![]() They had to just keep cranking out new hooks. As jingle writers, the kids couldn’t be precious about their art. ![]() Harrell and Stewart credit their time in the jingle-writing business as key preparation for the larger pop world. Eventually, the kids started writing jingles themselves. Sometimes, the kids of the family would sing on those jingles. Harrell and his cousin Tricky Stewart were raised in and around Chicago, where Stewart’s father owned an advertising agency and wrote jingles for commercials. Vintage Funk Kit 03 – Umbrella…ella…ellaīy this point, Kuk Harrell had been in the music business for a long time.Rihanna was already famous and successful, but “Umbrella” was the song that made her. Now, years later, that contrast seems key to the enduring power of “Umbrella.” The song presents us with a Rihanna who’s both caring and aloof, warm and icy. I wrote that “Umbrella” was “uncompelling event-pop,” and I blamed “the disconnect between Rihanna’s cold, clinical delivery and the comforting warmth of the lyrics.” But that was a feature, not a bug. Rihanna’s voice sounded mechanistic and almost oppressive, and I couldn’t see why she was the person singing this song that was ostensibly all about comforting someone, about giving someone refuge. ![]() At the time, though, “Umbrella” didn’t work for me. I wrote the Pitchfork review for Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad album - a great record that I only slightly underrated. If you somehow avoided “Umbrella,” it was because you wanted to avoid “Umbrella.” Even then, I don’t see how you could’ve done it. “Umbrella” wasn’t just a song it was a cultural force that could not be denied. In this column’s commenting community, there are people who claim that they’ve never heard some of the songs that have appeared in this space. It became a cultural touchstone, an inescapable mantra. “Umbrella” topped charts all over the world. Instead, “Umbrella” became one of those perfect-storm songs. Maybe the song would’ve taken Britney to even higher heights, or maybe it would’ve been overshadowed by the chaos of her public image and her personal life. So it’s worth wondering: How would “Umbrella” sound if it had been Britney Spears’ comeback single? Britney’s “Umbrella” would’ve been hungrier than Rihanna’s. She’s already been in this column once, and she’ll be back more times, but none of her later hits conquered the world in the way that “Umbrella” did. ![]() So Rihanna got “Umbrella” instead, and “Umbrella” helped turn Rihanna into the Rihanna that we know now.īritney Spears ultimately made many more hits. They submitted the track to Britney’s management, but Jive Records, Britney’s label, said that she already had enough songs for her 2007 album Blackout. The writers knew that they had a hit, and they wanted to give it to her. At the time, Britney was at the deepest depths of her dark period, and she needed a hit. The three songwriters who put “Umbrella” together - Terius “The-Dream” Nash, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, and Thaddis “Kuk” Harrell - had already worked with Britney Spears once. There’s no real evidence that Britney ever even heard the “Umbrella” demo. But you can’t blame Britney Spears, herself a global icon, for missing the opportunity. That’s a key part of the story behind “Umbrella,” the gargantuan hit that took Rihanna out of the realm of mere pop stardom and up to the global-icon level. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.īritney Spears said no. ![]()
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