then Rihanna would get on stage and sing six songs. Afterwards she would answer questions from the audience and sign autographs. They were nice, intimate performances, and allowed her to meet some of her fans for the first time. She hadn’t been a ‘celebrity’ for long and so she still found it a bit strange when fans asked for her autograph and wanted to pose for photos with her.
Rihanna had worked so hard that she deserved her success, but she was so busy, she couldn’t go home. She told
OK!
Magazine
at the time: ‘I haven’t been back there [to Barbados] in so long. I live in New York now. When I do get a chance to go back to St Michael, I go to The Boatyard, which is a club. I just love it. The whole atmosphere is young and the music is really good.’
The second single to be released from Music of the Sun was ‘If It’s Lovin’ That You Want’. Released on 28 November 2005, it failed to impress USA audiences as much as her debut single had, reaching only No. 36 in the charts. It did better in other countries, though, and got to No. 8 in Ireland, No. 9 in Australia and New Zealand, No. 11 in the UK and No. 13 in Holland.
The music video was directed by Marcus Raboy and they shot it on a beach in California. Since her first single came out, the female dancers had become friends of Rihanna’s, because they had been promoting it together around the world. The men in the video were complete strangers to her, and she only met them on the day of shooting. They all got to ride jet skis and play around in the
waves, just like Rihanna does with her real friends in Barbados. The trident-head symbol made a re-appearance here in three sand sculptures behind Rihanna and her dancers in the torchlit scene.
During filming, Rihanna told MTV: ‘This video is about having fun, giving off the vibe of the Caribbean. We did some mermaid-looking stuff down on the sand and I’m just [performing] to the camera as if it were my boyfriend. Now we’re going to do [some scenes with] the Tiki torches. It’s going to be incredible!
‘The song is basically telling a guy, “If it’s lovin’ that you want, you should make me your girl because I’ve got what you need.”’
The third and final single from the album was called ‘Let Me’ and it was only released in Japan, where it charted at No. 8.
While she was promoting
Music of the Sun
, Rihanna had a cameo role in the straight-to-DVD movie,
Bring It On: All or Nothing
(2006). In addition to playing herself, she was the announcer in the scene that is the climax of the movie, where the winning cheerleading squad is revealed. Rihanna was acting in front of hundreds of people, but she didn’t let it bother her. What is more, she hadn’t had any time to rehearse, because she had only one day on set.
In the movie, one of the cheerleaders from the smart school complains that the other squad has won, and what she says to Rihanna is ‘borderline racist’ according to director Steve Rash, who talked to 4Music about it. He
said he hadn’t given Rihanna a line to respond with, and so she just let her body language do the talking. That impressed the director, because it takes a real actor to be able to convey a response using only their movements rather than words.
The movie starred
Heroes
actress Hayden Panettiere and Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles, and was the second follow-up to the 2000 movie
Bring It On
starring Kirsten Dunst. Rihanna didn’t see the movie as being her first big acting job because she was playing herself, but her fans loved it.
She later admitted during interviews that she was looking forward to acting in a drama, horror or action movie in the future.
Her family and friends in Barbados were very happy that Rihanna was living her dreams, but that didn’t stop some people from making up lies about her. Rihanna explained to journalist Margeaux Watson from EW.com: ‘When I first got signed and went back to Barbados, people started talking about it. They said, “Oh, she must’ve slept with Jay-Z to get her deal.” That’s where I first heard it. They talk s*** about me all the time.’ It was as though they were jealous of her success and wanted to pull her down to their level.
People in the US started saying that Rihanna and Jay-Z were having a relationship, even though he was dating Beyoncé at the time. This was particularly hard for Rihanna to take, as she was only just starting out and Jay-Z was her mentor, nothing more. They had been out to dinner
together, but that was work-related, and he was always at the end of the phone if she had any difficulties. Both denied being in a relationship to the press, but some people refused to let the story die and continued to make comments on internet forums.
