Rihanna by Sarah Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

awards. Her people couldn’t say they definitely wanted it until she herself had approved it, and so they had to wait for her approval.
    Tricky explained what it was like to MTV: ‘In a two-day period, we were in the bidding war of our lives betweenMary J. Blige’s camp and Karen Kwak (Island Def Jam’s executive vice president of A&R), and L.A. Reid’s camp.
    ‘At the time, if you heard Mary’s name and you heard Rihanna’s name, you’d want to hold out,’ Stewart continued. ‘Mary’s coming off “Be Without You”, she’s nominated for all these Grammys, the whole thing. So the plan with us, really, was to hold the record to get a response from Mary. By the time L.A. Reid and his team got done beating us up, we just couldn’t say no. They’re calling every 20 minutes for the entire Grammy weekend. Every time we see him, everywhere we see him, they were just applying all kinds of pressure.’
    Once Rihanna heard the track and was allowed into the studio to record her interpretation, she made the song completely her own with her ‘ellas’. Having Jay-Z collaborating on the song moved things up another notch, and he re-wrote his rap from the original rap penned by Tricky and The-Dream. In addition to writing ‘Umbrella’, The-Dream was one of the writers of ‘Sell Me Candy’, ‘Lemme Get That’ and ‘Breakin’ Dishes’ on the album.
    As well as Rihanna becoming a bigger star as a result of ‘Umbrella’, The-Dream became much higher-profile, and he has released several albums since then, including ‘The Love IV’ in 2011. He has continued to write and produce great tracks with Tricky, and together they wrote the Beyoncé track ‘Single Ladies’, Mariah Carey’s ‘Touch My Body’ and many more great songs.
    Rihanna admits that she is grateful to have had the opportunity to record ‘Umbrella’ because of the boost itgave her both musically and commercially; the track also allowed her to secure a particularly lucrative endorsement deal. She told Q Magazine : ‘I did have a deal with an umbrella company and they had a range of very good umbrellas. This is kind of weird because I grew up in Barbados and there’s not a great culture of umbrellas, like there is in the UK and Europe. I guess we have the occasional storm or maybe the Caribbean is more known for its hurricanes, and an umbrella isn’t going to get you very far in a situation like that. But yes, I have a few umbrellas. Maybe ten? I dunno, but I am very grateful to the umbrella for what it has done for my career.’
    The video for ‘Umbrella’ was directed by Chris Applebaum, who had previously directed Rihanna in one of the ‘S.O.S.’ videos. He came up with the idea of having the singer completely covered in silver body paint after she asked him to dream up a treatment that took risks. She wanted to do something different in the ‘Umbrella’ video and loved the idea. A make-up artist called Pamela Neal was given the job of mixing the paint, and during the shoot it had to be be reapplied every minute. Only Rihanna, Chris and his assistant were on set during those scenes to allow her some privacy – after all, it took a lot of guts to strip naked for the cameras. After they had finished shooting it, the assistant started to cry. Chris told MTV what she said when he asked her if she was okay: ‘She looked at me and said, “Chris, this is just so beautiful! I just can’t believe I’m actually watching this. This is the most incredible thingI’ve ever seen.” And it really felt to me like we were shooting something unique at that moment.’
    In the video Rihanna stands ‘en pointe’, which is a classical ballet technique that involves moving on the tips of the toes. This was her idea and she trained really hard so that she’d be able to do it. It’s a very uncomfortable technique but Rihanna hid her pain, so you won’t be able to spot it in the video.
    Rihanna might have taken a risk with the ‘Umbrella’ video but it