Songoftheday 2/9/19 - A lifetime of memories going down the drain, I'd like to keep steppin' but I can't get past the pain...
from the album Gangsta Lean (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 15
Today's song of the day comes from the hip-hop vocal group D.R.S., or "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", who came together in Sacromento, California in the early 1990s. Guided by rapper MC Hammer, who put them on his vanity label Roll Wit It, the fivesome, with given "thuggish" nicknames like "Endo" and "Jailbait", released their debut (and only) album Gangsta Lean in 1993. It stood out from the rest of the R&B groups around by their willingness to get really violent and raw in their lyrical material, such as the album opener "Mama Didn't Raise No Punk". But the lead single, "Gangsta Lean", was a slow ballad mourning a friend who died on the streets, and the R-rated Boyz II Men homage got a huge and very quick response, sending the single into the pop top ten within four weeks, where it stayed for ten more...
"Gangsta Lean" became the first and only charting pop hit for D.R.S. in November of 1993. The song spent six weeks at #1 on the R&B chart in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single was #1 in New Zealand for three nonconsecutive weeks. A second single from the record, the downtempo jam "Scoundrels Get Lonely", was released but it comparatively bombed, only managing to make it to #87 on the R&B chart, although again overseas in New Zealand it would be their second top ten hit at #6. It was crazy how an act with such a fast-selling debut were wiped off the collective consciousness of America. They disappeared shortly after that, though they were a TMZ item a few years back trying to make a comeback. But this style of gangsta-ballad would make this track a foreteller of many hits yet to come in the next few years, most notably "Tha Crossroads" from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
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And here's the group on an appearance on Soul Train...
Up tomorrow: Janet's backup singer rates herself as she steps out.
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