Songoftheday 6/21/19 - I got the data to turn your body into anti-matter, and just like a piece of Sizzlean you'll fit inside my stomach with the eggs and grits between...
from the album Project: Funk Da World (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #9 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 20
Today's song of the day comes from (the late) rapper Craig Mack, who grew up in the New York City area, and got his big break through producer and label head Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, who signed Mack on his Bad Boy Records label. That is where Mack recorded and released his debut album Project: Funk Da World. The lead single, "Flava In Ya Ear", was originally released as a solo track where it started climbing the charts...
But it was the remix of the track, released on a second CD Single, that would catapult the song into the pop top ten. With cameos from a then-unknown Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes as well as LL Cool J and Rampage among others, all over a disguised sample of O'Donel Levy's jazzy cover of the Carpenters' "We Only Just Begun", "Flava" was transformed into a different animal altogether, and you can gauge Biggie's stature even then with him given the whole first verse, and he dominates the music video, directed by an up and coming Hype Williams...
"Flava In Ya Ear" became Craig's first and biggest pop hit, climbing to the top ten in November of 1994. The song also went to #4 on the R&B chart in Billboard magazine, while it reigned on their Rap Singles chart for fourteen weeks. Internationally, the single was a minor hit in the UK at #57.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Craig appearing on Soul Train in 1994...
And surprisingly, on Nickelodeon's children's channel...
And finally again in concert with just Mack and Puff Daddy...
Up tomorrow: More grunge rockers from Seattle are back. WAY back.
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