Rihanna’s Gold Coast path to gold records
Rihanna lived in Stamford when she was a teenager.
If those same words popped up in your social media feed, would you be able to resist clicking the bait? It’s like trying not to sing along to “Umbrella.”
And you know how that usually turns out, right? You scroll along, being fed trickles of information like the FBI is trying to track your location. Your screen freezes or the feed restarts. You finally reach the last sentence a few days later, which only reveals the same information as those first nine words.
I wouldn’t do that to you. In real journalism, we follow the model of the “inverted pyramid,” which piles the most important intel on top and the least on the bottom. It’s more like the top half of an hourglass. And the 21st Century Clickbait-and-Switch Edition isn’t a pyramid or an hourglass. It’s just a trap.
See what I did there? I promised I wouldn’t use misdirection, and then I did. The truth is that I don’t really know much about Rihanna’s time in Connecticut.
It all started exactly 20 years ago, in the winter of 2003, when music producer Evan Rogers and his wife went for a vacation in Barbados and discovered Robyn Rihanna Fenty when she auditioned for him. In 2004 she moved into their Stamford home while she worked on demos that became her breakout hit, “Pon de Replay” in 2005, when she was 17.
So maybe Connecticut was Rihanna’s good-luck charm, but she wasn’t here long. And I’ve never been able to track down anyone who knew her in Stamford. She’ll be watched by 100 million viewers when she performs at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, but no one seemed to notice her in Connecticut.
And she’s just not calling me back.
My fantasy is that Rihanna will smuggle in a nod to her Connecticut peeps before the Chiefs and Eagles rudely interrupt her stage comeback. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have any hits about Connecticut.
For that matter, neither does anybody else. About the best-known Connecticut song of the last century was performed by Bing Crosby and Judy Garland (who probably would have headlined the halftime show if the Super Bowl existed in 1947). Alas, “Connecticut” features lyrics that should have been sacked ( “Connecticut is the place for me. It’s such a great state, for a late date, with a maid waiting just for you; And every Yale guy, is a male guy, through and through”).
Then there’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which even RiRi can’t pull off at a halftime show in Arizona.
There’s still time to pull something together. What could be more fitting than to use music from Burt Bacharach, the maestro of suave Sixties hits who died Wednesday at 94. Bacharach left behind the forgotten soundtrack instrumental, “Hello Connecticut.” OK, it doesn’t even have any words and already sounds more like an Adele weeper. But it’s only 59 seconds, so how hard can it be to come up with a few lyrics?
The music, unfortunately, sounds more like a lost take on a Christopher Cross boxed set (“Caught between Beantown and New York City”).
Rihanna, of course, could just sing the names of Nutmeg towns and top the charts. But even she’d get stuck on “Bozrah.” I remember a day thenGov.
Dannel Malloy stopped in the office and mentioned Bozrah. A colleague made a face like the governor was speaking a different language.
“What? Bozrah, it’s a real place,” Malloy said.
I still don’t believe him.
OK, so maybe we need something a little more on the nose.
“Hello Connecticut
It’s been a while Since I left my heart in Hartford.
You’re still my steady habit.
My love’s as deep as your pension debt.”
Yeah, that’s not gonna work, work, work, work, work, work.
I reach out to Lou Ursone, who knows a thing or two about lyrics from decades running Curtain Call in Stamford. His email reply confirms why such collaborations were better in the days when writers got together in the same room.
So maybe Connecticut was Rihanna’s good-luck charm, but she wasn’t here long. And I’ve never been able to track down anyone who knew her in Stamford. She’ll be watched by 100 million viewers when she performs at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, but no one seemed to notice her in Connecticut. And she’s just not calling me back.
“Love Connecticut and our beautiful fall
Almost as much as I love Curtain Call.”
What was I thinking? I should have looked at the calendar and realized Lou would see the Super Bowl as just an opportunity to plug the Giving Day fundraiser for Connecticut nonprofits on Feb. 23.
Maybe it’s better to just leave the lyrics in the hands of Rihanna. She can take “Connecticut” and “etiquette” and create an earworm.
After all, she’s turned everything she touches into gold. Everything, it seems, except the Gold Coast.