The Untold Story Behind Rihanna's Forgotten Debut Mixtape
"Nobody at the time thought she would be as big as she is."
Back in summer 2005, before Rihanna became a global megastar, she was jackin’ for beats just like every post-50 Cent rapper.
Then just a 17-year-old aspiring singer from Barbados, Rihanna flipped the mixtape format with This Is Rihanna, a promotional CD released by Def Jam and SRP Records to help launch her career. While her look was Aaliyah starter kit—crop tops, baggy jeans, sneakers—Rihanna’s sound was a dancehall, hip-hop and R&B mix of its own. The 12-track project showed that range by packaging singles already earmarked for her pending Music Of The Sun debut album alongside revamps of buzzing tracks by artists like Sizzla, Damian Marley and Foxy Brown.
This Is Rihanna was the brainchild of Cipha Sounds, then senior vice president of Jay Z’s Roc-La-Familia label. Rihanna’s manager at the time, Marc Jordan, called up Ciph in early ’05 for some counsel—he wanted to make her debut single “Pon de Replay” live up to its title. The Puerto Rican DJ who’d made his name on New York’s Hot 97 radio station already has 
)a rep for breaking Caribbean artists. As Nina Sky’s manager, Cipha helped the reggaeton duo’s breakout single “Move Ya Body” shoot to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2004. But he recognized a limitation of his group’s quick success that also befell one-hit Wayne Wonders like Lumidee and Kevin Lyttle.
“I had the experience of having a song, it blowing up and then getting all these shows and having nothing else to do because you only have one song,” Cipha Sounds tells Genius. “I was like, ‘Let’s make a mixtape of some freestyles, some covers, so when we get booked to do these clubs, we can have 15 to 20 minutes as opposed to just one song.’ [Rihanna] was all for it.”
Cipha trekked up to Loft Recording Studios in Bronxville, NY—home base of Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, the songwriter-producer pair who discovered Rihanna—with 2005’s biggest dancehall instrumentals for RiRi to flip.
“We wanted as many people as possible to listen to it—especially in New York,” Cipha tells Genius. “When the beat is new and the person singing is new, it’s complicated to break.” He used Nina Sky as a case study: their song “Move Ya Body” is built on the ubiquitous Coolie Skank riddim and interpolates lyrics from Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s 1985 track “Can You Feel the Beat.” As the project’s A&R, he had Rihanna take a similar approach. “I just tried to what we call ‘sandwich’ her so it’s not all new,” says Ciph. “It’s some familiar shit.”
There’s no family more familiar in dancehall than the Marleys, and Rihanna showcases her love for reggae’s royal clan on the mixtape. She borrows Foxy Brown’s “Oh Yeah” instrumental to remix Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1973 classic “Get Up, Stand Up” into a party starter. Meanwhile, the introductory “My Name Is Rihanna,” a flip of Damian Marley’s “Welcome To Jamrock,” became her live-show opener.
She also nods to R&B icon Mary J. Blige on “My Name Is Rihanna,” borrowing the melodies from her 1992 single “Real Love” but instead singing about her passion for music:
So I try my best and pray to God My dreams will all turn real
‘Cause there’s a fire burnin’ in my heart
I hope you all can feel
To my music I’ll be faithful
You know I’ll give my all and all
Through the good times and bad times
Summer, winter, spring and fall
“I used to listen to a lot of Destiny’s Child, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston,” Rihanna said in a 2005 interview. “I was influenced highly by those artists—R&B artists, of course—so that’s why I sing a lot of R&B over reggae beats.”
She found inspiration in contemporary lyrics, too. “Don’t Even Try” is a dismissive response record to another one of her faves, Sizzla’s “Give Me A Try”—artificial mashups of the two tracks have since become treasure trove deep cuts online.
Fellow Bajan artist Rupee, still hot off of his 2004 hit “Tempted To Touch,” was already writing with Cipha Sounds. He penned “Hurricane”—a track likening
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