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While it’s been a hot minute since Rihanna has blessed us with some new music, it’s been even longer since her smash hit “SOS” made it’s debut in 2006. Now, nearly two decades later, one of the song’s writers has revealed the track is stacked with 80s music tributes that have gone completely unnoticed.
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During a recent interview with Daniel Wall on the Behind the Wall podcast, GRAMMY-winning songwriter Evan “Kidd” Bogart, who co-wrote the A Girl Like Me lead single alongside Edward Cobb and Jonathan Rotem, revealed the entirety of the song’s second verse is a tribute to 80s song titles.
Noting the song was “one of the first pop songs” Bogart wrote, who began his career at as an intern at Interscope Records and primarily had experience writing rap songs. Evan said that when he was penning the Rihanna track, he “had no idea” what he was doing.
“If you really look at how that song is written, it’s not written by anyone who knows anything about pop music,” he explained. “I was going off of instinct. If you look at the verses, they’re crafted with a lot of clever word play and internal rhyme schemes, like a rapper would.” Going on to recite the first verse, that after hearing him riff off as bars, makes complete sense. “I'm obsessive when just one thought of you comes up / And I'm aggressive, just one thought ain't close enough / You got me stressing, incessantly pressing the issue / ‘Cause every moment gone you know I miss you.”
Then after clarifying how the catchy “S-O-S” part of the lyrics is actually the pre-chorus and “This time, please someone come and rescue me…” is actually the chorus, Bogart disclosed his unknown mind-blowing secret about how he came up with the lyrics to another one of the song’s verse.
“The whole second verse of that song is 80s song titles strung together as sentences because I thought it would be clever… they’re all No. 1 songs from the 80s.” Also noting the song also features a sample and borrows vibes from the 1981 Soft Cell hit, “Tainted Love.”
Going on to dissect the verse from the latter end of the song — which includes mentions of A-Ha‘s “Take On Me,” also including the band’s name, Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight,” Tears For Fears‘ “Head Over Heels,” Kim Wilde‘s “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and Michael Jackson‘s “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
For reference, these are the lyrics Rihanna sings on the verse — “Take on me (aha), 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 (over heels) / Boy, you keep me hanging on, the way you make me feel."
When Wall admitted he never noticed the pattern over the 18 years since the song’s release, Bogart acknowledged, “No one does.”
Check out a clip of Bogart’s mind-blowing revelation below, and listen to the entire podcast episode — HERE.