The media seemed to suggest that Rihanna was trying to steal Jay-Z from Beyoncé, and that Beyoncé in turn was furious with Rihanna. In fact, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. When Rihanna was interviewed by talk-show host Tyra Banks, she had a broken toe, so her foot was strapped up and she had to walk with a cane for support; Tyra joked that really Beyoncé had pushed her down some stairs, which made Rihanna laugh.
She had actually been on holiday, and on the first night she wanted to go to the pool – even though it was 4.30am. While rushing back to her friend’s room, she managed to walk into a heavy mahogany chair and knocked her toe the wrong way.
Rihanna and Jay-Z talked about the rumours from the beginning, and he told her to try and ignore what people were saying. The more people talked about her supposed rivalry with Beyoncé, the more annoying it became. In fact the two singers get on really well, and Rihanna thinks Beyoncé is one of the sweetest people you could meet.
Even though Rihanna was busy, she still had the occasional holiday, and returned to Barbados for Christmas 2005. She enjoyed catching up with her friends and family, eating her
mum’s food and visiting all the places she loved to go before she was famous. She missed her music, though, and was eager to get back to recording.
J
ust eight months after
Music of the Sun
came out, Rihanna released her second album,
A Girl Like Me
, in April 2006. Most artists wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the speed at which she was working: she was writing, recording and promoting non-stop. She herself didn’t mind, though, because she finally had the chance to do what she had always dreamed of doing, and for this she would work from 6am to 6pm every day.
A Girl Like Me
was released first in Japan, on 19 April 2006. Five days later, it came out in the UK, and was then released in the US on 25 April. Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken wrote many of the tracks, alongside Ne-Yo, Sean Paul, producer J.R. Rotem and Stargate’s production team (Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen). It had a similar feel to
Music Of The Sun
, although there was a
rock-influenced side to some of the tracks. Rihanna toured with Gwen Stefani in Japan to promote
Music of the Sun
, and Stefani’s style of music had influenced her own work.
The album sold well worldwide, as Rihanna’s fans all rushed out to buy a copy. It topped the charts in Canada and reached No. 5 in the US and UK. In its first week in the US alone, it sold 115,000 copies – almost double the sales of
Music of the Sun
in the same period, which shows just how popular Rihanna had become. It was also in the Top 10 in Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Switzerland!
In order to get her second album out so quickly after
Music of the Sun
, Rihanna had to write and record tracks at the same time as promoting her first album. This was a big challenge as she was travelling all over the place. She had to spend many long nights recording, then get up early and hit the road. To succeed in this, she needed all her inner strength, and she did well not to burn herself out. Her song, ‘Kisses Don’t Lie’, was created in Barbados, because this is where the two men who discovered her wrote it (with her help), and where she recorded the track. All in all, it took Rihanna and her team five months in total to finish the album.
Rihanna decided to give her second album the title
A Girl Like Me
because it was filled with tracks exploring her own life experiences, things that other girls of her age go through all the time. As she explained to MTV: ‘Vocally I’ve matured so much, and lyrically I’m speaking about stuff I would never sing about [before this]. Now I’m singing about experiences
that I’ve gone through and stuff that other 18-year-old girls go through, so it’s all about progression.’
In the album Rihanna sings about the complexity of love, of secrets, the pitfalls of relationships, of being a cheat and about people trying to pull you down.
Once the album was completed, she promoted it in various different ways. She did her own tour, took part in the Australian ‘Rock Tha Block Tour’ alongside Jay-Z and Ne-Yo, and also became the opening act for the Pussycat Dolls’ ‘PCD World Tour’ in their November UK concerts. On the Pussycat Dolls’ tour, she would sing eleven songs at every performance before the girls took to the stage. This must have been extremely tiring, but Rihanna gave it her all. Naturally she was keen for the audience members to go home eager to buy her album
A Girl like Me.
The tracks on the album are as follows:
For the album cover, Rihanna and her record company chose a close-up image that was very simple and showed off her natural beauty. Her hair hangs loose and free, covering part of her face, she’s wearing hardly any
make-up
and her left hand is just about to pull her shoulder strap up. Her face is the main focus of the picture and she’s standing outside, bathed in natural light. At the top of the cover are her name and the album’s title.
