She maintained a remarkable work rate, releasing an album a year for the next four years. Umbrella installed Rihanna as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, and in 2008 her country’s prime minister David Thompson announced an annual Rihanna Day. She continued to branch out with her true breakthrough, Good Girl Gone Bad (2007), which used heavy, highly synthetic guitars while her enormous hit Umbrella rode a hip-hop breakbeat – yet you can still detect Barbados in Don’t Stop the Music’s syncopation. Unfaithful expanded into classic pop balladry, and with an insistent sample of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, SOS had no Bajan swing to it all, giving her a club stomper that even the most inebriated could clomp about to – it diversified her audience and became her first US No 1. The swift follow-up A Girl Like Me (2006) had predominantly the same dancehall, skanking reggae and Destiny’s Child-ish R&B, but with a voice that could be commanding or earnestly vulnerable, Rihanna was capable of more than pretty, summery material.
Her Bajan roots shone on debut album Music of the Sun – released when she was just 17 years old – with lilting roots reggae backings, digital dancehall beats, and a cover of Jamaican singer Dawn Penn’s classic No, No, No.
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