Songoftheday 11/13/17 - Here it is the groove slightly transformed, just a bit of a break from the norm...
from the album Homebase (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 13
Today's song of the day comes from the hip-hop duo of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, aka actor/rapper Will Smith, who had scored back-to-back top-20 pop hits in the summer of 1988 with the comic novelties of "Parents Just Don't Understand" and "Nightmare On My Street", winning a Grammy Award for the former. However, with their next album, ...And In This Corner, the lead single "I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson" only managed to climb to #58 on Billboard's pop Hot 100, with the album scraping the bottom of the top 40. Luckily, Smith had started his TV career as the star of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which gave him and in return the duo a level of mainstream exposure way beyond hip-hop. Also, by the time the pair's fourth studio album, Homebase, arrived, they pretty much ditched the novelty comic kitsch of their earlier work, and Smith changed his delivery to a more adult and direct phrasing. That didn't stop them from having fun, though, as proven by the first single from Homebase, "Summertime". Riding on a sample of Kool & The Gang's "Summer Madness", which is also name-checked in the single, the result flowed so smoothly with Will painting such a vivid picture of summer in Philadelphia that it remains one of the best songs of that season...
"Summertime" became the biggest pop hit for them as a duo, reaching the top-5 in August of 1991. The record topped Billboard's R&B and Rap Singles chart, while the remixes on the 12" vinyl/CD single helped it climb to #41 on their Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the song reached the top ten in New Zealand (#5) and the UK (#8), and made the top-40 in Switzerland (#11), Germany (#12), Ireland (#12), Sweden (#17), the Netherlands (#20), and Canada (#29). It would sell over a million copies in the U.S., and went on to win the duo their second Grammy Award for Rap Duo or Group...
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the pair performing on TV for New Year's Eve in 1991...
Jeff and Will reunited for a tour this past summer; here they are performing "Summertime"...
Lastly, there's this....
Up tomorrow: You can rely on this British new wave band.
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