The hidden 1980s song titles in the hit Rihanna song ‘SOS’
Rihanna has had a career of fame, glamour, and entrepreneurship, which in 2022 culminated in her becoming a billionaire. However, the Bajan vocalist was once a relatively unknown singer who occasionally appeared on the charts.
Rihanna first came to Jay-Z’s attention after he received a demo from Evan Rogers, a renowned producer and songwriter in the music industry. At the time, Hov was the president of Def Jam and didn’t know how to get her career off the ground. As such he employed a team of renowned songwriters to help the star craft tracks. Since then, she has become a major success.
The singer has had a lot of hits over her career which now spans 20 years. However, one of her earliest was her 2006 anthem, ‘SOS’. The song was the lead single of the Bajan vocalist’s sophomore album, A Girl Like Me and was a chart-topping effort.
The track had a big production team behind it, and one of the key individuals was the Grammy-award-winning songwriter Evan ‘Kidd’ Bogart. However, during an appearance on the Behind The Wall podcast, Bogart discussed how he crafted the hit song.
Bogart revealed that he began his songwriting career at Interscope as a writer of rap songs. He admitted that when he was assigned a track for Rihanna, he “had no idea” what he was doing.
Explaining how if you look at the song in-depth, there’s nothing “pop” about the writing style, Bogart explained, “If you really look at how that song is written, it’s not written by anyone who knows anything about pop music! I was going off of instinct. If you look at the verses, they’re crafted with a lot of clever wordplay and internal rhyme schemes — like a rapper would.”
The songwriter admitted that to form catchy lyrics, for the second verse, he pieced together the names of songs from the 1980s, explaining, “The whole second verse of that song is ’80s song titles strung together as sentences because I thought it would be clever.”
Upon close inspection, the second verse references songs such as ‘Take on Me’ by A-ha, including the band’s name and the song’s ‘Take Me On’ lyric, Cutting Crew’s ‘(I Just) Died in Your Arms,’ ‘Head Over Heels’ by Tears for Fears, Kim Wilde’s ‘You Keep Me Hanging On,’ and ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ by Michael Jackson.
During the second verse of ‘SOS’ Rihanna sings, “Take on me (a-ha), you know inside you feel it right / Take me on, I could just die up in your arms tonight / I melt with you, you got me head over heels / Boy, you keep me hangin’ on, the way you make me feel.”
The instrumental notoriously samples the 1981 hit ‘Tainted Love,’ and Ed Cobb, who wrote the original track, understandably has a writing credit on the 2006 hit. ‘SOS’ was Rihanna’s first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still considered a pop classic.