For the limited-edition deluxe version of the album, a second cover art was released. In this image, Rihanna is standing sideways but her right hand touches the wall behind her, and she has turned her head to look at the camera. Her hair is loose again, and she is wearing some of her trademark dangly earrings and a purple, backless dress.
For the ‘S.O.S.’ cover, Rihanna looked sultry; she is captured sitting on the floor with her back leaning against a stone wall, and one hand fiddles with the necklace she wears. One of her fingers is underneath her white blouse and she gazes provocatively at the camera. Her hair is wavy and natural, with her right eye covered by a fringe.
Rihanna’s cover art for ‘Unfaithful’ was taken at the same time and place as the ‘S.O.S.’ cover, and she wears the same white blouse, necklace and jeans. This time her arms are by her side and she gazes to the left. Her name and the single’s title are much larger, though, and cover the bottom half of the image.
For the ‘We Ride’ cover art, Rihanna wears the same purple dress she wore for the limited- edition deluxe album cover. She is smiling and we get a sense of movement; a piece of fabric hangs behind her as if she’s been dancing or running. The background is a wooden wall and this time, her name and the album’s title run together across the middle of the image.
For ‘Break It Off’ the cover art was more important than for the other singles, because no video was released. From the cover-art image, fans would use their imagination to come up with what the video might have looked like, had it been made. The image Rihanna chose was of her wearing a long white dress (which the fans suspected might be a wedding dress), running away, with her hands hitching up the skirt of the dress to make this easier and to give the impression that she’s about to do a twirl. She looks as if she is holidaying in a foreign country, with the trees and bushes in the background making it seem almost tropical.
‘S.O.S.’ was the first of Rihanna’s singles from the second album to be released, and it reached the No. 1 spot in the US on May 13. Now she had achieved what she had always wanted: a No. 1 single!
Rihanna was surprised when she found out that she had topped the charts, because one minute the song was in the thirties and the next it was No. 1. It stayed at No. 1 for three weeks in the US but fared even better in Australia, where it was No. 1 for eight weeks. It was also No. 1 in Canada and No. 2 in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Hungary.
Both critics and fans loved the song because it sounded
more like ‘Pon de Replay’ and sampled the Soft Cell track, ‘Tainted Love’. The writers had also cleverly added lyrics from several popular 80s songs, from Michael Jackson’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ to Kim Wilde’s ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’.
Before she recorded the song, Rihanna hadn’t been at all familiar with ‘Tainted Love’ – after all, she wasn’t exposed to much 80s’ music growing up in Barbados – but she had heard it a couple of times while living in the US. She was actually the second artist considered to release the track; the song had originally been given to Christina Milian, but she had decided not to record it for her third album. Rihanna may not have been the first choice to sing it, but once she sang the song she made it her own, and after three days in the studio the finished recording was ready for the album.
For this song, Rihanna filmed one main video and two additional promotional videos, one for Agent Provocateur and another for Nike. For the main video she is seen using a Nokia mobile phone and the camera zooms in on it, clearly pushing Nokia phones. For a time this resulted in MTV banning the video. Rihanna was so popular with young people that companies would pay good money for her to promote their brands in her videos. ‘S.O.S.’ was the first video that Rihanna did with this kind of product placement, and the money these companies gave for the privilege no doubt paid for some of the production costs.
In 2010 Rihanna spoke to
NME
about the subject of product placement: ‘I don’t like things to be so commercial.
I hate product placement in my videos. Videos should just tell the story of the song.
‘With product placement, it becomes this big ad campaign. I just don’t like that. Sometimes we have to [use products in music videos], for whatever political reason, but it’s never my first choice.’
As well as being Rihanna’s biggest song to date, ‘S.O.S.’ won her a Billboard Music Award for ‘Hot Dance Airplay Song of the Year’ and a MuchMusic Video Award for ‘Best International Artist Video’. All those people who had claimed she was a one-hit wonder after ‘Pon de Replay’ was released turned out to be wrong. Rihanna was here to stay!
