I had not actually heard "Umbrella" until an a capella group at my school did a version of it.

"Umbrella-eh-eh-eh" struck me as pretty stupid.

Gotta side with 'smasher on this one. Great song.

Be sure to view the video at the linked page!

Of course, I also like "Don't Stop Believin'" and almost all of the latest Justin Timberlake album.

It's a terrible song. Woeful.

You're all waiting for me to embarrass myself on this one, aren't you?

Be sure to view the video at the linked page!

Shit. One of my cousins spent Christmas dinner singing "In your head" for a straight half-hour. Becks' post applies there as well.

It's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad song.

I'm with the naysayers on this one, but I'm old so discount as appropriate.

ack noooo! you put it in by head!

The video is awful too.

6: C'mon, I already stepped out on the ledge. You're gonna leave me out here by myself?

Dude, an undeniably catchy song and an incredibly cute girl -- on pointe! Can nothing satisfy you people?

I'm sorry; "umbrella" is not a four-syllable word. FAIL.

but may be you'll like Mandy Moore's version

Sorry, Becks, but Rihanna beat the level with that song.

13: It is in "Puttin' on the Ritz". Thus I refute you.

I don't know why this is one of the songs music critics are claiming to objectively enjoy. There's a few random songs like that every year. It's almost as inexplicable as Pitchfork's multiple articles about Robyn.

I loved Pon de Replay. Then she made Umbrella and I was sad inside.

16: Shit. I always preferred Triscuits, anyway...

Racists.

one of the songs music critics are claiming to objectively enjoy

Lil' Mama's "Lip Gloss" was another.

Tris McCall, who really hates a lot of things, really liked Umbrella. Mostly because he had a shitty year and the sentiment felt good. I guide you to him for his much-more-sour appreciations of everything else; check out Rilo Kiley, M.I.A. and Mika, and Eskimo Joe for a few good examples.

Oh, and unsurprisingly, I like the song. w-lfs-n gets it exactly right. The heavy, dark synths and the "ella" echo are great.

I thought I disliked "Umbrella," then found myself dancing to it passionately at a recent party. Most likely alcohol inflamed me as well, but it's fun to gesture both to the word "umbrella" and "come into me," and it inspired a combination of seductive softness and hard right angles in my movement. My dance partner--famed himself as a dancer in some circles--was impressed by my performance to that song, I believe. Unless "what do you DO when you're not dancing?" was a come on instead of an expression of his conviction that only in the presence of a throbbing bass was I truly alive.

not that bad song in my opinion
i like for example Aretha Franklin's a little prayer song, can't say "umbrella" will last that long
though i'd prefer those eh-eh things like dropped
and the video is very pleasant, Rihanna's beautiful
what else do you want from a pop song
Mandy Moore's version is quieter and also nice too

Smasher had it right here. Good song, and amazing remix source material. The chorus was damn nigh unforgettable, and the echoing "eh-eh-eh-eh-ella..." is just so fun to pair to rhythms.

Sure, it's not super-unstoppable-dancey-R&B-single-of-the-decade like "1 Thing", but not much is.

6. yes, i actually really was.

I'm with Becks and Heebie.

Ahm-ber-ella EH EH EH EH. Please.

Oh, and nice try to get us to stop arguing about politics, Becks.

I cannot listen to this song all the way through. I've tried, several times, hoping this time it won't make me want to stab someone, but that time has never come, and I'm too young to go to prison.

Oh wow. I actually listened to the song again. I don't think I had heard the unremixed version before. It really is about 10-15% too slow, the Jay-Z intro is dire (as they always seem to be), and the slow quiet divaish bit around 2:50 totally doesn't play to Rihanna's hook-riding strengths.

"S.O.S." was way better. Hell, "Bubble Gum" by the very similarly-named Rasheeda is a better R&B single from this year.

