Rihanna performs on The Today Show
Sometimes an umbrella is just an umbrella. A few seconds into Rihanna's Umbrella — the No. 1 song on iTunes and seemingly every passing car radio — you realize that this is not one of those times. It's not that Umbrella is explicit; its lyrics ("Now that it's raining more than ever/ Know that we'll still have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella") owe more to Doris Day than Madonna. But Rihanna, a Barbadian ex-beauty queen who just released her third album, has a special talent for vocal innuendo. She toys with the word umbrella — or, as Rihanna would put it, um-ba-rella, ella, ella — as if she's taking it for a ride on a water bed. It's hard to believe there will be a sexier song this summer.
— Josh Tyrangiel