The ballad ‘Unfaithful’ was next to be released, and this track was written by Ne-Yo, Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen. Rihanna had wanted to work with Ne-Yo for a while because she had been amazed by the track he wrote for Mario. She thought ‘Let Me Love You’ was awesome, and when he visited her in the studio for the first time, they chatted about doing something together. She already had her tracks for the first album but once that was out of the way, they started thinking about a song for
A Girl Like Me.
That song was ‘Unfaithful’, a different style of song to anything Rihanna had done before. A beautiful ballad rather than an up-tempo number, the song became one of her favourites.
‘Unfaithful’ is about a woman who is cheating on her boyfriend. Rihanna admitted that she drew on a personal experience that she had when she was fourteen, but explained that in her case the relationship wasn’t physical. In
an interview with MTV, she confessed: ‘I’m referred to as a murderer in that song, meaning, I’m taking this guy’s life by hurting him, cheating on him. He knows, and it makes him feel so bad. It’s killing him to know that another guy is making me happy. I love that song because we always put it out there that guys cheat and finally someone put it in perspective: Girls cheat too.’
‘Unfaithful’ reached No. 6 in the US on July 22 and got to No. 2 in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Austria, Germany and Norway.
The video for ‘Unfaithful’ was directed by Anthony Mandler and was set in a restaurant and on a stage. A movie of the same name featuring Richard Gere and Diane Lane is said to have been a source of inspiration for the video concept.
In the video Rihanna is sitting in a restaurant when she is passed a note, written by her lover, while her boyfriend is away from the table. Later, she texts her lover and goes out to meet him while her boyfriend sleeps. There are scenes of Rihanna singing next to a pianist on a stage and he is revealed to be her lover. After finishing their ‘performance’, Rihanna leaves and her boyfriend meets her. She can’t help but cry as she hugs him.
The same month that ‘Unfaithful’ was released, Rihanna hit the road and performed her first proper concert tour. It was called the ‘Rihanna: Live in Concert Tour’ and altogether she played over 30 dates in the US and Canada, with one very special concert in Jamaica as part of the Red Stripe Reggae Sumfest. On selected dates she was joined
by Sean Paul, Ciara, J-Status, Trey Songz, Yung Joc, Field Mob and Jeannie Ortega; they either performed beforehand as her supporting act or joined her onstage for her collaboration tracks.
Performing on stage every night gave Rihanna such a buzz that she couldn’t wait to do another tour!
‘We Ride’ was the third single to be released from the album, but it failed to make the Top 100 in the US charts when released in August 2006. It charted at No. 4 in Finland, No. 7 in Germany, No. 17 in the UK and Ireland, and No. 24 in Australia.
Rihanna had been optimistic and thought it would do well, because fans had seemed to love the song; before its release it had been her third most downloaded track on iTunes. She told MTV: ‘“We Ride” is about this guy saying over and over again, “When we ride, we ride, we’re gonna be together until the day that we die” – promising all these things and then it turns out he broke all of his promises, which is sad – but it’s summer and I don’t care if you wanna do that and be ugly and unfaithful, then I can just do my thing, chill with my girls and have fun.
‘That’s what summers are all about. And every summer you remember a certain relationship and there’s always a song to connect to that. So “We Ride” is just one of those songs.’
‘Break It Off ’ was released in December 2006 but it didn’t have a video. It was the final release from the album,
A Girl Like Me.
The song was written by Sean Paul, Rihanna, Donovan Bennett and Kirk Ford. Sean Paul sang
the majority of the single with Rihanna singing other parts of the track.
When Rihanna performed the song live she generally did so as part of a medley, because her bit of the track lasts less than two minutes.
‘Break It Off ’ reached No. 9 in the US charts and No. 19 in the Canada charts – a fantastic achievement, considering there was no accompanying video. Fans were disappointed by Def Jam and Atlantic Records’ decision not to film one, but Rihanna was too busy planning her next album.