To follow up, I propose that no one should be allowed to do guest raps in an R&B song anymore except for the following MCs:
Ludacris
Andre 3000
Lil' Wayne
(further MCs pending approval)

Also Bun B. This song is pretty fun, despite the inadequacy of Rick Ross's contribution. I laughed out loud at the word "Hubble".

30 gets it right.

The song is a dirge. Jay-Z was always crap. He has crap flow. Rihanna can be good, but that song isn't it.

Terrible, terrible song. Ugh.

The Umber Ella: a unique, CR 9 monster found in the high forest of Cormanthor.

RMMP makes a good point. It's a bit racist of the songwriters to make Rihanna claim to be an umber anything, isn't it?

"S.O.S." was way better.

"S.O.S." s/b "Tainted Love"

34: Either that or she's tamed the Umber Ella and thus can offer it for standing-under purposes. That would be pretty bad-ass.

Blissfully, I have no idea what y'all are talking about.

35: Just as "Stronger" is a distinct song from "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in style and taste, despite super-heavy sampling, "S.O.S." is indisputably different from "Tainted Love".

It is a damn awesome backing track though, and can't help but make anything else better.

Obligatory self-promotion.

It's as if you people don't even read my blog anymore.

Ah, I see that Kriston does. No wonder he's so successful in every walk of life.

But her "Shut Up and Drive" rocks, plus the video is raw cheesecake.

raw cheesecake

Yuck.

Never heard the song, but it cannot be worse than the "I wish I was a punk rocker/with flowers in my hair" song of a few years ago.

S.O.S. and Pon De Replay were probably better songs, it's true. But suck it haters, Rihanna is awesome.

A friend of mine works on the Rihanna tour so I ended up going to her gig in Dublin (mainly to meet up with my friend on her brief pass through the country). R. puts on a good show. I would have said I didn't know any of her music but Umbrella and one or two other songs did sound familiar.

I think most of the women my age there were escorting their tweeny daughters. Two 30ish male friends who also got free passes were stopped a couple of times on the way in by helpful bouncers saying "No, no, the Interpol gig is thataway". It occurred to me during the show that somewhere Samantha Mumba was probably sobbing "That should be MY career".

I'm kind of at a loss as to how to listen to this song--I don't understand what it's trying to do. This leads me to question my basic boredom with it/dislike of it, simply because I remember only too well not understanding what Elvis Costello was trying to do on My Aim Is True and hence not liking it--I really couldn't hear the album; it just bored me. Also, Mark K-Punk, who is very smart, writes very interestingly about Rihanna.

So seriously, when I hear this song it sounds very flat, very slow, and not particularly pretty. Totally unmemorable. When I think of music-to-dance-to, I think of In The Beginning There Was Rhythm, particularly the Certain Ratio track, or maybe I think of the original version of Gang of Four's We Live As We Dream, Alone, or maybe The Faint (yesterday's heros, I know). Or Le Tigre. I can't understand how you would dance to the Rihanna track--obviously not that no one can, but that I feel no bodily desire to dance when hearing this song. And I do like to dance.

So I think I'm missing something. What is it that you're supposed to pay attention to when you listen to this track? How is it supposed to work?

re: 46

It's not a song for dancing to. It's a ballad.

But far upthread (23, in fact) someone alleges that the song was redeemed by being not just danceable but passionately danceable. Also, if it's not danceable, then why is Rihanna, er, dancing in the video clip I saw? Other than for coarsely commercial reasons.

46 is correct. This song was written to make people listening to the radio in the background not change the channel. It's definitely not danceable. Any positive qualities it has are purely unintentional.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me about critics. Why don't you champion someone who actually wants to be championed, or needs your help, or both? It seems like just about every film-blogger goes through a stage in which they think it's controversial and important to say that we sometimes forget that Steven Spielberg is actually a good director, and therefore Spielberg must be underrated, and therefore Spielberg must be underappreciated. Tell us something new.

re: 48

People dance in videos for ballads all the time. They dance in clubs to ballads too -- in that slow-dancing way. That doesn't make those tunes 'dance' tunes or 'danceability' their primary purpose.

