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in the US on May 13. Now she had achieved what she had always wanted: a No. 1 single!
    Rihanna was surprised when she found out that she had topped the charts, because one minute the song was in the thirties and the next it was No. 1. It stayed at No. 1 for three weeks in the US but fared even better in Australia, where it was No. 1 for eight weeks. It was also No. 1 in Canada and No. 2 in the UK, Belgium, Germany and Hungary.
    Both critics and fans loved the song because it soundedmore like ‘Pon de Replay’ and sampled the Soft Cell track, ‘Tainted Love’. The writers had also cleverly added lyrics from several popular 80s songs, from Michael Jackson’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ to Kim Wilde’s ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’.
    Before she recorded the song, Rihanna hadn’t been at all familiar with ‘Tainted Love’ – after all, she wasn’t exposed to much 80s’ music growing up in Barbados – but she had heard it a couple of times while living in the US. She was actually the second artist considered to release the track; the song had originally been given to Christina Milian, but she had decided not to record it for her third album. Rihanna may not have been the first choice to sing it, but once she sang the song she made it her own, and after three days in the studio the finished recording was ready for the album.
    For this song, Rihanna filmed one main video and two additional promotional videos, one for Agent Provocateur and another for Nike. For the main video she is seen using a Nokia mobile phone and the camera zooms in on it, clearly pushing Nokia phones. For a time this resulted in MTV banning the video. Rihanna was so popular with young people that companies would pay good money for her to promote their brands in her videos. ‘S.O.S.’ was the first video that Rihanna did with this kind of product placement, and the money these companies gave for the privilege no doubt paid for some of the production costs.
    In 2010 Rihanna spoke to NME about the subject of product placement: ‘I don’t like things to be so commercial.I hate product placement in my videos. Videos should just tell the story of the song.
    ‘With product placement, it becomes this big ad campaign. I just don’t like that. Sometimes we have to [use products in music videos], for whatever political reason, but it’s never my first choice.’
    As well as being Rihanna’s biggest song to date, ‘S.O.S.’ won her a Billboard Music Award for ‘Hot Dance Airplay Song of the Year’ and a MuchMusic Video Award for ‘Best International Artist Video’. All those people who had claimed she was a one-hit wonder after ‘Pon de Replay’ was released turned out to be wrong. Rihanna was here to stay!
    The ballad ‘Unfaithful’ was next to be released, and this track was written by Ne-Yo, Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen. Rihanna had wanted to work with Ne-Yo for a while because she had been amazed by the track he wrote for Mario. She thought ‘Let Me Love You’ was awesome, and when he visited her in the studio for the first time, they chatted about doing something together. She already had her tracks for the first album but once that was out of the way, they started thinking about a song for A Girl Like Me. That song was ‘Unfaithful’, a different style of song to anything Rihanna had done before. A beautiful ballad rather than an up-tempo number, the song became one of her favourites.
    ‘Unfaithful’ is about a woman who is cheating on her boyfriend. Rihanna admitted that she drew on a personal experience that she had when she was fourteen, but explained that in her case the relationship wasn’t physical. Inan interview with MTV, she confessed: ‘I’m referred to as a murderer in that song, meaning, I’m taking this guy’s life by hurting him, cheating on him. He knows, and it makes him feel so bad. It’s killing him to know that another guy is making me happy. I love that song because we always put it