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'Umbrella girl'. That's probably the most popular and positive name she's earned in her young career.
The others include 'Chris Brown's ex-girlfriend' and 'Beyonce wannabe' in the early days.

Robyn Rihanna Fenty crossed over the latter-most tag with ease considering her star power was hard to
escape no matter what the critics said. But will she get rid of the Chris-Brown-bashing-session
that none today can refrain from mentioning?

Maybe with an upcoming album she might. But till then, it's our turn to pick apart
the pieces of Rihanna's life in the limelight.



The 21-year-old singer was born in Saint Michael, Barbados. Her mother, an accountant, split from Rihanna's father,
a warehouse supervisor, because of his crack and cocaine addiction. As most star stories go,
she too was a shy individual who took up music as a means to express herself.
How many of them do we have? Most recently - Susan Boyle.




Sometimes it's not all about luck and talent. Good friends count, too. And Little Riri certainly had some.
They introduced her three-girl band, which she created when 15, to Evan Rogers who helped
Christina Aguilera shoot off to fame. And then, it was history.




She landed up in the USA to live her American dream. And she didn't have to try too hard.
The 16-year-old cut a demo-tape with her big hit Pon De Replay. It landed up with none other than Jay-Z.





Her first two albums - Music of the Sun and A Girl Like Me - did well commercially,
but didn't win favourable criticism. Promoted as a reggae artist, her music had elements of anything but reggae.

Her lead single from the first album was described as 'a dancehall-pop mixture that owes plenty of its sweat and shimmy
to Beyoncé's Baby Boy,' by Slant Magazine. Nevertheless, the single hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

Rolling Stone had to say this about A Girl Like Me: Like her filler-packed debut album, this similar
but superior follow-up doesn't deliver anything else as ingenious as its lead single.

But the public was lapping up her SOS, Unfaithful, We Ride, and Break It Of.