And if it's a ballad, I still don't get why it's interesting. I'm not opposed to ballads...I just can't hear this one, sort of. And I contend that this is probably about me and my lack of hearing rather than anything else.

re: 51

Well, I am with you. It's a crap song. So I don't have any defence of it as a piece of music.

49: I don't know...there's the reverse problem, where pop or disco or whatever are acceptable and hip after they've been sanitized by time and distance. Like, the music snobs in my immediate circle (including me) have been on a certain-types-of-disco kick (late Chic, all that Paradise Garage stuff...unbelieveably, a Don Cherry disco-ish track (which is awesome), and....Andrea True!) and yet I remember quite well the retro punk snobbery about disco (not just dance, but specifically disco) embraced by the same people in the mid-nineties. And how there was a popular revivial of trash disco (YMCA, etc) in the late nineties, scorned by the hip, and now there's a proper snob revival as sort of a follow-up to the post-punk/no-wave stuff.

Of course, this is all about the culture of the music and not the music as such, but man, it makes me distrust my immediate reactions.

re: 53

One partly avoids that by not being hip.

And also by mostly scorning 'ironic appreciation' as an appropriate reaction to music.

54: For some values of hip, true enough. But the trouble is that music snobs often have the best music. (I don't include myself here, since my music-snob record-collection is pretty much parasitic upon the labor and know-how of others). It's difficult to hang about with the music snobs without having one's values compromised, and yet--!

It's more about access than about ironic appreciation, I think...once I met the 53rd-level music snobs, I was surprised to learn that while they follow fashion (just like avant-garde fashion designers, for example, or like Comp Lit academics) they would rather gnaw off their own forearms than admit it and they don't consciously seek out ironic pleasures. That is, there's no retro-ironic heavy metal in the circles in which I move, and it will probably take four or five years and the dying-away of the fad for it before it arrives. Probably via some sort of prog-rock trajectory--prog-rock hasn't been recaptured by the local music-snob narrative apparatus yet.

re: 56

Not all music snobs who are hip in that way, though. There are people who aren't really that captured by fashion.

I'm a bit of a music snob myself if knowing a bit about music and having strong opinions about music counts as such. But I'm not really aware of not-liking something I once liked [at least not since I was in my teens]. So in that sense, the sort of narrative you tell about disco doesn't match with my experiences or of some people I know.

[Of course, some people I know fit that pattern entirely].

ttaM has a too-meagre and narrow (fuckity fuck I can't remember the actual word I want, all I can think of is gering; it sucks to grow old) conception of what "dance music" is.

Nope, 'Umbrella' is shit dance music. I have a pretty broad conception of dance music -- 'Umbrella' isn't it.

Of course, what I really mean here is 'Umbrella is a song I personally dislike and find deeply undanceable'.

57: There are so many types of music snob, of course.

I don't think that no longer liking something precisely captures it for the music snobs I know--it's more a question of emphasis and perception. Music that seemed interesting or seemed to answer a certain question (how to incorporate soul influences, or something) maybe doesn't seem interesting any more, or doesn't seem like a good way to answer the question.

Like, London Calling doesn't interest me too much anymore, even though I never mind hearing it. But I'm not even sure I've got a copy since I never particularly want to play it--it's too big, too rockist, too sure of itself, too cloying where it wants to be political.

Or sometimes it's sort of a stripping-away of preconceptions--that Don Cherry track, I Walk, I wouldn't have been able to understand it at all five years ago. It would have seemed too disco; I didn't get free jazz; I would have been embarassed by the particularly late-seventies vision of the city that it offers, without being able to pick out the utopian, joyous multiculturalism of the lyrics. It's not that I just hadn't heard it five years ago; I wasn't able to hear it five years ago.

I mean, I've certainly got rid of stuff and regretted it later, but not since I was much younger--Hell's Ditch wasn't one of the "punk" Pogues albums, for example, and I sold my copy. Or I got rid of all my Erasure albums.

