Yeah Nah: Where Rihanna got her yeahs

By Kim Gillespie

Rotorua Daily Post·

18 Aug, 2011 07:53 PM2 mins to read

There's a party at the bar, everybody put your glasses up and I drink to that.

Rihanna's new song is Cheers (Drink to That). It must be great to be young, rich, sexy, and able to sing a love song to booze. And if you've heard her speak - she was on Graham Norton the other night - she has the most wicked Bajan accent. She could talk her way through a love song, no sweat.

Cheers is Rihanna's seventh (!) single from Loud - crikey that's nearly a whole album. It's her 25th single overall (and that's not counting some of her best work like Live Your Life, Who's That Chick?, Love the Way You Lie or All of the Lights) and it's from her fifth album. And she's only 23.

If you're keeping tabs this is her alcohol song, having already covered sex (S&M) and violence (Man Down). It's also the catchiest tune on an album full of catchy tunes. But a lot of the credit for that has to go to another musical youth - Avril Lavigne.

Anyone interested in either of these singers who has access to Google has probably already worked out the "yeah, yeah" sample from Cheers is from Lavigne's 2002 song I'm With You, released when she was 18.

That was her "mature" song, the third single from her first album after her breakthrough alt-pop hit Complicated and Sk8er Boi.

In complete contrast to Cheers and its party hard theme, I'm With You is powerfully depressing. Even the "yeah, yeah"s (the same ones that sound ecstatic for Rihanna) sound sad. One critic said it was "the perfect song to drown your sorrows to when that guy from your class breaks your heart". The same critic said it was the sort of song you'd expect to turn up on Dawson's Creek (Both observations give a good clue as to Lavigne's target audience but the link between schoolkids and drinking may be a bit off).

The former teen star is 27 next month, but funnily enough none of her current crop of tunes seems as mature as this early track.

It's an inspired choice for Team Rihanna to sample.

I'll drink to that.