24 May 2007
One of the red herrings of pop culture is the alternate history: a singer turns down a song, or an actor misses out on a role, or a musician quits a band, only for it to be a smash hit for someone else. What poor judgement, what bad luck, is the thinking. But what if it just wasn’t for them? Sam Neill’s James Bond screen test snippet is great, but it still has the air of your star striker being forced to go in goal and save a penalty. Maybe the next-choice person was simply a better fit; watch A Hard Day’s Night and you’ll realise the coolest Beatle is Ringo: fact. And who’s to say a noted dud couldn’t have been a success in the right hands? (A corollary here is the success that could have been a dud: it’s an urban myth that Ronald Reagan was first choice for Humphrey Bogart’s role in Casablanca, but Michael J. Fox replacing Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly during filming of Back To The Future was surely a good call.)
Anyway, Britney Spears, or at least her people, turned down ‘Umbrella’, which got passed on to Rihanna, who duly became a global superstar. This gets held up as a salutary lesson: don’t turn down ‘Umbrella’! Entertaining as this parlour game may be, for me it doesn’t hold up. For one thing, Britney didn’t turn down ‘…Baby One More Time’, the track that created 21st century chart pop, and plenty of other colossal hits: I think we can credit her song choices as being broadly sound. Also, so much of the success of ‘Umbrella’ is down to Rihanna herself: her dancehall vocals are what nail that “ella-ella-ella ey-ey-ey” chorus hook. And the Britney-‘Umbrella’ story is filtered through Britney’s troubled mid-’00s, as if it were typical of her misfortunes or that one track could have saved her from the TMZ-driven turbulence that turned her from chart pop star to tabloid Internet target. In all likelihood, while the song’s melodrama is in classic Britney’s wheelhouse, a mid-’00s Britney ‘Umbrella’ would have been yet another middling Britney number one overshadowed by yet another celebrity-paparazzi-hell video.
I’ll also throw into the mix that ‘Umbrella’ is a fairly ordinary R&B-pop song in itself. Lyrically it’s a bit corny, the hooks (as noted above) depend on Rihanna to do all the heavy lifting, and Jay-Z yet again as hype-man and MC hints at formula. Yes, the production glistens, right from the fizz of that opening hi-hat pedal cymbal, but I just don’t get the same pop thrill from this as I do from a Xenomania banger. Still, fair play to Rihanna for making the most of ‘Umbrella’ and parlaying it into superstardom. Now leave Britney alone!
Irish Number Ones 