The thing about fashion and disco is that fashion sort of sets the kind of questions that are asked. In the late nineties, disco ('round here) was kitsch, something that white people who didn't know anything about music liked. Something that sorority girls would think was funny to dance to, probably while dressed up in "seventies" clothes from the thrift store. The gay kitsch of YMCA was...well, it was nothing more than kitsch. There wasn't any political or libratory aspect when people listened to it. Then--and I'm not exactly sure how this happened; it was during a time when I wasn't listening to much music--disco fell from popular-kitsch consciousness and was reconstituted with an emphasis on the mid-late seventies and on race and sexuality. Disco became an acceptable subject of inquiry. Now, this wasn't because music snobs everywhere consciously said "well, we couldn't listen to this when the commonality liked it but now we can see it's very good really", but that's an aspect of what happened.

Of course there's other factors--changing distribution patterns, small labels, Soul Jazz Records, hipsters in New York, and so on.

This leads me to question my basic boredom with it/dislike of it, simply because I remember only too well not understanding what Elvis Costello was trying to do on My Aim Is True and hence not liking it--I really couldn't hear the album; it just bored me.

I wanted to highlight this comment just because I too, have had the experience of listening to music and being distinctly aware that I wasn't getting it and then, at some point, having that shift, understanding the music and being unable to figure out what it was that I didn't get about it.

Embarassingly, the strongest example of this for me is Otis Redding. The first time I heard him, I just didn't get Soul. It wasn't rock, but it wasn't intimate either, it obviously wasn't pure pop, and it seemed lacking in irony . . . it took me a couple of months of listening to it once ever week or two and then, at some point it clicked. Now, just typing the above feels weird to me, what kind of wierdo doesn't understand soul music?

I wish I could get better at understanding those transitions because I feel like it would make me better at explaining the appeal of the music I like.

Soul Jazz Records

Which is teh awesome.

If The Faint are yesterday's heroes then I don't want to be right today.

Which is to say, I love The Faint more than is probably reasonable.

61: For me it's more by artist than by genre: Elvis Costello, Bob Mould (although there's someone--possibly the only person--whose work I really, really liked once and now really, really don't), even Gang of Four, as difficult as that is for me to believe now. My youthful musical bias was toward pretty and speedy, so I liked the Smiths and most of the Cure and some of the artier pop stuff. (This was in the very late eighties).

GoF were sort of the wasabi of post-punk--I couldn't bear them at first but had this sort of traumatized longing to repeat the experience. (I'd bought A Brief History of the 20th Century because of an article in The Chicago Tribune, of all places. Ah, the glory of life before the internet, when each album purchase was a total crapshoot!) Then suddenly I really liked them a lot.

I usually need to hear things that lead to things, so to speak. Like, I got the Soul Jazz Records (yes, teh awesome, You Can't Go Wrong With Soul Jazz should be their slogan) 06-07 singles, and it's all really techno--not my normal sort of thing at all. But I'd been listening to some recent remixes which I'd gotten because one was of A Certain Ratio, and I'd heard A Certain Ratio on In The Beginning There Was Rhythm which I got because it had the Slits and a Gang of Four track on it...and now I find I'm a bit interested in techno, even though it's techno. ("A Little More Oil", that's pretty good, if depressing)

63: The Faint! The Faint are like an electric current when one thinks one is too tired to dance any more. And they're from Omaha!

Oh, yeah, and you know what was weird? I was in a (whisper it low) Old Navy looking for a cheap black shirt for work (no luck, man that place is grim) and what should they be playing in their customer-friendly pop mix but Jens Lekman!

I saw them at The Ritz in Raleigh a couple of years ago and they were so fucking fantastic live that they managed to overcome The Ritz being the worst music venue in human history: a big box made of cement blocks with metal everywhere so that sound just goes clang-a-lang-a-lang around the room and it's impossible to hear.

Tonight my band is playing with Adventure, whom I like a lot.

Also: Feist.

17: i am saddened that none of the regulars here jumped in to defend robyn's honour.